Last night saw the first Future of News West Midlands meetup take place at Birmingham City University’s Perry Barr campus.
We started off with a quick introduction before Andrew Brightwell gave a short talk on his background and his involvement in new hyperlocal project, Grounds. Andrew told us how Grounds was the result of a chat between fellow students and the folks at Urban Coffee Co in Birmingham where Grounds is based.
Andrew Brightwell shows off Grounds
He said that the success of the blog to him was not about sales numbers or generating revenue but how many people were involved, demonstrating how the driving force was community-centric.
Andrew also went on to speak about possible business models they are considering to help make the site sustainable. They included a white label dating site, event services and advertising as possible streams of revenue.
However, Andrew seemed less convinced about those as really viable options and more about having a network of sites like Grounds that collectively could present sufficient economies of scale and leverage that such streams would be viable. Not only that, but other streams could become apparent once such a network was in place.
Then, without further ado, we split into three separate groups for a challenge. The brief that I gave to the groups was this; they are managing a start-up news operation with six month’s worth of funding. Their funders will not back them again after the six months is up so they need to find a viable business model within that timeframe. The funding will get them an office with all the necessities, two people (these could be journalists, or not) and kit (laptops, smartphones) for 3 people (i.e. you and your staff of two). There were no limits on what kind of news operation, what area (geographic or otherwise) to report or anything else – it was a very open brief.
Group think time
So the groups went away and after a good half an hour (’cause there was a lot of good discussion going on) the three groups reported back.
The first group talked quite extensively and I really enjoyed listening in on the conversation. In the end they concluded there was no one business model that would work. As Paul Squires put it, there is no panacea, no silver bullet.
The second group seemed to be obsessed with porn, interestingly, though there were some good suggestions. They came up with News Butler, a tailored news service which will take your preferences and then phone you each day to tell you the news that’s important to you. We were promised that Jon Hickman would be the guy on the other end of the phone – watch this space. There was also the news booth where you go and submit your own news. The most serious suggestion though, and one that really caught my attention was event journalism – providing reporting services for events. It was then that I filled everyone in on the last UK Future of News Group meetup where Not On The Wires launched their service after covering the G20 and Berlin Project.
Group 3 came up with a whole barrage of ideas; something I was hoping for considering the earlier comment about there being not just one model. Paul Hadley went through the various ideas for going about their news offering, including; specialised news services (e.g. banking news in Small Heath), daily site sponsorship (a different sponsor each day), vendor relationship management where the publisher becomes a broker between user and advertiser (correct me if I’m wrong, Mr Bradshaw), non-geographic community news (e.g. topic-based), advertorials, business listings, premium membership for special features, selling services of staff (kind of like a collective of freelancers), event services (again!), selling data about visitors, mobile/gps-based news & advertising, a supporters wall (like CiB has done), selling on content to different platforms, selling news to pubs to make use of their TVs (which could also move on to kiosks such as in bus stops and train stations).
So a whole raft of ideas but one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was that none of the groups came up with anything solid – they all produced ideas for things that might work – they had very little idea what would work. This is where I was a bit cheeky about it, I guess – I knew that the task was kind of impossible but I wanted it to be obvious, as Paul said, that there is no magic bullet, there is no one option but that the future will see a multitude of solutions and that until we try all these ideas out we won’t know anything for sure.
Nigel Barlow made a good point – he said there are “lots of ideas for supporting local news but seem to revolve around ancilliary services which will subsidise news” – something to think about, as is the Seth Godin post that Paul Squires mentioned – Who will save us? – which emphasises the point that we will make our own future because it is within our power to do so.
My last point will be based on a point made by Dan Slee in the pub afterwards. Dan spent the previous day at a local government conference where there was lots of enthusiasm that was hampered by the risk-averse nature of councils when it comes to actually doing things. We have the enthusiasm but we also have the opportunity to experiment, and it’s actually pretty low cost to start experimenting – so let’s JFDI.
I’ll be sending out an e-mail to all group members soon to ask for your feedback so look out for that, and if you have ideas for future meets please do let me know! If you’re not yet a member but you’re interested, join us and see if you fancy the next meet.
I’ll be updating this post with other member’s contributions as they come in, so let me know when you have anything.
Big thanks to Paul Bradshaw and the Birmingham School of Media at BCU for letting us borrow a room for the evening.
Keep an eye out for Future of News South Wales (#fonsw) as hinted at by Hannah Waldram and the Scottish group (#scofong) that Iain Hepburn is setting up.
Update: Paul Hadley has typed up his notes on the group message board.
Update 2: Kate Hughes has written a great post about her thoughts on the meetup.
Update 3: Alex Gamela posted a nice continuation of his group’s discussion including the Online Journalism Talk audioBoo on business models with Caroline Beavon and Dan Davies.
Update 4: Judith Townend, organiser of Brighton Future of News Group has started a wiki to collaborate on future ideas.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Six months before withdrawal of funding is, er, not realistic. West Seattle Blog – http://westseattleblog.com/ – reportedly took about 2 years to become sufficiently financially viable to cover ongoing costs (including two salaries) and more traditional businesses would realistically plan for 3 years before starting to make any kind of profit.
However, thanks for the interesting post on what sounds like a great event.
Philip – many thanks again to you and the BCU team for organising this excellent event.
Very much looking forward to future events and seeing some of these business models become reality.
News Booth reminded me a little of the old Channel 4 “Video Box”. It’s a great idea and provides a very real, open, physical aspect to making online contributions – perhaps it’s time to bring the concept back to life.
Paul
Russell, if your idea is to set up a local blog then it will take a while, but there was no criteria set that it should be local. Having spoken to West Seattle myself, what you really need is great – I mean GREAT – community support. Then the amount of time it takes may not be that long. But community support is not the same thing as a commercial business model. And that’s kind of the point about blogs. They rarely start with the kind of resources that would allow them to generate profit.
I’ll probably write something on this site about it soon. In fact, I promise I will.
Really good round up Phil.
Russell – good to meet you today at #smtrain. What I found so interesting about the brief is that it didn’t say anything about the project being local, nor being financially viable – it could have been a community-funded non-profit model which didn’t necessarily keep on the same people after the six months. I think this is where stepping out of the box and our comfort zones comes in. We need to think outside the norm of financially viable for-profit business ventures and more about the possibility of co-operatives and social enterprises.
Hey all. We have this saying over here about your ears burning when someone is talking about you.
Anyway, to clarify if you care:
Our path was really bizarre.
We started our site with NO intention of becoming what it has become. I was sitting at the table one night thinking someone should be “blogging” (a verb I now loathe) about West Seattle – and finding nobody was. But by “blogging” I meant just spouting off random observations.
After a year of doing that, a big news event turned us in the news direction, which we still followed without any intention of becoming a full-fledged news site, much less a business (we didn’t even run – and still don’t — Google text ads, for heaven’s sake), for the second year.
THEN when in late 2007 we said “hey, let’s try to make this a business, we seem to have become a community news source!” – we started selling local ads.
We needed a few months worth of savings (well, penalized early retirement-fund withdrawals) to help till we had enough ads. But it only took about six months. Of course, in the early going we were living EXTREMELY frugally. No restaurant meals. Etc.
I don’t know if it would be possible to do this within six months of total out-of-nowhere startup but if you do a bang-up job serving your community, it might be.
Don’t underprice yourself out of the box. We have not raised our rates since we started, but we set them at a reasonable-enough price that we could survive without having to sell a hundred of them.
Good luck, all!
-Tracy
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