Next Steps: What We Heard, What We Need
At the end of our New Business Models for (Local) News Conference last week we asked a question we’ve been asking since our first go-round three years ago: What’s next? What do we, as practitioners of journalism, need to do to help sustain journalism in this new age?
It seems there is still a simple two-word...
Livestream: NewBiz Conference
Our third annual summit on the future of news is getting started. Today it’s all about local. We’ll be tweeting all day, too. Hit us up with questions and comments, the hashtag is #newbiz. Conference details and schedule are here. And, here’s the livestream for your viewing pleasure:
The Survey Results
The foundation of the business models we built this summer was data culled from an online survey we conducted of web entrepreneurs. We asked online startups from across the country to give us a confidential glimpse at the nuts and bolts of their businesses.
We sent invitations to hundreds of online news organizations, from...
Chi-Town Daily News Aims to Profit
The Chi-Town Daily News, the not-for-profit out of Chicago that launched four years ago, announced today that it will become a for-profit venture. Editor Geoff Dougherty announced the move in a post on the site, which has received funding from the Knight Foundation and a host of other supporters.
Dougherty explains the move:
We’ve concluded...
New Organizations, New Relationships
We’ve heard a lot about our forecasts for advertising revenues in the New News Organization this week (mostly asserting that our cpm and penetration assumptions are too optimistic). But, it seems our other goal–to envision a sustainable business built on a diversity of revenues–has been largely overlooked.
In fact, in year three of our NNO model,...
The Assumptions Behind Our Models
Some points about the assumptions baked into our models:
We settled on a $12 cpm as a conservative benchmark, based on feedback from a number of news organizations, large and small. Indeed, we commonly heard a range of $15 to $20 cpm. In terms of for-profit startups that replicate what we are calling the New News...
The Models: Hyperlocals & the Framework
This set of spreadsheets incorporates two models: hyperlocal and the sales, support, and technology framework that we believe is necessary to optimize businesses in the ecosystem. We believe an organization that enables advertising networks and other services to support the local news ecosystem is both a sustainable business and will make individual hyperlocal news organizations...
The Models: New News Organization
This model envisions a new, metro-wide news organization serving a market of five million people that operates on a smaller scale and performs a wide variety of tasks. It will produce original unique beat and investigative reporting and it will also work collaboratively with the other members of the ecosystem and its readers to add...
