Category Archives: Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate

On media’s stage, a scenery shift: De Correspondent shows off thrilling new props verging on a ‘keiretsu-cooperative’; a NY Times columnist tugs the curtain on the old set

. Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , , ,

android dec 2011 to nov 2012 035

Betwixt and between: stage hands at work - postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

Betwixt and between: stage hands at work
– postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

A group of Dutch media innovators – inevitably, young, as noted here last week – has created an actual, working prototype of what we expect to be a popular style of organisation for publishing in the near future. It has no advertising. It is financed by reasonably-priced subscriptions. Most important of all, it puts commenters on articles – the people it prefers to refer to as ‘contributors’ – at the centre of its enterprise, treating them as honoured extensions of its founding family. Wondermooi. That is exactly what we recommended in 2010 when, in keeping with the fuzzier usage of the time we referred to this same constituency as ‘bloggers’ — or ‘blogger-commenters,’ after a critic rightly demanded a clarification.

We did not foresee a big, ambitious media venture being able to do without advertising so soon. Nor did we anticipate that one would launch itself with crowdfunding, which Kickstarter was just beginning to turn into a household word four years ago. De Correspondent raised a breathtaking $1.7 million between March and September last year. In a post in April on the site of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Loes Witschge reported a remarkable feat in a country with a population of just 16 million:

On March 18, [Rob] Wijnberg, former editor-in-chief of the young-adult-targeted newspaper nrc.next, proposed his idea for a new online journalism platform on Dutch national television. Within 24 hours, his team had raised half its goal, and after eight days, Wijnberg got an earlier than expected go-ahead: 15,000 had subscribed, and many had added donations on top of their subscription fee. In just over a week, in a small country, the Dutch crowdfunding project De Correspondent had raised over €1 million (about $1.3 million).

By this spring, the group had 24,000 subscribers – the proportional equivalent of 450,000 in the US, Wijnberg says — each paying roughly $80 (€60) for the privilege.

Now this, you might agree, is seriously important news. Print media are desperate for a viable new economic model. So, has The New York Times written about De Correspondent? Er, … no, unless we’ve been using the wrong search terms, hunting for evidence. The Guardian, another of the most-visited sites on the net? The Telegraph? The Independent? The Economist? Apparently not – and anyone who has proof to the contrary must please leave a comment with appropriate links beneath this post. … Oh, and there is no point in trying to look up its history on the Wikipedia for anyone irritated by having to make do with a machine translation from Dutch.

We only learnt of De Correspondent’s existence in checking that search engines were keeping up with our last entry on post-Gutenberg, using, for search tags, ‘new media’ and ‘business model’. Its own site is naturally the best guide to its modus operandi, but the applause it richly deserves is to be found exclusively on new media sites of the likes of Journalism.co.uk, Gigaom and MediaGazer. On the Medium blogging platform, Ernst-Jan Pfauth , another founder, explains under the headline ‘Why we see journalists as conversation leaders and readers as expert contributors’:

Every reader is an expert at something

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about news sites shutting down their comments sections, since readers’ contributions are often too obtrusive (read Mathew Ingrams excellent post about this).

Here in Amsterdam, we sincerely regret these developments, since we believe that modern journalists shouldn’t see their readers as a passive group of annoying followers. Instead, they should regard readers as a potential gold mine of expert information. That’s why, at De Correspondent, we encourage our journalists to function as conversation leaders and our members as expert contributors.

At De Correspondent, we owe our very existence to our members, since we launched our Dutch ad-free journalism platform after raising a total of 1.7 million dollars with a world record breaking crowd-funding campaign. We encourage our correspondents — who all have their own niche — to tell the stories that they feel are important, instead of just following the hype cycle of the news.

He also said:

We end every article with a question to our members

In our custom-built editor Respondens, we have a special field called ‘Oproep’ (which translates to ‘Call-up’). Correspondents can use that field to make explicit what they would like to know from their readers. The call shows up underneath the article and steers the contributions in the direction the correspondent finds journalistically most relevant.

We invite members to write guest articles

We continuously invite our members to write guest posts. […]

There is no mention of turning those subscribers into shareholders and running De Correspondent as a cooperative – yet. That might be an idea for another group to try, one we hope will give us the sort of laugh these Dutchmen did in setting out their names — well-established in Netherlands media before they banded together — as follows: Rob Wijnberg (1982), Harald Dunnink (1981), Sebastian Kersten (1976), and Ernst-Jan Pfauth (1986).

Advertising their birth years, you might suppose, amounts to a sign reading, Oldies Keep Out. But, not quite. The first part of ‘the keiretsu-cooperative’ in the paper that started this blog in 2010 referred to the Japanese name for a network of firms collaborating as trading partners, in a proposal for a news site (long-established or new) sharing the initial expense of starting and running a subscriber-owned cooperative with a partner in, say, book publishing. De Correspondent says it is working with:

De Groene Amsterdammer (founded in 1877) … a weekly magazine of ideas and opinion; it is perhaps best comparable to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books[…] De Groene Amsterdammer will share some of its content as well as its editorial and investigative resources with De Correspondent.

… and …

Momkai (founded in 2002) … an independent, digital creative agency in the Netherlands that is renowned for its ability to combine conceptual thinking, design and technology in the creation of online formats and campaigns. Momkai is founding partner and responsible for the brand, the website, the identity and the campaigns. Momkai also created a new publishing framework and editor for De Correspondent called Respondens.

… Well, well, well – we thought, spotting Monday’s column in The New York Times by its media correspondent, David Carr: this De Correspondent has not been born a moment too soon. Snippets that stood out in the column, a review of a new book — a roman à clef about New York newshounds by Michael Hastings, a journalist killed tragically young in the 2003 Iraq war:

… [P]oliticians and journalists are now neck and neck in a race to the bottom of public trust. According to a poll released by Gallup last week, fewer than a quarter of news consumers trust what they read, watch or click on, a historic low.

… Much has changed since the period Mr. Hastings chronicles, most notably that the audience has fled established print outlets …

… The public is less prone to the allure of Great Men pontificating from inside a magazine, the television or behind a lectern at a news conference. The jig is up.

The public is ready to share the stage, onto which De Correspondent has invited it to step up and join fully in the action. Bravo for the courage to try out a new idea — never mind if the degree to which it has succeeded so far is hard to judge for those of us who cannot read in Dutch. And a hat tip to David Carr for facing the facts, refusing to bury his head in the sand, and telling us what he sees — truthfully.

The components of the next media ‘business model’ are ready: dewy-eyed newcomers, not media’s Old Guard, will do the essential assembly and testing

. Cooperatives, Micropayments, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , , ,

august 2013 lolling nymphs circular balcony DSCF1026

The old classic forms for media are broken: their replacements are coming from young explorers open to the magic of possibility and experimentation - photographs of the Villa Borromeo: MIL22

The old classic forms for media are broken: their replacements are coming from young explorers open to the magic of possibility and experimentation
– photographs of the Villa Borromeo: MIL22

Though Larry Page, the Google co-founder, has a thatch of grey hair, we know he is still only forty-one. His baby face reminds us that he was twenty-five in 1998, when he hatched a search engine with Sergey Brin. We also know that Jimmy Wales was thirty-five when he launched the Wikipedia in 2001, and Jeff Bezos a mere thirty at the founding of Amazon.com in 1994.

So, why are we looking to today’s old media leaders to reshape the way we get news and commentary through them? Google, Wikipedia and Amazon — three inventions that have made done more than any others to re-shape the habits of those of us who used to be called bookworms — should have made it pointless for anyone to expect the big names in print media, whose chiefs are nearly all middle-aged or old, to build the bridge to future economic survival for their enterprises.

Three identifiers of the most promising scheme for publishing – called a ‘business model’ – look more practical and likely than ever:

Some form of collective ownership and management – which, for some new publishing groups, would mean replacing the old idea of ‘reader subscriptions’ with small ownership stakes for audience members who want a say in drafting rules and setting policy.

Consultative decision-making on strategic and policy matters helped by free, ‘sharable’ software tools designed to streamline collaboration — the kind being developed by New Zealand’s Loomio cooperative (the most sophisticated of which might include software tailored to deal with particular kinds of conflict).

Vast aggregations of micropayments making up the financial lifeblood of media collectives – from selling access to certain kinds of information or entertainment (though most of this would be free); or in-payments for the privilege of stakeholding, and outpayments when there are profits to be distributed.

Most of the worker-bees driving the creativity at Loomio and the micropayments innovator Flattr are decades younger than the old media leaders in continental Europe interviewed last week by The Guardian about their struggle to adapt for digitisation. The limit of bold and adventurous thinking by these appears to be a subscription club – similar to the plan described by Mario Calabresi, editor-in-chief of Italy’s La Stampa , in which most of its offerings would continue to be free …

… while holding back some premium content in order to be able to offer more in-depth information to those who want it. Around this premium content we are building a club-like structure, which brings together our keenest readers and offers them exclusive tools with which to understand the world.

Club, yes; but stake, no – and that is surely a mistake. Giving readers the chance to own a financial stake, even a small one, in drawing more traffic to a media site would encourage more of them to linger to chat with other readers – regularly log on to comments sections, treating them like virtual pubs or coffee-shops for relaxing sessions of teasing, information-sharing, debating and flirting anonymously and pseudonymously as well as in the prosaic guise of being, as on Facebook, simply themselves. One commenter on the Guardian survey of European papers had the media enterprise of the future exactly right:

ringodingo

13 June 2014 11:03am

… Newspapers, tv etc have to accept that media is now two-way.

So Guardian etc should become more like a social media site?

To an extent they already involve the readers with the comment threads.

Or, as the 2010 paper that this post-Gutenberg blog extends said, if we may be forgiven for the unpardonable sin of quoting ourselves:

New communication technologies have created a karaoke world. … Practically no one is content any more to be just a spectator, reader, passive listener or viewer. Audience participation as well as the right to talk back – which includes non-expert reviewing of works or performances by trained and seasoned professionals — have become absolutely essential.

That La Stampa understands this is clear. Calabresi said:

We are drawing on user-generated content, seeking to unite and integrate it with our quality journalism. On social networks we are working to increase reader engagement in order to make them key players in the debate on our content.

He sounds remarkably like The Guardian’s own editor, Alan Rusbridger, telling an American interviewer that

We are putting our commentators in the same space as all our readers and letting them fight it out. … [R]eally, in this community of Guardian readers, there are a lot of intelligent, well-versed people actually traveling. So let’s open it up to them.

But those are just words, mere sentiments, at present. Until they are offered a financial stake and the possibility, some day, of sharing in any profits, those readers contributing comments and reporting to ‘opened up’ papers are simply supplying unpaid labour. Not, in our view, an operating scheme with much of a future.

When will some newspaper like La Stampa or The Guardian test the idea of sharing ownership and decision-making on a strictly experimental section of its site – as this blog has suggested before, more than once? They might take a cue from the adventurous ‘skunk works’ at the Harvard Business School testing online education.

One European interviewed by the London newspaper about the digital future, Stefan Niggemeier – an ex-Spiegel staffer who has worked both as an editor and publishing innovator — is part of a group of twenty-five German investigative journalists playing with financial schemes that do not rely on advertising: ‘We want to see if there’s a way of establishing a non-advertising-based model. Whether it will work, I don’t know, but I know it’s right to try it, even if it fails.’

Rusbridger is sixty. Niggemeier and Calabresi are both in their mid-forties. Even they might not be young enough to translate proposals and hypotheses into media’s clicking and whirring fully operational future.

A hint from the insect world about radical post-Gutenberg adaptation

. 4th Estate moves, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , ,
enchantedlearning.com

-photograph: enchantedlearning.com

With eyes usually peeled on the media revolution, we read with special fascination about a Darwinian parallel in the insect world in a small item by Sindya Bhanoo in today’s New York Times.

We came across it still reflecting on a post about the sacking last month of the editors of Le Monde and The New York Times by Susan Glasser — editor of the Politico site – in which she revisited her own disastrous experience as an editor and department head at The Washington Post:

In the course of my short and controversial tenure in the job, I learned several things, among them: 1) print newspapers REALLY, REALLY didn’t want to change to adapt to the new digital realities; 2) I did not have the full backing of the paper’s leadership to carefully shepherd a balky, unhappy staff of 100 or so print reporters and editors across that unbuilt bridge to the 21st century …

The doomed survival strategy of the newly silent Hawaiian crickets at the end of this snippet reminds us of print newspapers’ continuing refusal to make radical alterations of their ‘business model’ for the identical task: communication.

On Separate Islands, Crickets Go Silent

In 2003, a number of male field crickets on the Hawaiian island of Kauai were born without the ability to chirp. Two years later, the same thing happened on Oahu.

Researchers thought the events were related — a genetic mutation that spread from one island to the other through commercial transport, or perhaps even a flying cricket that found its own way over.

But now, researchers report that the mutant males on each island stopped singing independently, through two similar but distinct adaptations.

“It’s an example of convergent evolution,” said Nathan Bailey, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the new study, which appears in Current Biology. “And it’s exciting because we are catching this mutation as it’s happening in the wild.”

Male crickets have specialized structures at the end of their wings. When they rub them together, the structures engage with one another and make the chirping sound.

“It’s like rubbing a fingernail along the teeth of a comb,” Dr. Bailey said.

[…]

Dr. Bailey said the crickets had adapted to become less vulnerable to a parasitic Hawaiian fly that is attracted to the males’ chirp. The fly larvae burrow into the cricket, causing it to die within a week.

But there is a downside: The males who do not chirp cannot attract females as easily as those who do.

“So instead they adjust their behavior,” Dr. Bailey said. “They hang around the remaining singing males and then intercept the females.”

 

The most wonderful calling-card for a writer trying to squeeze past literary gatekeepers? Your very own powerful publishing house!

. Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , ,

sigrid rausing book cover
Last year we heard from an eminent scientist about the complaint by a friend of his — a physicist who won the great Swedish prize in the late 1960s — that his lofty New York agent had reported that his latest book proposal had met a wall of rejection by publishers. ‘He was told that if he was – you know, that British physicist in a wheelchair, er …’. ‘Stephen Hawking?’ post-Gutenberg suggested. ‘Yes, him. My friend was told that it would be different if he could attract the kind of public attention Hawking does. There would be no trouble placing his manuscript and getting him a very large advance.’

The eminent scientist telling us the story had been suffering the identical fate at the hands of publishers on two continents.

With this as an excellent specimen of the sort of conversation between writers and their representatives that is dead common today, we considered what an agent – today’s equivalent in publishing of St. Peter at the pearly gates – would say to an unknown scribe trying to place a manuscript about her sojourn on a collective farm in Estonia in the early 1990s. ‘Estonia – you must be joking, who has ever heard of it? And it’s so ridiculously small I am not sure I could even place it on a map! Have you spent five seconds considering what point there could be in asking anyone to read about such an obscure and insignificant country? You say that it’s based on your out-of-date experience of doing fieldwork for your doctorate in anthropology, twenty years ago? And you have already published the thesis you wrote on the subject? Come, come, you are an intelligent woman! There must be some other subject you can think of! You know you have no track record as a writer? Why not invest some energy in building a platform? Then you can try us again, okay? And now, sorry, but I really must take this next call –.’

But, miracle of miracles, we have described an actual book being reviewed respectfully in recent weeks, called Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia. It is indeed based on someone’s memories of fact-gathering for her old Phd. thesis. The only reason why it is not mouldering on an attic shelf under four inches of dust is the author’s identity. She is Sigrid Rausing, an anthropologist and philanthropist – routinely referred to as one of Britain’s richest women in media profiles explaining that she is an heir to a great Swedish industrial fortune — who also became a publisher to watch when she bought Granta, a pillar of the British literary establishment, the name of both a magazine and book publisher, in 2005.

She did not have to publish her book herself. Truly, the strangest fact of all in this story is that she really can write – her atmospheric prose frequently recalling the travel writer Colin Thubron’s otherworldly, melancholy, In Siberia — and, with the luck of having her own power base in the business, evidently had no trouble getting her manuscript read and given a green light.

Post-Gutenberg has for some time been avoiding all the usual superlatives in praising new books – bankrupt currency, for the reasons Jennifer Weiner offered in a summing-up in ‘All Blurbed Out’ in last Sunday’s New York Times that said in part: ‘”Stunning” is mundane, “gorgeous” is commonplace, “brilliance” and “genius” are positively de rigueur.’

We offer the best and only reliable guides to literary achievement — excerpts from the author’s own text. We are pleased to do this because Rausing is not only generous with her family’s money, but the far more precious gifts of her attention and engagement. In a recent profile in The Telegraph, she announced her commitment to personally going through unsolicited submissions – usually called the slush pile – dispatched to Granta. Over to her book, now:

EXTRACT ONE

That evening I found Marika and Alar and Heli drinking cocktails: 96 percent ethanol from Marika’s veterinary practice poured into a Russian vodka bottle, mixed with ‘exotic juice’. They used to drink ethanol eggnogs because Marika got paid in eggs from the farmers; thirty to forty eggs to cure a sick cow. When the salmonella started appearing in the eggs they stopped it, and started mixing the alcohol with juice. I drank that strange and ravaging mixture with them, and at midnight we went to a bar by the harbour, open all night now for drinking and dancing. Somebody, I think it was Ets, brought a bottle of champagne, and we drank that, too. Some strangers turned up – a pale man with green eyes and sandy moustache, and a young couple with a Doberman. They were from President Meri’s staff – he had a dacha on the peninsula, from the Soviet era. I had come across it by chance – a seemingly abandoned narrow dirt road broadened, then turned into an asphalt road, ending by a high gate and a fence. People were dancing wild Estonian waltzes and polkas; under the influence of ethanol and Georgian champagne, the strangers seemed like friends. Dusk merged with dawn, and I walked home alone.

EXTRACT TWO

Who was I, at this point, for them? A kind of mascot, perhaps. In the plenty of Estonian summer I was offered strawberries, gooseberries, rides in Ladas. Once I was offered fish, two tiny brown fish. I was always offered drinks, too many drinks. A slight anxiety set in about leaving. At the same time the heat, the relentless heatwave made me feel as if nothing would ever change. The glaring light was eating me up, and I longed for grey clouds and cool winds. Something felt stuck in my throat. I slept and slept. My Swedish duvet, so warm in the winter, smelled of sweat now. There was no wind – the village echoed without the perennial wind. The dogs howled. I woke up at night from the howling, or from Karl crying next door. The moths fluttered in the kitchen as I stumbled out for a glass of water. I dreamt, anxiously, about leaving my laptop behind.