How To Save Journalism

Submitted by Michael Rosenblum on September 29, 2009 – 5:05 am2 Comments

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OK, now tap out “it’s the real thing”….

Advertising saved radio.

Like the web, radio was a wholly new technology, a new way of delivering vast amounts of information to people in their homes. There had been nothing like it ever before. And in the beginning, it was free.

The first ads didn’t appear on radio until 1922, twenty-four years after radio’s invention.

But it made radio work. And profitable.

Now journalism is in trouble on the web.

It is in trouble because the web, like radio, seems to be free. So we give away all the content (like The New York Times), for free.

This is a situation that obviously cannot continue. So we search for models to ‘monetize’ it.

Our problem is we are looking in the past. When radio was invented ATT tried to make it pay for itself by creating ‘Toll Radio’, where you paid by the minute. They did that because they were comfortable with the phone model, where you did the same thing.

Now people like Murdoch are discussing a ‘Toll Model’ for the web. This clearly won’t work, but subscription is what he is used to so that’s where he goes.

I have another idea.

When I went to journalism school we hardly ever talked about the ad sales guys. That was the ‘forbidden world’ for journalists. That mentality continued during my time at The NY Times and CBS News. It was a dirty place, not for us.

We have seen how the digital revolution has re-made the content side. Where once text and now video were produced by highly paid ’specialists’, online content now comes in great waves because anyone can make it and now everyone does.

From bloggers to the 8.9 billion videos viewed on Youtube last month alone, the content is coming from everyone.

What is not coming from everyone is the revenue.

That is, seemingly, coming from no one.

It is time then to create the revenue analog to the digital content revolution: the digital revenue revolution.

Let us do for revenue what we have already done for content: democratize it.

Everyone and their brother eventually launches their website – whatever it is. And if you get so far as to wondering how it will pay for itself, the answer is ‘advertising’. Yet advertising on the web is still a kind of miasma. Where exactly does it come from and how does it work?

As newspapers have collapsed their more intrepid staffs have sometimes taken them online as independents – The Rocky Mountain News or the refugees from The Newark Star Ledger among many others. While they are great at the content, they founder on the shores of revenue.

That is because while we have brought the benefits of the digital revolution to content creation, we have not touched the revenue side. Which is crazy.

How would we do this?

I think we could take a lesson from the very successful Travel Channel Academy.

There we train people who want to become ‘Travel Journalists” to shoot, edit, script, and upload quality material.

Let’s imagine instead a Saatchi & Saatchi academy. A place, married to an ad agency, where we would train students, housewives, house husbands, retired folks – pretty much anyone who was interested – to create digital ads.

A video camera, a laptop and a creative mind are all it really takes.

Once trained and certified, they would become a massive army of digital ad makers.

What would be their targets?

Well, for starters, the world.

‘Viral Advertising’ is the holy grail of webworld. But how do you ‘get viral’.

Right now, it’s all blind luck. God willing some expensive ad agency will create a clever ad and put it on Youtube and someone else will find it.

This is no way to work.

If there were an ad army of say, 10,000 people who had graduate from the Saatchi Academy, and if, say, Starbucks were to hire the army (and they could afford it), and the army got its marching orders – go to your local starbucks and make a 30 second spot and put it online – well then in an afternoon, you have 10,000 videos from 10,000 different starbuck’s locations flooding the web. Or Twitter.

And you pay the 10,000 people for their time and effort. Not a lot. But they get paid.

That’s the macro.

Now the micro.

Even small websites have advertising shelf space that is available. And so do big sites and cable TV.

It’s a market in search of clients.

Of course, the numbers are much too small to attract major advertisers. But they could attract what we might call hyperlocal advertising.

The 10,000 people who have been trained to do this. They can go to the local shoe store or pizza parlor and create an ad on their own – then place it with thousands of small to medium locales and take a 30% commission for their work.

It’s where blogging meets advertising.

As we have opened up the process of content, now we have to open up the process of ad sales.

When everyone gets involved it is both highly competitive as well as cost-effective.

And it generates income – for the content creators and for the ad makers.

As my friend Jeff Jarvis might say, ‘its what Google would do’ – at least I think it is.