I’m sure most readers of this blog also follow US new media giant Jeff Jarvis’ blog over at Buzz Machine.

Jeff was telling us the future of journalism is entrepreneurial before anyone had really considered it and Buzz Machine is a hive of interesting writing. Today Jeff posted the results of an Entrepreneurial Journalism class where his CUNY students have been pitching their own business ideas.

For obvious reasons he’s not giving much away, but what he did reveal about the pitches that won some development cash (and those that didn’t) offers some excellent inspiration and ideas to the rest of us:

The four ideas that won some money from the McCormick Foundation are (emphasis mine)

• a platform for news assignments
• a mobile sports application
• a creative, algorithmic answer to filter failure
• and ClosetTour a new media site dedicated to fashion

And those that didn’t:

• a specialised womens travel service
• a specialised local real estate (property) service
• a cool food idea
• 2 business-to-business ideas
• a hyperlocal idea
• a service for NGOs
• a commercial service for NGOs

What’s great is the huge variety of ideas – covering news, fashion, food, sport. What’s more as Jeff notes:

A few were built around the need not just to create content but to curate it. Most are highly targeted. Some saw the potential in specialised local services. Some saw the need to go mobile to service the public. Some are international. Some are multimedia. A few saw the need to make news fun, others to make news useful.

And Jeff stressed the need for every business to cut a profit in order to survive. We must be capitalist about it now.

Anyone outside of CUNY or the US should read this and take inspiration. Although Jeff’s descriptions are necessarily vague, use them to fuel your own ideas and thoughts for entrepreneurial models. Think about the importance of serving a market, having a niche, finding a gap in the market – and being able to sum up your business in an elevator pitch.

Earlier today a friend showed me plans for an exciting news business in the North of  England, which I can’t  say anything about at the moment. But all this adds strength to my conviction that, if 2009 was the year of “great media collapse” then 2010 will be the year it rises from the ashes.

This is a perfect example on how companies must learn to respect their clients. Dell learned it the hard way after guru blogger Jeff Jarvis posted on his blog BuzzMachine “Dell Sucks” regarding a bad experience he had with their product and customer service. His article got linked with others and sooner or later everyone was reading how Dell sucked. It affected their sales, and they came to him for help. Now it seems United is going down the same path.

They broke some poor musician’s guitar and didn’t want to fix it. So what did he do? Wrote a song about how United breaks guitars. As you can expect, it caught on and now it has over 5 million views on YouTube. Rumor says that United has offered him various undisclosed deals which he declined saying that “the time of the clever United has passed.”

Check his video below and pass it on!

I highly recommend checking out the work being done on the New Business Models for News Project.  The project examines what a paper-less news organization might look like in a top 25 market (The project assumes that daily print newspapers are gone).  The effort is designed to look at the type of organization that might replace the traditional newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis, heading up the project, sees an ecosystem rather than a single entity emerging.  He cites the fact that numerous hyper-local bloggers currently generate $100-200K in annual revenue.  The theory is that such bloggers (many with formal journalism training) will band together with other service providers to create a lower cost, highly distributed news organization.

These “New News” organizations might generate $20MM in revenue in a top 25 market (versus $400-800MM that a traditional newspaper generated).  Margins would remain in the 30% range.  The news staff might be approximately the same as a traditional organization.  Obviously, overall staff would be dramatically less.  (Too bad the newspapers completely missed the boat on classified ads – the most profitable part of a traditional daily.)

The revenue streams for New News are predicted to be far more diverse.  The model predicts that 57% of revenue will come from advertising.  The rest will come from a wide variety of sources (e.g., event hosting, ticket sales, B2B online marketplace, consulting local businesses regarding online marketing).

In terms of advertising itself, online display advertising will ultimately be displaced by newer forms of advertising that behave more like ecommerce (e.g., coupons, deals).  “Online ads want to be transactional.”

The project team published a very detailed financial model (great work!!!).  The model is in Google Docs and can be copied and modified.  I took a look at the model from the perspective of Portland, Oregon.  In my opinion, many of the assumptions are a bit off (especially as applied to the Portland market).

* Most obvious is the assumed market size of 5,000,000 people.  Portland is substantially smaller.

* Additionally, the traffic ramp is far too aggressive.  The hypothetical New News org reaches 73% of “mature” potential in three years.

* Most fundamentally, the model doesn’t take into account competition.  It assumes a single winning New News organization.

* Furthermore, I would toss out most of the “alternative” revenue streams as too speculative in my modeling.

* On the expense side, the Portland organization would be SUBSTANTIALLY smaller.

I do feel that there is an opportunity in Portland, Oregon to join forces to create a very interesting (and profitable) New News organization. Perhaps the initial organization wouldn’t directly compete with the Oregonian.  A coordinated network including blog/niche news sites like BlueOregon, BikePortland, SiliconFlorist and the like would be very interesting.

In terms of the advertising products, some work is necessary.  Perhaps the best way to launch is to simply focus on “traditional” online display ads.  However, it makes sense to quickly move to more performance based advertising approaches.  Portland’s ForkFly is a good example – applied to the restaurant category.

In terms of quality of the journalism itself, Jarvis optimistically believes that quality might actually increase as blogger/journalists are able to focus more and dive into more detail.  In terms of the Portland market, there are plenty of high quality local websites.

I’m convinced that there is an opportunity along these lines in Portland (although on a smaller scale).

Finally, here is a link to Jeff Jarvis being interviewed on On The Media.  Well worth a listen.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/what-would-google-do/

Over at Buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis has been speculating on the decline of advertising in a one-to-one world linking consumers with marketers. Google presumably makes this possible. Social networking presumably makes this possible. They are the high-tech conduits of word-of-mouth, which has always had the underlying responsibility for building brands. Give consumers the power on their own through these and other tools to talk about brand experiences and marketers can cut out the middleman: advertising.

Rumors of the death of advertising are driven as well by the fact that advertising grew so pervasive and intrusive off-line that skipping commercials became a business, starting with the remote control, then the VCR, then TiVo, Napster,  the iPod, etc. James Fallows gave time in his Atlantic Monthly blog last month to the idea that newspapers aren’t dying; instead, advertising is dying and dragging newspapers and other media down with it.

Here’s my take: nothing is dying. Newspapers aren’t dying, TV isn’t dying and advertising isn’t dying. To be sure, there may be a few deaths in the family, but the distinguished line of TV, print and advertising  inheritors can look forward to a continued life of citizenship.

As an industry we have discussed that changes may have to be made by some of those inheritors in order to carry on their legacy. For the most part this means specialization, or enhanced relevancy. Newspapers don’t have to disappear, but they may have to stop trying to be all things to all people. Ditto most every media business. But, fortunately, most media types have shown themselves willing and capable of successful adaptation over the years, enough to ward off extinction.

Now it is important, however, to come to terms with the significant role that advertising has played in the survival skills of media through the years. Today, most media are utterly dependent on it, new and old. That dependency is making it hard for advertising to change in the ways it needs to in order to catch-up with others in a consumer-driven world. As the thing so totally and utterly responsible for powering the New Media Age advertising has been feeling recently that the world needs it more than it needs the world. Some have even said so.

Well, Jeff Jarvis and others are speculating this may not be true. I don’t agree; but their conjecture is not uninformed. The world dislikes advertising - the Internet world, I think, most especially – and the reason why is simple: advertising insists it has the right to be rewarded, which is fundamentally out of step with what every sensible marketer knows is true about the world in which it does business today – rewards are given at the discretion of consumers. The rather astonishing trail over the years of advertising innovations designed to reward advertisers online such as adware, pops-ups (then pop-unders), flashing banners, interstitial, home page take-overs, and even pre-roll have done nothing except leave room for the doomsayers to howl at the moon.

Can it be advertising by this or any other name if it is not so insistent and demanding? Can advertising let go and give itself over to the care and judgement of the users groups and web pages and the mobile telephones of consumer generations today and tomorrow? Can it be successful at cultivating consumer trial and loyalty? Yes, it can, if it agrees to second place behind the consumer.

Consumers have rewarded advertisers many times over the years that agree to see it their way. Research has regularly documented that subscribers especially value the shopping circulars in their Sunday newspapers, which despite the onslaught of new media still splash out of the paper onto the kitchen counter every weekend. What is a fashion magazine to readers without the fashion advertising? There is as much anticipation today over Super Bowl commercials as there is the game, a reward to advertisers for their bold creative efforts. The brilliant Herb Schmertz forever changed corporate image advertising and showed how to constructively engage audiences by underwriting Masterpiece Theatre on PBS in the 1980s for Mobil Oil.

Put the consumer first and great things can happen for business, including the business of advertising. Unfortunately, not enough of that takes place online where, instead, it was suppose to be pay-back time for advertisers: one-to-one advertising, nothing lost or wasted. A little “me time” for beleaguered ad executives desperate to show that, “Yes, we can.”

Bad idea. Wrong for the times. Especially wrong for the medium and its value proposition to users. Of all places, the Internet, a consumer-driven, owned and operated, ours not yours, media tapestry with genetic hyper-sensitivity to third-party encroachment and control was the wrong place for advertising to insist on the spot at the front of the line. After much banging around, we are now in serious trouble of regulation that is thoroughly disconnected from practical reality and – worse - out of proportion to the more significant encroachments that exist offline. And, unfortunately, the facts really don’t enter into it. As of now, it’s perception not reality. How ironic.

As a consumer I have no satisfactory response for advertisers that have been denied for so long the answer to Mr Wanamaker’s question. When I’m not busy selling the virtues of vertical niche content online, I am a media consumer and as a consumer I have no reliable guidance for advertisers that wish to engage me.

“When would be a good time to talk?” I don’t know. I suppose when I’m in the mood. I suppose when I’m thinking about whatever it is that I’m thinking (note veiled, commerical reference to vertical niche content above).  I suppose if you have something clever to say. But I need my space. Please don’t hover. If I have questions, I’ll ask. That’s my attitude and, I suspect, the attitude of many consumers.

I don’t know how Mr. Schmertz measured the effectiveness of his corporate underwriting experience back in the 80s. It was a sensation and gave him a certain celebrity along with his pioneering use of op-ed advertising positions. He wrote a book. I suppose he did some research to measure favorability of Mobil among the opinion-leader demo that was his target. Still, today, however, I expect to see Mobil (now Exxon Mobil) as the underwriter of Masterpiece Theatre and I will forever associate the company with citizenship, whether I agree with them or not. And while it may or may not be connected, I really have always favored their brand when buying gasoline, which leads me to report, sadly, that Exxon Mobil is pulling out of Eastern Massachusetts. The stations will be replaced with Gulf. Ifeel like I’ve lost a life-long community connection that I had learned to trust – a connection that had its roots in advertising and gave me something interesting along the way.

Advertising is about consumers and no one talks about the death of consumers as a marketplace constituency. Make advertising the servant of consumers, in the way advertisers do their products, and its future is assured.

Jeff Jarvis, em seu Buzzmachine, nos mostra uma nova maneira de empacotar notícias.

Seguimos tentando buscar uma solução para os jornais impressos…

As noted in TechCrunch today, Contenture has launched a site that will hopelessly attempt to charge people for things that they seem to think are free.  I wish them luck, but the small blogs they will get to join aren’t enough to create a tipping point.

Actually I don’t think it will be entirely hopeless, but ‘Freemium’ systems count on some form of altruism which is not widespread.  MC Siegler, bucking the trend of those who believe everything should be free, has dipped his toe in the micropayments water a couple of times lately.  He seems to be hedging against the inevitable.

Let’s get one thing straight.  The only thing in life that is free is air.  Even water costs $1.25 a liter now.  Air is next.  But not before news and journalism on the web.

It’s only a matter of time until the people who pay for the bandwidth, salaries, coffee, etc. realize that they need to charge visitors and that display ads aren’t covering the nut.

Free content on the web is the last vestige of the deferred payment generation that got us into the sub-prime mortgage mess.  I love to flit about, reading all the news that is fit to steal, but I bet I would spend more productive time on other things if I knew it would cost me $.10 to read that stupid article about John and Kate.

I would be happy to ditch my paper copy of the NYT and have their website become a portal for me to savor the news of the world.

Jeff Jarvis has an excellent post at BuzzMachine explaining, point by point, why newspapers and their lawyers are wrong to lobby the government for tax breaks, changes in copyright law and antitrust exemption. Here’s a taste of his must-read piece, on the issue of tax subsidies:

We out here don’t actually need such a subsidy because we’ve been smart enough to take advantage of the new, free press and we are not saddled with the costs of an old press. Why should we then have to subsidize the market failure and anti-strategic stubbornness of the owners of those old presses? “Congress,” they write, “could provide incentives for placing ads with content creators (not with Craigslist).” That’s just plain payola.

As reported on Poynter Online, Romanesko relays a memo written by Dean Singleton – the CEO of MediaNews Group – detailing the changes that MNG will be effecting in order to recover and react to the massive changes affecting the legacy news business.

Jeff Jarvis savages Dean in his latest post on BuzzMachine.

I’ve already posted over there, so you can go over and read my response.  Basically my response is:

Jeff, if you want MediaNews group to give it’s journalism away, how about giving me a free copy of your latest book, ‘What Would Google Do?‘?

The Wall Street Journal plans to start a micropayments service for individual articles this fall. Let the echo-chamber pooh-poohing begin! (Quote below is from Jeff Jarvis; emphasis is mine):

So if the Journal brings on micropayment, I fear for them that they’ll lose doubly. They’ll lose my subscription. They’ll lose my even occasional readership and the ad revenue that can come with that. They will, in a cruel irony, replace digital dollars with micro pennies.

Or, conversely, WSJ could increase readership by allowing the purchase of individual articles without the need for a yearly online subscription. Time will tell.

I’m sharing a few quotes I’ve excerpted from Gina Chen’s excellent post, “Journalists must change thinking to change industry.” Chen was inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s recent blog entry about the need for journalists to add value in their newsrooms. And while Chen frequently cites Jarvis’ What Would Google Do?, her own observations are equally compelling:

• In my experience, the hurried newsroom culture doesn’t encourage deep thinking.

Indeed it doesn’t. To give but one example: Journalists on a beat are forced to quickly write stories both large and small, with no time to step back and consider, “Is my daily routine serving my readers in the way they would — and should — expect?”

• We forget that we’re a service industry: We’re in the business of helping readers make sense of their world, not of selling them news.

And yet how many times have we read articles that are little more than notebook-dumps of information? Journalists, in the rush to make deadline, have little time but to toss half-baked, confusing stories upon their readers — readers who need knowledge, and don’t care whether we’ve included a minimum of three sources, or have written an award-worthy nut graf.

We expect the reader to want ice cream and soda, and we see ourselves as the high-minded intelligentsia shoveling up broccoli and whole-grains to the toothless masses. I think we sell the reader short. I think we need to realize that if readers don’t get the stories we think are important — the economy, politics, war, genocide – we’re not telling them in the right way.

Notice how each of Gina’s criticisms builds upon the previous. Journalists up against the clock dump confusing stories on readers. Then the readers get blamed for not wanting nutritious news, when the problem is that journalists haven’t been giving them — pardon the cliche — “news they can use.”

Google-lover Jeff Jarvis hasn’t been asked to speak (yet) before Sen. John Kerry’s hearing on failed newspapers. But if he were, he would say some very Jeff Jarvis-y things like:

• Newspapers and their proprietors – and, in many cases, their professionals – have had a generation to reinvent themselves and bring journalism forward into the next age: 20 years since the start of the web, 15 since the introduction of the commercial browser and craigslist, 10 since the invention of blogs and founding of Google.

• I would like to see our government follow the leads of the U.K. and Australian governments in making ubiquitous and open broadband connectivity a priority and a promise.

And, of course:

• Newspapers are going to die.

The interweb was abuzz today over Michael Kinsley’s Washington Post op-ed, “Life After Newspapers.” And perhaps no one was buzzing with more buzzy glee than the BuzzMachinist himself, Jeff Jarvis.

Jarvis’ post “Kinsley nails it again” (as in another nail in the newspaper industry coffin?) praises the Slate cofounder for his dismissal of government subsidies as a solution to the industry’s woes.

Jarvis, if you didn’t already know, is no fan of dead-tree media. Among his pronouncements:

Newspapers will vanish

Shutting down the printing press is inevitable

Newspaper subsidies are dangerous

And on each of those points, Kinsley’s op-ed falls in line, from its portentous title to its admonishment against making newspapers beholden to government or benefactors:

Capitalism is a “perennial gale of creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter). Industries come and go. A newspaper industry that was a ward of the state or of high-minded foundations would be sadly compromised. And for what?

Kinsley even takes news execs to task for not being pioneers:

If newspapers had been smarter, or moved faster, they might have kept the classified ads. They might have invented social networking.

If everyone agrees to admit that newspapers are doomed, could we possibly get a reprieve from the smug tsk-tsking like Kinsley’s (and this one) that newspaper execs should have been brilliant and clairvoyant in the mid-’90s?

The blogosphere is swift and merciless. Behold the responses to Sen. Ben Cardin’s introduction of a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits (which some already do, but never mind):

Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine):

The obvious danger is government certifying what is and isn’t news and who does and doesn’t do it. Should my blog get to be a tax-free, not-for-profit enterprise? Who gets certified? Further, Cardin’s proposal also would forbid papers as charities from endorsing political candidates. That takes more voices out of the democracy. Not good.

Tim Windsor (Nieman Journalism Lab):

If the government (the government!) starts getting in the business of propping up the fading part of journalism’s business model, forget the ethical and constitutional issues, it’ll effectively cut off oxygen to the parts of the business that are trying to innovate.

We all know Dell as being a major force in the computing industry.  It is a massive company that has been trying to become better communicators with their customers, which is something they previously have not be so adept at accomplishing, due primarily to the blogging works of Jeff Jarvis on his site BuzzMachine.com, which so aptly coined the phrase “Dell Hell” at the time.  Well times have changed and Dell has initiated a program called Ideastorm, which originated from Michael Dell in January 2007, with the purpose of increasing their social media skills, specifically in the blogosphere.  Dell is a direct company that is utilizing their new communication tools.  The way Ideastorm works is an idea is posted (marketing, sales, service, etc) then users vote positive or negative on the idea.  Following this, discussion and comments are circulated concerning the idea to work out tweaks and what not.  The final step is called Ideas in Action which finalizes the ideas.  They have 10,000 plus ideas and have implemented around roughly 200.  This project is immensely successful for Dell and is one of the reasons they have been headlined on many social media sites as being a company at the forefront that cares about consumers and their input.

Ideastorm is built on the software available at salesforce.com which is the same service that Starbucks uses for their similar consumer idea blog.  With Dell being the direct to consumer company that has made them the hugely successful business that they are, it is not necessarily the return on investments that is their primary focus.  They have followed their culture of being a company that is dynamic and democratic and this has proved to be immensely successful for both communication, innovations, and ultimately sales.  Ideastorm gets positive and negative feedback, but what Dell has understood, which many companies must be doing if they want to survive in this ever-changing economy, is to realize that all feedback is good feedback if you’re using it to better your business, goods, services, whatever it may be.

Although it might not seem so, not many resources are committed.  One individual, Communicator Vida Killian manages the site with an additional full time person reading the comments.  The genius behind it is the 40 Dell employees who monitor the blogosphere, whether they be engineers, marketers, etc, the fact of the matter is that dynmaic employees with varying expertises are all contributing their ideas and thoughts.  To commennt on the blog you must simply sign up and with subscriptions currently around 45,000 members it is obvious that Dell’s Ideastorm is a huge success.

Such a success that it gave birth to Dell EmployeeStorm, which is more of an internal site that gives Dell employees the opportunity to not only share, but discuss ideas for innovative Dell technologies.  It was the efforts of the company Cohn&Wolfe that helped to implement both the EmployeeStorm and IdeaStorm strategy, so check out their site.

Hope you enjoyed the article.  See you all soon!

This may sound like a simple enough concept but believe it or not many companies fail at this. A great example is the fiasco Dell went through a few years back when they provided poor customer service to a customer who turned out to be quite popular. That customer was blogger, among other things, Jeff Jarvis. I’m sure many of you know the story of Dell Hell, but if you don’t then I will give you a quick overview. If you want to know more details then visit the Dell Hell link to all see all of the blog posts Mr. Jarvis has posted on Dell.

The story starts when Mr. Jarvis bought a Dell notebook along with a four year in-home warranty. The notebook malfunctions and Mr. Jarvis contacts Dell to get someone to come fix his laptop but Dell decides not to honor his in-home warranty and has Mr. Jarvis send his notebook to them instead. He sends it in and they fix it and send it back but the notebook still overheats. Dell once again refuses to send someone to Mr. Jarvis’s house so Mr. Jarvis reacts, much unlike Dell, which you will see later on. Mr. Jarvis takes to the internet on his blog and posts about his bad experience with Dell only to find that many other people are having the same problems. Thanks to Mr. Jarvis, things like “Dell Sucks. Dell Lies.” became a viral message. Dell doesn’t react and instead forms the “look but don’t interact” blog policy, which essentially just means they were ignoring the customer completely. Dell customers start to wonder if Dell really cares about them and Dell’s reputation becomes threatened.

Still Dell ignores complaints from consumers and assume that the whole problem will just blow over. Then in July 2005 Dell closed it’s customer support forum to avoid more negative comments, thus cutting off communication with the customer. After a letter from Mr. Jarvis to Dell, and many months later, Dell realizes that their non-response strategy isn’t working. In July 2006 they came up with Direct2Dell site where they offer support and many other things for their customers, including IdeaStorm, where customers can post ideas for things they’d like to see on their dell. They even have a link on their blog roll to BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis’s blog.

As I’m sure you have learned, listening to your audience is one of the best ways to keep them around. In my next post I’m going to tell you about some tools, that you may not be using, that are very helpful in engaging your audience.

There is no one business model newspapers can turn to, writes Clay Shirky, citing historical precedence, revolutions and spooky “wait for it, wait for it” pronouncements of dramatic import:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Good going, Mr. Internet. Real smooth.

Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

So nothing will work, but everything might. The future is wrapped in a Zen Koan. Jeff Jarvis (of course) nods in agreement:

Yes, and until we make those experiments and learn from them, the optimists – Clay, Jay [Rosen], me – are also sounding vaguely religious: faith-based. I have faith that there will be a market demand for journalism and we will find the means to meet them. But we can’t get there until we try.

In a comment on Jarvis’ post, Paul Evans relates a rather depressing tale of upper management at his newspaper:

I would like to play a role in what they [his news company] are doing, but leadership has made it abundantly clear they don’t want staff input and that discussion of our issues, even in general terms, outside the company is grounds for firing.

In other words, “Be afraid, fellow journalists. Be very afraid.”