Innovations in journalism

Journalists — science writers, especially — are accustomed to reporting on innovation. Now many are living it. Today's tumult is forcing our profession to reexamine what we're really about and realizing our roles in society. Just as musicians were not about LPs or cassette tapes, we are not about printed-on-paper publications, many of which are being undermined by accelerating losses of ad and subscription revenue to often-free Internet alternatives.

by Mike Ross

Journalists — science writers, especially — are accustomed to reporting on innovation. Now many are living it.

Today's tumult is forcing our profession to reexamine what we're really about and realizing our roles in society. Just as musicians were not about LPs or cassette tapes, we are not about printed-on-paper publications, many of which are being undermined by accelerating losses of ad and subscription revenue to often-free Internet alternatives. Paper is merely one of today's vehicles for our true value — creators of information valued by our audiences. We are in the midst of a worldwide transformation of interpersonal communications, and professional journalism will surely be valued in the various media and content vehicles that thrive in the new paradigm.

Such was the cautiously optimistic tenor at the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism (IJ-6) held at Stanford University, May 18 to 20. Some 241 journalists, publishers, scientists, and academics from 15 countries heard talks from luminaries such as Vint Cerf ("Father of the Internet" now Internet Chief Evangelist at Google). Attendees participated in wide-ranging roundtable workshops chaired by 16 "InJo" Fellows: professional journalists sponsored by their governments to spend six months in the U.S. learning about innovation and the role of journalism in fostering it. The event was chaired by David Nordfors, senior researcher at Stanford and executive director of the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism, who has a Ph.D. in physics and for several years was a science writer and editor for a Swedish computer magazine (see sidebar).

In its first five years, this conference has concentrated on the practice of "innovation journalism," a phrase Nordfors coined to make people aware that insightful stories about innovation usually combine elements from traditional business, politics, and science beats. This year, in view of the dire state of the journalism business, much more emphasis was placed on innovation in journalism. The conference task was "journalism succeeding with innovation."

With the current advertising-and-subscription business model for mainstream media collapsing, no single alternative seems capable of replacing it. Rather, each publication must assess its own situation and decide how it can best fill the information needs of its audience.

Three types of publications seemed to have relatively clear paths to success: The largest publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, can leverage their well-known brand images and huge high-quality audiences into significant online advertising revenue.

Small "hyper-local" websites, on the other hand, use predominantly citizen journalists to cover community news for a neighborhood, town, or city. They have relatively low expenses and should be able to attract loyal audiences suitable for local advertising. Many such news sites have sprung up across the country, a number of them receiving seed funding from the Knight Foundation.

Finally, tightly focused publications covering a high-value niche area can attract high ad prices. But VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall said his publication's entire potential audience of venture capitalists and associates numbers just 18,000, which is low enough that other "revenue streams," such as events and sponsorships, are needed to be profitable. Mike Kanellos said Greentech Media is also staging events, which have the additional benefits of enhancing a publication's relationship with its readers and facilitating interactions with sources for many new stories.

xConomy ("business + technology in the exponential economy") is a hybrid. Founded by veteran high-tech writer Bob Buderi, it provides intensive local coverage of high-tech news in key tech centers, currently Boston, Seattle, and San Diego. "We publish three to five stories a day — like what the Boston Globe does in a week," Buderi said. "Our stories are all across the innovation scene: information technology, biology, energy. We do blog-, newspaper-, or magazine-length stories ... one-paragraph, three to four pages ... whatever it takes. We engage the comment stream, Twitter, do events, and maintain forums." They don't do video, however, as they've found it's not worth the effort for their audience.

The worldwide importance of high-tech news gives xConomy a significant audience outside its coverage zones. "Our motto is 'Local story, global impact," Buderi said.

"We set out to create a high-value audience," and Buderi claims that now only the Wall Street Journal has a more affluent, highly educated audience. Advertising is xConomy's fourth-ranking revenue stream. A select network of "xConomists" supports the publication and also provide ideas, introductions, and write guest columns.

Of course, no media business can ignore its audience. Herman Gyr of the Enterprise Development Group described how he and colleagues helped BBC's Radio 1, in 2005, understand changes taking place in its audience and what they could do to serve them better.

Radio 1 was losing younger listeners, Gyr said. The initial response was to create new shows aimed at younger audiences. Yet ratings still fell. When Gyr and colleagues surveyed Radio 1's potential audience, they found — and gave names to — four distinct types:

Ana (passive/reflective) — The station's existing listener.
Andi (playful/interactive) — Assembles and arranges. Creates his own best jazz list, for example, but doesn't create content itself.
DJ: Digital Joe (or Jane) (creative/impactful) — Creates content; seeks audience, fame and money.
Syndi (sharing/connected) — Seeks communities and interest groups to help them connect with people.

After seeing this analysis, Radio 1's management understood why their initial efforts to attract young listeners had failed: Those shows appealed only to their existing passive, Ana-type audience. Other more interactive youth — a large and increasing fraction of today's youth — were still tuning out Radio 1. The station's management realized they had to serve their Andis, DJs, and Syndi is differently. As a result, Radio 1 incorporated new media into the core of its business, creating games (including some on science), blogs, podcasts, and message boards. Ratings increased immediately after the new features were rolled out.

The lesson, Gyr says, is that "if you become irrelevant to your audience, they will go elsewhere." That may seem obvious, but managements and even employees can often be blind to changes that require nontraditional responses.

"Journalists are some of the toughest crowds to get to think innovatively," said Corey Ford, a longtime producer for PBS' Frontline. A Stanford Business School graduate, he leads the "Redesigning Journalism" project as a lecturer at the Institute of Design at Stanford.

Co-founded five years ago by David Kelley, who helped create the iconic Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, Stanford's "d.school" philosophy is that design "is not an aesthetic, event, or a product ... but a human-centric process of "focusing and flaring; repeat." Several Knight Fellowship journalists at Stanford joined this project and helped conceive, make, test, and refine many simple "low-resolution" prototypes that quickly home in on what works or doesn't. Some call this fail-early-and-often approach "the drunken walk of the entrepreneur."

Three items conceived and developed in the six-week program were shown at the conference:

NewsZen: Immersive and empathetic video montages entice people who typically shun text stories to dig deeper and learn more.
NewsTiles: News photos are sent as tiles to iPhones based on the user's preferences. Clicking on a tile brings up headlines and stories. Tiles and content can be shared with others.
The Reader Meter: A screen gadget that shows writers how frequently their stories are being read.

"You can also apply this design process to story telling," said Burt Herman, Associated Press bureau chief in Korea and a 2008-9 Knight Fellow. "Be open to your users and how they will receive your info."

Conference participants gave much attention — and hope — to ideas for enabling content creators and publishers, rather than aggregators like Google, to reap the benefits of advertising revenue. Publishers can't make much money selling generic ads to general readers on random content pages. Rates are typically less than $1 per thousand impressions. Advertisers would pay much more — even 10-fold or greater -- if their ads could be targeted to readers who matched a certain interest or history profile or were placed on pages where the content relates to the advertised product or service. Tools are being developed to make such discriminating ad placements. But many small-to-medium-sized publishers may be in the Catch-22 situation of not having the online reader volume or overall profile quality to warrant the expense of implementing such a system.

Bill Densmore, a veteran journalist and Reynolds Fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute of the Missouri School of Journalism, described the Information Valet tool he is developing to create an enhanced advertising market for news stories from many sources. Users would sign up for a variety of news "services" — some free, some could be paid — provided by publishers who use the tool. Customer profile information is pooled anonymously, allowing high-value targeted ads to be placed on appropriate pages of any of the publishers' content pages. The tool would also handle the financial transactions.

[A week after the IJ-6 conference, Densmore announced the creation of a spin-off company, CircLabs, Inc., that will develop and provide services to finance online news, such as those born in the Information Valet project. CircLabs' first product is called Circulate. A few days later, it was reported that Alan Mutter (aka "Newsosaur"), an adjunct faculty member of UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and former newspaper editor and entrepreneur, who also participated in an IJ-6 workshop, had briefed a large meeting of newspaper publishers on the "conceptual framework" of an industry-owned nonprofit entity, which he called ViewPass, for providing what appear to be similar online news, advertising, and payment services.]

As Cerf noted in his conference-opening keynote: In the past, advertising has been tied to locality, a specific place on a page in a particular newspaper or magazine. That distinction disappears with the Internet and, especially, mobile phones, which are increasingly important for news and advertising. Some 25 percent (and growing) of the world's three billion mobile phones are already connected to the Internet he said.

"The Internet never runs out of space ... or time," Cerf said. "Though its viewers might!"

Indeed, that is a key aspect of an "attention economy" that seems to be emerging as first predicted by the influential psychologist Herman Simon in 1971: "What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently ... "

This is where journalism would seem to fit in — in the future as or more importantly as in the past. In this vein, Nordfors has developed a "medium-independent" definition of journalism:

Journalism directs public attention to items of public interest with a mandate from the audience.

So the journalist's ride inside in this innovation space might be rough and turbulent, especially now. But it looks to continue to be creative, interesting — and valued — profession.

SIDEBAR:

How did a Swedish physicist turned science writer turned funding manager create an international center for innovation journalism halfway around the world at Stanford University?

"It's been quite an entrepreneurial trip," said David Nordfors, senior research scholar at Stanford and executive director of the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism.

Even while earning a Ph.D. in physics in Uppsala and doing postdoctoral research in Germany, Nordfors said he did some science writing, penning columns for Datateknik, the biweekly Swedish computer magazine. He said his core motivation was learning "how new knowledge creates value." He believed that a popular understanding of science helped the public comprehend and accept innovations. "To introduce something new, it must be communicated," Nordfors says. "Mass communications, particularly journalism, offers a part of the solution." In 1993 he decided to pursue journalism. He was named science editor of Datateknik and created the magazine's first science section.

Recruited two years later to manage a foundation that funds research collaborations between universities and industry, Nordfors insisted that each proposal include a public communications plan that involved journalists. One of these programs educated Swedish reporters on how to use new technologies, such as databases and the Internet, to improve their coverage of innovation.

In 2001, he became an advisor to VINNOVA, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems. Nordfors and ProfNet founder Dan Forbush then created a Swedish analog of that Internet-based service for connecting reporters with expert sources. Nordfors also realized that a new term would be useful to describe journalism that covers broadly the intertwined technical, business, political, and cultural aspects of the innovation process. For this purpose, he coined "innovation journalism."

In 2003, Nordfors decided the best way for Swedish reporters to understand the nuances and power of the innovation process was to experience it first hand in Northern California's Silicon Valley. He turned to a person he'd once interviewed for Datateknik: Stig Hagstrom, a Swedish-born physicist at Stanford who once served as chancellor of the Swedish university system. Hagstrom agreed to host Nordfors at Stanford for six months as a visiting scholar. The first class of Innovation Journalism Fellows, funded by VINNOVA, were six Swedish reporters for whom Nordfors designed academic interactions and arranged newsroom internships at such high-tech media as Technology Review and C|Net. The six-month program culminated in the first Conference on Innovation Journalism, held in April 2004 with (then) Science magazine editor-in-chief David Kennedy as keynote speaker.

The program was immediately successful, leading to Nordfors joining the Stanford staff. VINNOVA's director general, Per Ericsson, encouraged Nordfors to expand the program to include journalists from other countries who were interested in fostering an appreciation for the power of innovation to improve their countries' economies. The next year, the Finnish government funded an Innovation Journalism Fellowship, and in 2006 Pakistani reporters were supported through the Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF) created by the Pakistani government and the United States Agency for International Development. This year's class had 16 fellows, including journalists from Mexico and Slovenia, whose participation was funded by their governments. Additional countries are in the process of joining the program. Nordfors is also expanding his audience and influence as a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media.

One of Nordfors' goals is to stimulate the creation of an innovation system around journalism that will continually provide new business models. "Constant renewal," he said. "Just like any other business."