A model for the 21st century newsroom: pt1 - the news diamond. UPDATE: A more up to date version of this post can be found at OnlineJournalismBlog.com, where this blog has moved to. A month ago, I used the Online Journalism Facebook Group to ask readers to suggest what areas they wanted covering, in an experiment with bottom-up editing (the forum for suggestions is still open by the way).
Megan T suggested “Rethinking the production of newspapers”. After researching, conceptualising and scribbling, I’ve come up with a number of models around the news process, newsgathering, interactivity and business models. The following, then, is the first in a series of proposals for a ‘model for the 21st century newsroom’ (part two is now here).
This is a converged newsroom which may produce material for print or broadcast or both, but definitely includes an online element. Here’s the diagram. Building on the strengths of the medium The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth. That news process in action Like this: Online Journalism Blog. SKOEPS.nl. Usernewspdf_1.pdf (application/pdf-object) Knight Citizen News Network. Steven Brill is a man intent on putting toothpaste back in the tube, as he put it, one dab at a time. News publishers “committed mass suicide,” said Brill, when they began giving away content for free on the World Wide Web more than a decade ago. The serial media entrepreneur’s newest venture, Press+, is offering publishers of today’s news sites a chance to reverse that practice and begin collecting for their content.
His solution is designed to encourage a reader to pay after consuming a set amount of content. “It’s not a pay wall,” he was quick to note. “We don’t even allow use of the term pay wall in our office. It’s always a metered approach.” What differentiates this from walled-off content is that the payments are optional. The Knight Foundation funded a Press+ trial on 10 sites as part of its efforts to explore sustainability models. By the start of December 2010, just a dozen sites had Press+ installed, with another 10 to 13 set to come online by the end of the year. How It Works. Medium4You Screws Up Launch. More Studies on Media Participation. After an earlier post on the recent OECD report on "The Participative Web", some more interesting studies on media participation, user-generated content, and other aspects of convergence culture: An April 2007 report by Forrester (based on surveys among U.S. adults) divides the participatory spectrum up in groups (see image): - Creators (13%): Publish Web pages, publish blogs, upload video to sites like You Tube- Critics (19%): Comment on blogs, posting ratings and reviews.- Collectors (15%): Use RSS, tag Web pages- Joiners (19%): Use social networking sites- Spectators (23%): Read blogs, watch peer-generated video, listen to podcasts- Inactives (52%): Other internet users.
Furthermore, a new (April 2007) study (PDF) by the Pew Internet & American Life Project called "Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks" reports on teens with online profiles (at sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and so on): NewAssignment.Net. PressThink.