The 2008 New Business Models for News Summit

Welcome to the New Business Models for News Summit at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, held on Oct. 23, 2008 and funded by the MacArthur Foundation with followup work funded by the McCormick Foundation.

We at CUNY believe that finding, sharing, and creating new business for news is an urgent need in journalism – perhaps our most urgent need. We have called this summit to begin doing just that, bringing a diverse group of editorial and business executives, entrepreneurs, and academics to the school.

The day begins with informational and perhaps inspirational talks from people who are creating and implementing new models. Samir Arora of Glam and Tom Evslin of Fractals of Change will talk about new network models for media and business in the connected internet. Edward Roussel of the Telegraph and Dave Morgan of Tennis (and founder of Tacoda) will explore new structures for news companies – e.g., spinning off or outsourcing what once were core tasks but are now costs burdens, such as distribution, production, and even sales.

We will have two lightning rounds of presentations by entrepreneurs and executives who are executing new models. We will list those on the agenda.

In the afternoon, we will move into Aspen-Institute-like sessions in five groups, each charged with coming back with specific models, suggestions, and needs:

* Network models for news

* New structures for news organizations

* New structures for news operations (newsrooms), including new efficiencies and new focus leading to new job descriptions.

* New revenue models for news – advertising and more and what is needed to support these new models

* Public support for journalism – there are no white knights but can the public (in the form of foundations, corporations, and individual contributions) help support elements of journalism?

The groups’ leaders and rappateurs will return to a closing plenary session to share their work. And then we break out the well-deserved wine.

There will be ample time at lunch and breaks to talk, followup with entrepreneurs and executives who have presentations, and network.

We at CUNY will also ask for a charge from the group for the continuing work of the New Business Models for News Project.

* * *

The Networked Journalism Summit — bringing together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism — will be held on Oct. 10 at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, thanks to a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

This is a day about action: next steps, new projects, new partnerships, new experiments. The first two-thirds of the day will be devoted to sharing lessons, ideas, and plans with a representative sample of different kinds of efforts, hyperlocal to national to international, with participants from big and small media, from editorial and business, from the U.S., Canada, the U.K, Germany, and France. The last third of the day will be devoted to what’s next, with participants meeting to come up with new collaborations.

What makes this meeting different? We hope this does:
* It’s about action and next steps, not talk.
* The panel discussions will be discussions, not presentations. Every session will start with very brief introductions and then go immediately to discussion from the entire room.
* This is made possible by write-ups of the work being done by everyone in the room that will be distributed before the meeting. David Cohn is reporting some of these (and they are beginning to appear on this blog); the participants will submit more. This give everyone a headstart and lets them get right to their questions.
* We will followup on the actions pledged by the participants with reports on progress that will be shared on this blog.
* No MSM-bashing or blog-bashing allowed. We’ll gong it off. This is about working together. The snarking is over.
We hope people leave with a lot of new information and inspiration, with new partners, and with new steps to take to spread journalism in their communities.

The premise of all this is that even as journalistic organizations may shrink, along with their revenue bases, journalism itself can and must expand and it will do that through collaborative work. The internet makes that collaboration possible and we’ve barely begun to explore the opportunities it affords. A year or two ago, the point of such a meeting might have been evangelizing this idea. But in that time, a number of great projects in collaborative, networked journalism have taken off. So now is the time to share the lessons — success and failures — from these efforts and to determine what’s needed to move on to the next goals. By bringing together about 150 practitioners from all sides, we hope that the meeting itself can spark new partnerships and projects.

Among the sessions planned:
* Sharing experience from hyperlocal projects.
* Early efforts to make money at this: ad networks, print publications (ironically), independent businesses.
* International efforts from the UK and Germany.
* Reports from visible projects, including Gannett’s reorganization of its newsrooms around citizen participation, Jay Rosen’s experience with NewAssignment.net, and Now Public.
* Video and broadcast projects.
* Projects built around data as news.
* New tools.
* Political efforts.

In the afternoon, the participants will split into groups — local east or west, national, business, multimedia, revenue, tools, and other groups that form at the meeting — to pledge next steps. After reporting back to the meeting as a whole on these promised efforts, all will be rewarded with wine.

We have a great cross-section of different kinds of efforts, different models, and different locales. There is room for a few more. If you are interested in attending, please email David Cohn, who has been doing a great job organizing the conference and the information around it: [email protected].

The meeting will begin at the auditorium in the new New York Times headquarters on 41st Street and 8th Avenue in New York (note, not on 40th St as previously listed here; go tot he Times Center sign). It will then move next door to the new CUNY Graduate School of Journalism at 219 W. 40th Street, New York.

This meeting is made possible entirely through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The summit is organized by Jeff Jarvis, who heads the interactive journalism program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and blogs on journalism and media at Buzzmachine.com. The school has just begun its second year as the only publicly supported school of journalism in the Northeast.

The next meeting at CUNY, early next year, will focus on new business models for news.