THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM!!! Reporters will work for themselves! In a crowded market, niche-journalists will thrive! Publications will get out of the content-generation game, and will instead bid on each story in a sort of daily news-auction!
Is NewsTilt on to something? Maybe. Who knows? Let’s give it a try!
I met Paul Biggar a few weeks ago at Google, where we were both attending a Hacks and Hackers demonstration of Google Wave. I spent most of the talk furiously Tweeting about Wave’s flummoxing interface and the importance of easy collaboration; and after the presentation, Paul and I started chatting about his new site, NewsTilt (recently rechristened from NewsLabs).
A New Market for News
It’s sort of an eBay for news stories: a journalist writes an article — on spec — and then if a publication likes it, they pay NewsLabs, which splits the take with the writer. Neato. I called founder Paul Biggar to talk about the site.
“It won’t be exactly one size fits all,” Paul told me, “but the idea is that we build the tools for one reporter, and then we scale that up so that everyone can use it.”
NewsTilt is aiming big: it’s for professionals out to make a living more than for mere hobbyists.
Sole Source of Income
“Is this something that you see as a writer’s sole basis of support?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” Paul replied. “We are 100% trying to make it sustainable for the journalist. We’re trying to make it so that the superstars get rich and the not-quite superstars are earning a good income. … We’re trying to make it so that people who are good will absolutely earn a living online. And maybe it won’t be like that for the first six months or first year, but our pitch to journalists is, it couldn’t be worse than trying to do it yourself on your own.”
NewsTilt’s big selling point for journalists: the website streamlines a lot of the “agent” work that freelancers often have to spend a lot of time doing by themselves. “The kind of things [reporters] are experienced with are writing and reporting,” Paul said, “but not necessarily being their own business. So we’re going to do absolutely everything they need that’s not writing, reporting, or dealing with their community.”
Reporter as Brand
The emphasis at NewsTilt is on establishing the writer’s brand: so, rather than presenting each reporter as a cog in a giant news-gathering machine, each writer is presented as a sort of a maverick. TechCrunch and VentureBeat are models, as well as other A-list bloggers: “People like 37 Signals … Jeff Atwood … Dooce,” said Paul. “Those people have completely transitioned from being a blogger to being someone with a giant brand. … I’m not sure that everyone is going to be a superstar like Dooce or Perez Hilton or something like that. But they are going to be superstars within their niches.”
But don’t confuse it with the blue Examiner, an el-cheapo aggregator that, like the old About.com, touts its news-gatherers as nichey subject-matter experts. Paul isn’t seeking to replicate that model: “Like a lot of these sites, it’s not about the writer. Examiner.com is about Examiner, and it’s not about the journalist. … [On NewsTilt], the primary place you’re publishing [articles] is on your site, under your brand. … Because it’s about building your brand online, it’s about saying, ‘I have great copy, you should read everything that I write.’ … We are working to syndicate [reporters'] stories for them.”
Technical Innovations
And another difference: NewsTilt isn’t necessarily the last stop for an article once it’s written, since publications can swing buy and, if they like what they see, pay for a license to publish a piece. “In order to be able to print something in your paper or magazine or whatever,” explained Paul, “you click the ‘buy’ button and then you fill in your circulation, and then you get printed a license that says … ‘The New York Times has a license to print this story by this journalist on this date in their paper,’ or something along those lines.”
He clarified, “At the start, we’re not looking at doing exclusives. If people ask for that, then we’ll try to figure out a way for it to be done.”
I would expect that to be a pretty big deal for some publications: many of the news outlets that I’ve worked with place a high priority on exclusivity. Paul’s listening to users and building tools to respond to their requests, so oft-requested features and tools will pop up as time goes on.
Another feature I expect to see more of: the ability for users to interact and collaborate. “One of the first things that we’re going to do is increase the interaction between collaborating journalists,” Paul told me, although he mechanisms of such a feature are elusively complex. “We have people who want to provide infographics, video, and pictures, and there’ll obviously have to be some kind of revenue share there.”
The site already has a focus on personalization, and that seems like a spot-on strategy to me. As I’ve noted, targeted content is key to the success of modern news sources; whereas one-frontpage-fits-all is the Achilles heel of old-timey news. NewsTilt’s front page will be dynamically generated, based on each user’s interests: “The front page is going to be a place where you can discover quality journalism, and you can discover things that interest you. When you log in, our site will automatically know your interests from reading your Facebook profile and will create a personalized homepage that says, ‘this is a set of stories that you’re most likely to be interested in.’ And then over time, when you vote for stories and comment on stories and share stories, we’ll know what you’re interested in and personalize it based on that.”
“I think that the future of local news could be centered around our site,” Paul went on. “It could be that local newspapers move out of the content-creation business and the local journalists instead become the content-producers. Which is bought, then, by the local newspapers.”
A Radical Re-Thinking of Local News
This is a radical re-thinking of how local news works — not just local newspapers, but TV, radio, and blogs. Imagine if, for example, your local ABC station axed its stable of permanent reporters, and instead farmed out each day’s reporting to whichever freelancers had that morning’s best pitch. One day you might be shooting video of a construction site for ABC; the next day writing up a press conference for SFist; the next day snapping photos for the Chronicle.
In this model, “The newspaper will be the editor. It’ll also be the sales staff and the advertising people; they just won’t necessarily need a newsroom.”
Like I said: a radical rethinking. Too radical, maybe? I see a lot of shortcomings to this model: you lose the stability of a regular staff, so a newspaper might not be able to count on always having access to the same expert sources. And reporters can’t always count on having each other to brainstorm ideas and research.
But those aren’t necessarily insurmountable problems — people are social animals, and we’ll always find ways to interact. And this model seems to have business logic behind it: it would be inexpensive, highly competitive, and a natural extension of the current overstock of journalists currently flooding the market.
NewsTilt Versus Doing it all by Yourself
Publications that want in on the ground floor should email Paul to get involved. Journalists can apply online, where they’ll be vetted by a panel of industry professionals: Jon Margolis, Les Kretman, and Doug Clawson.
A prime motivator for signing up for this project may be a fear of being left behind. It’s clear that something is going to happen to the news industry; somehow it’ll pull itself up, dust itself off, and reach equilibrium. Nobody wants to be left standing on the platform when the train that is The Future of Journalism pulls out of the station.
“I think that if you were to do it yourself, Paul told me, referring to the small-business work that takes up much of freelancers’ time, “there would be something like 90% of your time would be spent on doing things that aren’t writing. And we’re trying to increase the percentage of time that you can spend focusing on writing. … For every journalist who’s trying to do this, they will be much better off trying to do it on our platform with our support. And I guarantee that it will be cheaper, time-wise, for them to do it on our platform than to do it by themselves.”
Do you agree?
Bonus content! Here’s a WSJ interview with Paul about the site.
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I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 