Innovations in Journalism Expo

**Meet the Players:**** Dan Gillmor – founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship:** Seees himself as the outlier in the panel. He doesn’t work for a news publication (though he did work at the San Jose Mercury News for quite some time, and probably went off on his own at the perfect time). **Chris Rauber of SF Business Times**: Mission is to break business news on a daily basis online and weekly in print. Started 25-30 years ago, and succeeded by exploiting the daily papers deficit in business coverage. Still around, making money, and doing pretty well despite the “harsh economic times.” **Troy May of ON Magainze**: provide stories of the diverse lives of the LGBT community, and to give people outside the LGBT community a reason to read the magazine. His personal contribution consists of filtering through a massive influx of info in order to find the gems that he feels will connect with the audience. His workflow involves working very closely with his freelancers to cover the stories in the best way possible. Works to engage the reader. **Andrew Fitzgerald – Manager of the Collective Journalism department at Current.com:** developed VC(Squared) because the first two letters in UGC start like “ugly” – Starting from the premise that we should be in more platforms as opposed to a single platform. — The station invites its viewers to take part in making content. **Kourosh Karimkhany – Vice president of development for CondeNet** – His job is to figure out how to make money from the online side of the business. Has experience with the acquisition of Wired.com and feels it has been going well thus far. Dan sees this to be an incredible time for young journalists despite the fact that the career paths he followed as a journalist are greatly diminished. The reasons include the fact that the barrier to entry to trying something is essentially nothing beyond time and a good idea (though I’d contend that essentially nothing is still out of reach for much of the working class). He points out that most projects will fail, but that the small percentage that succeed is still a pretty big number. Dan’s excited about the enormous number of experiments, and points out that failing is a learning opportunity and that people will eventually get it right. When asked by Tom about time being a valuable commodity and when people must resort to getting their money from Starbucks. All Dan’s efforts are focused on people who want to take risks, it’s not easy to do this if you are 48 with two college kids and a mortgage. He hopes that people who are still employed, will think about some niche product that good journalism can find an audience for. “There’s never enough people to do good journalism at the niches.” Troy was working for a business publication before buying OutNow Magazine. It was dying at the time, but through surveys, focus groups, and a redesign he’s managed to turn it around and double his distribution. He points out that there is a market for niche journalist, but there is an inherent risk involved. Kourosh is talking about the marketability of niches and how Nick Denton launched a series of niche blogs with Gawker and it’s been remarkably successful in that regards. Similarly when Conde Nest reaquired wired.com, they’ve followed a similar approach creating and ditching blogs Andrew states that from a revenue standpoint, their money is coming from Cable fees. “Once you reach a certain threshold, more of the money comes from advertising. Current is trying to get away from the perspective that citizen journalism is bad journalism. The Vanguard journalism department has won many awards and critical acclaim, and they are also developing collective journalism endeavors. Current is inviting people around the world to be sources while the “work of journalism” is being done internally. In other words, the video itself is being produced within the company relying on leads and ideas from the audience. Hal from reelchanges.org is proposing to the panel that if you ask the audience what they want, they will be more inclined to help pay for what they are looking for. Andrew points out that they cover a wide range of topics, and says they are similar to a big newspaper with a niche of “young adults.” If they were driven by clicks exclusivelly, they’d be perezhilton.com. He feels that the audience is interested in a wide range of topics, but there are elements the audience doesn’t realize they are interested in. What Kourosh is looking for are areas where they are making a lot of money: fashion, tech, beauty, etc. he then takes these segments that are highly profitable to underwrite journalism that may be expensive and not profitable but are in need of coverage. “It’s either the MBA’s or the English majors that are running the show.” In response, Kourosh studied the business side to get a more comprehensive perspective of the business.