28 February 2014

8 business models for journalism in the digital age

From the Andreessen Horowitz blog:

Here are eight obvious business models for news now, and in the future. This isn’t a pick one model and stick with it prospect, news businesses should mix and match as relevant.
  1. Advertising: Advertising is still central for many news businesses. But they need to get out of the “race to bottom” dynamic of bad content, bad advertisers, and bad ads. Quality journalism businesses need to either take responsibility for their own high-quality advertisers and ads, or work with partners who do. There is no excuse for crappy network-served teeth whitening come-ons and one weird trick ads served against high quality content. Disastrous.
  2. Subscriptions: Many consumers pay money for things they value much of the time. If they’re unwilling to pay for a news product, it begs the question, are they really valuing it?
  3. Premium content: A paid tier on top of free, ad-supported content. This goes after the high-end news junkies reading the likes of Bloomberg & Reuters. It will work for more and more new outlets. Again, value equals people paying money for something.
  4. Conferences and events: Bits are increasingly abundant, and human presence is becoming scarce. So charge for that scarcity, and use bits to drive demand for human presence.
  5. Cross-media: Tina Brown was right but too early with Talk. News is a key source of material for books, TV, and film—which happen also to be growth businesses.
  6. Crowdfunding: This is a GIGANTIC opportunity especially for investigative journalism. Match people with interest in a topic to the reporters on the ground telling the stories. Click = vote = $. (Helpful hint: Start today with Crowdtilt. Easy-as-pie.)
  7. Bitcoin for micropayments: Easy to get started now (checkout Coinbase). As the consumer use of Bitcoin scales up for transactions, it becomes easy to ask for small amounts of money on a per-story or per-view basis with low or no fees. (A lot more of my thinking on the subject of Bitcoin here.)
  8. Philanthropy: Today the examples are Pro Publica and First Look Media, tomorrow the could be many more examples. There is around $300 billion per year in philanthropic activity in the U.S. alone. It’s WAY underutilized in the news business.

06 February 2014

Repacking the 'suitcase' sentence … or:

How to convey a lot of information in a single sentence, without frustrating your readers, or causing their eyes to pop out of their heads and wave madly on their stalks

Roy Peter Clark, the highly regarded writing coach at the Poynter Institute, criticized the New York Times for the lead paragraph of a controversial news story published Feb. 3 on the Times’ blog. And rightfully so. It’s a dreadful sentence, even for the Times.
Here it is, and this was the Times’ second version of the lead:
The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge in the scandal now swirling around Gov. Christie of New Jersey said on Friday that “evidence exists” the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening.
This is an example of what’s known in the news biz as a “suitcase lead.” Clark describes it better than I can:
If all the news doesn’t quite fit, you just sit on it until it closes.
To demonstrate that it is possible to include a lot of information in a lead while also crafting a clear sentence, Clark proposed reframing the Times lead as a question/answer lead:
When did N.J. Gov. Chris Christie learn about the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge that created traffic chaos and a swirling political scandal? In a new development, the official who oversaw those closures says that the governor knew about them as they were happening. He says that “evidence exists” that this is true.
Not bad, and certainly a major improvement. But let me propose another solution: a cumulative sentence. That is, a sentence that makes a clear initial statement, then adds additional information in easy-to-read clauses governed by commas.
Like this:
Evidence exists that Gov. Christie knew about lane closings on the George Washington Bridge as they happened, says the former Port Authority official who oversaw the closings, which sparked a scandal that could derail the New Jersey governor’s anticipated candidacy for the White House.
Or maybe:
The Port Authority official responsible for closing two toll lanes on the George Washington Bridge said Friday “evidence exists” New Jersey Gov. Christie knew about the closures as they triggered a morning rush-hour traffic jam near Fort Lee, leading to a political scandal that could derail the GOP front-runner’s potential bid for the White House.
Perfect? Probably not. But at least each sentence flows in one direction, guiding readers from one point to the next in a logical sequence, rather than forcing readers to retrace their steps to figure out what the hell they just read.

Each of my examples recasts the original Times lead as a cumulative sentence, the type advocated by Iowa State scholar Brooks Landon in his book, “Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kind of Sentences You Love to Read,” which you really should read if you haven’t already, and, if you have read it, you should read it again.

Great sentences are usually long sentences, Landon says, in that they provide more information than do short sentences, and do so elegantly and efficiently, if properly crafted and controlled. There’s no better way to accomplish this than with a cumulative sentence.

I think of these sentences as “cascading sentences,” because they give the reader a sense of kayaking along the rapids of a river, easily stepping down from one level, to the next, to the next, for as long as the writer wants to sustain the sentence.

Short leads aren’t necessarily better leads. The ideal lead summarizes the story in a way that informs the reader, and coddles the reader, and encourages the reader to continue.
A cumulative sentence can handle each task well. And it is fairly easy to build.

You start with a simple declarative sentence. Then you add information with commas and clauses. You really do build the sentence from the ground up.

Hemingway is often praised or criticized for writing short, terse, tough-guy sentences. But the truth is that he used cumulative sentences about as often as short ones. Here’s one from a Nick Adams short story, “Cross Country Snow”:
George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light all in a cloud of snow.
Faulkner frequently used the cumulative sentence as well, as in this example from “As I Lay Dying”:
I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
And James Joyce, from “Finnegan’s Wake”:
 Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody's bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts' huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy.
And Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”:
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself, and whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.
And Kurt Vonnegut, in his essay “I Love You, Madame Librarian”:
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
And Ernie Pyle, in a 1943 news story from the frontlines of World War II in Northern Tunesia:
In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
Here's one from a true master of the cumulative sentence, gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, in his factual novel, “Hell’s Angels”:
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
OK, you get the idea. Start with a simple, declarative sentence, and then build upon it with modifying clauses, refining the original image until you nail it.

Hey, it works, especially when you are forced to convey a lot of information quickly and efficiently, and you want to make life easier for your readers, or at least keep them from giving up and turning the page.