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.

Want more readers? Write stories and headlines that offer clear benefits

From the Function Writing Group blog::

Want people to read your post? Tell them what they’re going to get out of it. 

Like a gorilla swimming laps in Lake Michigan, useful headlines are easy to spot:

• How-To’s
• List Posts (Like, say, 6 Ways To Teach Your Gorilla To Swim)
• What Blank Means to Blank 

Headlines used most frequently by copywriters, bloggers, content managers and anyone else who wants people to read their work immediately convey benefit, usefulness and education. I use these all the time. 

People are busy and are constantly asked to manage a surplus of information every day. Let’s make life easy for new readers.

How to write a feature story in six steps

Writing coach Ann Wylie offers an ideal structure for the brand journalist who is learning to compose the feature story:

1. Lead: Illustrate your point. Show, don’t tell. Make the lead concrete, creative and provocative. Think anecdote, human interest and juicy details.
2. Nut graph: Explain your point. Now you can tell. Here’s where you summarize your story into a nutshell, or deliver the key point.
3. Background section: Fill in the blanks. Do you have a term that needs explaining? Does your story require an understanding of context or history? Include that background information here.
4. Body: Develop the story. Avoid the “muddle in the middle” by arranging the body of your story into discrete sections, organized thematically, sequentially or hierarchically.
5. Wrap-up: Restate your point. In the nut graph, you tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. In the body, you tell ‘em. Here’s where you tell ’em what you told ’em.
6. Kicker: Illustrate your point. Leave a lasting impression with a provocative kicker. Bonus points for circling back to the lead.

When I was a newspaper reporter, we called this structure the Wall Street Journal feature. Almost every WSJ front page feature is structured this way.

The nut graph can be tricky. I suggest you write it first, then build the rest of the story around it. If you lose your way, go back to the nut graph and remind yourself what the story is actually about. Stay on course. Less is more.

3 reasons for every brand journalist to love the inverted pyramid

For generations, newspaper reporters have depended on the inverted pyramid when they need to crank out a story on deadline.

The form has taken a beating in recent decades. The critics say it’s outdated.  They are wrong.

Think about it. Today's news cycle is both 24/7 and instantaneous, even for brand journalists.  Plus, more and more readers are choosing the smartphone as their main news medium.

We often have to write fast. We have to fit our stories onto smaller screens. Thus, the virtues of the inverted pyramid are clear. It is:

Easy to write

Unlike the story or the essay, the inverted pyramid is not designed to flow logically from premise to conclusion.

Instead, the inverted pyramid starts with a lead that answers the 5Ws and the H: who, what, when, where, why and how. After you’ve nailed the lead, you simply arrange the remaining paragraphs in the order of their importance.

This is child’s play with Microsoft Word. Just write the paragraphs in any order than occurs to you,  and then rearrange them into order by cutting and pasting.

There is a reason this is the first form a rookie newspaper reporter learns to execute.

Easy to edit 

The inverted pyramid is as easy to edit as it is to write. The editor really has only a few decisions to make. First, does the lead work? Second are the paragraphs in the right order?

Any rewriting takes very little time, even if you kick it back to the writer.

Easy to read

Readers are trained to read the inverted pyramid. They understand the rules and aren’t expecting a brilliant essay or a riveting story.  They just want the facts.

The inverted pyramid is designed to deliver information quickly and cleanly.  The reader can quit the story at any time and still get the gist.

Best time to use 

• When you need to write fast, particularly on deadline.
• When you are reporting hard news.
• When you are starting out as a content journalist.
• Anytime you are in doubt about which format to use.
• If you have a small staff with a large workload.