ISOJ: 3 ways the journalism business is changing

Versión en español aquí. 

Three of the speakers at the International Symposium on Online Journalism changed the way I look at the business of journalism: Jim Moroney, CEO of A.H. Belo and publisher of the Dallas Morning News; Jim Bankoff, founder and CEO of Vox Media, and Valtteri Halla, chief technical officer at Leia Media in Finland.

Here is what got my attention. 

Targeting new generation of consumers

Jim Bankoff,  CEO of Vox Media, described a digital media world in which the future winners will be those with high-quality branded content. He is running against the current here. He has the old-fashioned idea that you need to pay competitive salaries to attract top digital-journalism talent, and that you can make money doing it.

Jim Bankoff of Vox Media. Photo by ISOJ.

While he sees the most popular news sites on the web as chasing page views with sensational headlines and clickbait --  Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, others -- his emphasis is on quality of audience rather than quantity. "Now is the time for branded content."

High-quality branded content is the strategy behind the seven media brands that make up Vox, including the SBNation sports site, The Verge's technology coverage and the new Ezra Klein product that focuses on general news, Vox. 

As a business model, it's working, Bankoff told the ISOJ audience. They are attracting "a new generation of news consumers" that has been turned off by traditional media. The audience is young, highly educated and has high income. Six of the seven brands are profitable, the exception being the newest one, Vox, which just launched with a staff of 20. 

The sites were drawing 79 million unique visitors a month at year-end 2013, and the business has  attracted $74 million in venture capital (thanks to Maite Fernandez for that research).

How 3 independent news sites have survived 5 years

Juanita Leon, founder of La Silla Vacia. ISOJ photo.

Versión en español aquí.

Launching a news publication online is the easy part.

Paying the bills and surviving for several years is the hard part.

Three of those who have evolved and survived for at least five years are La Silla Vacia, a political website in Colombia,  Homicide Watch, a news and data platform in three U.S. cities, and Texas Tribune, a news site focused on Texas civic life.

It often takes at least four iterations for a digital initiative to gain traction, according to Michael Maness, vice president of the Knight Foundation’s Journalism and Media Innovation program.

Maness moderated a panel in which the editors told their stories at the International Symposium on Online Journalism April 5 at the Knight Center for Digital Journalism in the Americas in Austin, Texas.

MOOC experts surprised by how they're evolving

Versión en español aquí

Mark Glaser of PBS Mediashift recently pulled together a panel of experts for an online chat about how massive open online courses (MOOCs) are affecting universities and professional education. Some exceprts from the fascinating 40-minute exchange are below.

Alves

Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas, has been running MOOCs on journalism topics since 2012.

One of the surprising things about these courses is how many non-journalists are taking them, Alves said.  There is a hunger for learning the journalistic skills of gathering, verifying and presenting information, he said.

(Many of my 2,000 fellow students were non-journalists when I took the center's course on data visualization offered by Alberto Cairo.)

My MOOC experience and what it means

Versión en español aquí.

If you want to study journalism, you have more choices today, at lower cost, and of higher quality than ever. Sometimes you will get that at a university and sometimes not. That represents a challenge for universities.

In a lecture at a journalism conference in Puebla, Mexico, I described a personal experience taking a course in data visualization from one of the world leaders in the field, Alberto Cairo, author of  "The Functional Art."

The six-week course had readings and video tutorials of the highest quality. The homework assignments required at least 10 to 15 hours of work a week.  

Engaged professor

Cairo was intimately involved with the course participants, offering criticism of their work and suggestions for improvement. What was remarkable about this course was that there were 2,000 students enrolled from more than 100 countries, it took place completely online and it was free. 

10 entrepreneurs test new style of learning

Tenth in a series on teaching entrepreneurial journalism. Parts of this post are adapted from an article originally published in Revista Mexicana de Comunicación.

Latin American journalists have a great thirst for establishing independent media. Many of them are tired of working for low pay at media outlets that protect the friends and punish the enemies of the owners. 

They want to cover topics neglected by the mainstream media, such as education, health, environment, human rights and indigenous culture. They want to expose incompetence and corruption in government.

More than a dozen digital news entrepreneurs described how they are overcoming financial obstacles to sustain independent journalism during the Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism this spring sponsored by the Knight Center for Digital Journalism in the Americas. 

Online courses play bigger role in entrepreneurial journalism

Fourth in a series on entrepreneurial journalism programs at universities and media organizations. 

The Poynter Institute's online training center, NewsU, is building out its offerings in entrepreneurial journalism with the goal of creating a certificate program. It is one of the few organizations doing this kind of training mainly online. 

Howard Finberg
Poynter Institute, NewsU

NewsU already has eight courses, webinars and training videos that fit under the entrepreneurial umbrella and plans on developing more. These training modules are focused on helping journalists and news organizations stay competitive as digital media change the nature of their work, says NewsU's founder, Howard Finberg. 

“We're training people along two tracks. We're reshaping the traditional mass media business model to be more entrepreneurial and independent of major corporations. We're also training journalists to be more self-sufficient. We're giving them the skills to work across disciplines in ways they didn't have to when we were in school. We're changing the organizational and economic approach to training the people who do journalism.”