Chapter 8

Entrepreneurs Will Save Journalism, and You Could Be One of Them Did the title of this chapter scare you? It shouldn’t—but I’m going to ask you to stretch your mind just a bit in the pages ahead. In this chapter I want to discuss, celebrate and speculate about how journalism is moving into the new era. We are racing ahead because so many people are trying new ideas and creating startup enterprises around them. Maybe you’ll be one of them, at whatever level you may choose to venture into the arena—a blog on a topic where you can be the among the best guides, a community mail list, a video service, or anything that you are passionate about. You may want to make some money at it, or you may be motivated solely to help your community. Remember, the barrier to entry is close to zero, and you don’t need anyone’s permission. Even if you aren’t planning to do any of those things, you’ll find what follows useful for this reason: Entrepreneurship is journalism’s future—the future of pretty much all enterprises, for that matter—so we all need to appreciate how it works, and how it is working. As you read this, please remember to keep the core mediactive principles in mind. If we are not honorable in our practices, all of our innovation will fall short. A Prescient Warning, and Unheeded Advice Some of the most successful entrepreneurs of recent decades have come from the technology arena. One of the most brilliant business leaders in modern history is Andy Grove, a co-founder of Silicon Valley giant Intel Corp., where he served as chief executive and chairman. In the 1980s he led the company through a wrenching transition, when he and his colleagues changed Intel’s focus from computer memory, a business they were losing to Asian competitors, to the central processor chips that became the heart of the world’s personal computers. With that move, the genius of which became clear only much later, Grove gave Intel its 110 Mediactive future—at least for the next several decades—and assured his own place as one of America’s great business leaders. Grove, who is also an author and teacher, believes deeply in journalism’s importance, and he is never shy about speaking his mind. Never was that more clear than in April 1999, when he took the stage at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, held that year in San Francisco. In a conversation with Jerry Ceppos, former editor of Silicon Valley’s once-great daily newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, Grove warned the editors that their time was running short: Newspapers faced a financial meltdown. He wasn’t the first to issue such a warning, and hardly the last. But the degree to which he was ignored remains instructive, and sad. At the ASNE conference, he passed this same message on to the editors themselves: You’re where Intel was three years before the roof fell in on us. You’re heading toward a strategic inflection point, and three years from now, maybe, it’s going to be obvious…. And my history of the technology industry is you cannot save yourself out of a strategic inflection point. You can save yourself deeper into the morass that you’re heading to, but you can only invest your way out of it, and I really wonder how many people who are in charge of the business processes of journalism understand that. Grove was right about the trajectory, though a bit premature about the timing. He was even more right about the industry’s likely response: rampant cost-cutting, much too little investment and, above all, the failure to appreciate the value of entrepreneurial thinking. How times have changed. The entrepreneurial, startup culture has infiltrated journalism in a big way—because so many people are trying new things, mostly outside of big enterprises but also inside the more progressive ones; because Digital Age experimentation is so inexpensive; and because we can already see the outlines of what’s emerging. Although the transition will be messy, we’re heading toward a great new era in media and journalism. To be sure, we are losing some things we need, at least temporarily. But I’m an optimist, because if we do the transition right we’ll have a more diverse and vibrant media ecosystem. And by “we” I mean you, me and everybody. “Ecosystem” and “diversity” are key words here. The dangers of monocultures—systems that have little or no diversity—are well understood, even though they still exist in many areas, such as modern Dan Gillmor 111 farming and finance. Because monocultures are inherently unstable, the results are catastrophic when they fail—as we saw with Wall Street in

1. A diverse ecosystem, by contrast, isn’t as threatened by failures, because they tend to be smaller and are replaced by new successes. In a diverse and vibrant capitalist economy, the failure of enterprises is tragic only for the specific constituencies of those enterprises, but what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” assuming that we have fair and enforceable rules of the road for all, ensures the long-term sustainability of the economy. Recall from Chapter 1 that the journalistic ecosystem of the past half-century was dominated by a small number of giant companies. Those enterprises, aided by governmental policies and manufacturing-era efficiencies of scale, controlled the marketplace and grew bigger and bigger. The collision of Internet-fueled technology and traditional media’s business model, which is heavily reliant on advertising sales, was cataclysmic for the big companies. But is it catastrophic for the communities and societies the big companies served? In the short term, it’s plainly problematic, at least when we consider Big Journalism’s role as a watchdog (inconsistent though the dominant companies have been in serving that role). But the worriers appear to assume that we can’t replace what we will lose. They have no faith in the restorative power of a diverse, market-based ecosystem, because they have little or no experience of being part of one. The diversity that’s coming—in fact, is already arriving—is breathtaking. As we all come to demand better from our information sources, and create trustworthy information ourselves, we’ll have the choices we need at our fingertips. And remember this: The largest companies in the world started with individual people’s ideas. Maybe yours will someday be one of them. Even if you don’t really believe that, don’t ever assume you can’t try. Here’s why. Experimentation Is Cheap In digital media, the cost of trying new ideas is heading toward zero. That means lots and lots of people will be—and already are—testing the possibilities. Clay Shirky has done some acute analysis of this phenomenon. He points to the lesson of Sourceforge, the site where open-source software developers post projects for other people to download, analyze and hopefully improve, and for non-technical people to download and use. 112 Mediactive Clay notes that the overwhelming majority of Sourceforge projects are, by any definition, failures. Among the more than 150,000 projects that run on the Windows operating system, the most successful have tens to hundreds of millions of downloads. But if you go down the list, many even in the top 25 percent have fewer than 1,000 downloads—which in a practical sense is essentially none at all. (In more than a third of all projects, no one has cared enough even to look, much less help out or download the software.) But those tens of thousands of failures are individually inexpensive, and they set a stage for the few but vitally important successes. What does this imply? As Clay wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2007: [T]he low cost of failure means that someone with a new idea doesn’t have to convince anyone else to let them try it—there are few institutional barriers between thought and action. Similarly, the R&D that the news industry should have done years ago is now being done in a highly distributed way. Yes, some is being done by people inside media companies, but most is not—and increasingly it won’t be. It’ll take place in universities, in corporate labs, in garages and at kitchen tables. (I wish there was a more organized way to find and share what’s happening, and in Chapter 11 I describe a thinktank approach to doing just that.) In other words, not only don’t you need permission to create media, but you don’t need much money, either. This is one reason I’m so optimistic about the future of media, and of journalism. Experiments by Traditional Media Although I’m less optimistic about traditional news organizations’ willingness or ability to change, I definitely don’t want to write them off entirely. Not only are they needed, when they do their job well, but most are still making operating profits. Moreover, the traditional media have only just begun to experiment themselves. And the ones that are experimenting are doing wondrous things; we talk about many of them on Mediactive.com. The industry experiments have mostly tended to be on the journalistic side, however. The business innovation? Not so much. Even here, though, there are glimmers of ideas, mostly due to the sheer panic in executive suites. At the end of 2009, for example, media company executives were falling all over themselves to assert their determination to start charging for what they were allegedly giving away. (Never mind that they’d been Dan Gillmor 113 essentially giving it away for decades, as noted in Chapter 1.) My reaction: Heck yes, give it a try. As I write this, the New York Times appears to be on the verge of putting up a “pay wall,” as people call this kind of venture. I doubt pay walls will work, in most cases. There’s too much content available for no charge, and too little added value evident in what the news organizations say they want audiences to pay for. But there’s plenty of evidence that people will pay for specialized content that they believe they need. I subscribe to the online editions of the Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports, for example, and as long as their subscription rates are modest I’ll keep doing so. Magazines and some newspapers are working on a format and billing system, possibly tied to tablet devices. I wish them well. In early 2009, I tried stirring the pot a bit, with a suggestion that a few top news organizations could charge for what they produce if they merged outright. In a post on the blog BoingBoing, I asked: What would happen if some top English language journalism organizations simply merged and started charging for their breaking news and commentary about policy, economics and other national/international topics? That is, what if they were to combine for critical mass and keep most of their journalism off the public Internet for a few days after publication but then make the archives freely available? My list of top organizations included the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Washington Monthly, and The New Yorker. “I don’t know the combined annual newsroom cost of these organizations, but I’d be surprised if it was even $750 million,” I said. “Let’s go wild and call it $1 billion, so we can pay for lawyers, Web developers, accountants, and a bunch of other folks who’d need to be part of the operation.” The merged enterprise could generate much more than that with 2 million subscribers paying a modest $10 a week rate. Naturally, I got lots of pushback on this idea. But I do know this: I’d pay, gladly, for such a product. Government Intervention Some big news organizations and their corporate parents have latched, sadly, onto a much more alarming, anti-capitalistic notion: 114 Mediactive government (read: taxpayer) help. They’ve talked about changing copyright laws to prevent what they call “free-riding”—the notion that online media aggregators are taking the value from their use of the information from other sources without giving anything in return. They’ve talked about direct subsidies, and more. There’s a long history of government assistance, including but not limited to licenses to use the airwaves for broadcasters as well as postal subsidies for mailing newspapers and magazines. Most of what’s being proposed today, however, is ill-advised or even counterproductive. We need to let the marketplace work before concluding that taxpayer intervention is in any way necessary. This isn’t to say that politicians and bureaucrats couldn’t improve key laws and regulations that have an impact on media. In copyright and a number of other areas—notably broadband policy—we can do much better. I’ll discuss this in Chapter 11. The “Startup Culture” What is entrepreneurship all about? Whether you’re doing it inside or outside of another enterprise, here are some key features (credit for much of this goes to my colleague, CJ Cornell):  Ownership: This doesn’t necessarily mean owning stock in a company, though of course there’s nothing wrong with that. As CJ explains to our students, it’s about owning the process, and the outcome, of what you’re doing.  Focus: If you can’t focus, you can’t succeed in a startup. I know this from experience; my Bayosphere project failed in part because I believed—contrary to wise admonitions from one of my investors—that I could do lots of things at once.  Ambiguity: Startups are full of ambiguities and even chaos. If you’re the kind of person who can’t deal with this, you may be ill-suited for entrepreneurship. Understand a rule of startups: Your ultimate product is likely to be vastly different than what you originally imagined, and it’ll keep evolving.  Resourcefulness: Startups have to use what’s available. If you have everything on your wish list, you’re either over-funded or under-creative.  Speed: Entrepreneurs move fast. They change with evolving conditions and take advantage of opportunities that emerge and Dan Gillmor 115 disappear in short order. They make decisions and move forward.  Innovation: You can innovate by being more efficient or thorough, not just by inventing new technologies. The Googles are few and far between, but innovators often connect dots where others can’t imagine the connections.  Risk: Appreciating risk is essential to the entrepreneurial process, but it doesn’t belong at the top of the list. You minimize the risk when you can, understanding that you can’t eliminate it. The process of entrepreneurship differs from project to project. In the digital media space, however, I’d suggest the following:
2. Start with good idea, and above all follow your personal passion. An entrepreneur who doesn’t believe in her goal with every fiber of her being has already started to fail, in the words of Dave Winer, a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in digital media.
3. Develop it quickly and collaboratively, using off-the-shelf tools when possible and writing code only to create the parts you can’t find elsewhere. Be open with others about what you are doing. “Stealth mode” projects can and do work out, but most ideas will find more traction with the help of others who care about what you’re doing.
4. Launch before you think you’re fully ready, because when you launch you’re just getting started. Who says? My friend Reid Hoffman, founder of the LinkedIn network and a prescient investor in Internet companies, once told me with reference to the launch of a consumer Internet company, “If you aren’t completely embarrassed by your website when you launch, you waited too long.”
5. Following on the previous point, assume you’ll be in beta mode for some time. You will have bugs and problems. Fix what’s broken and keep iterating.
6. If you see that the project is going to fail, don’t prolong it. Don’t waste time, and don’t spend investors’ money after it’s clear you should stop. This may sound like a contradiction of the first point, and in some ways it is; remember what I said about ambiguity? 116 Mediactive
7. Repeat. A smart failure teaches valuable lessons. Internal entrepreneurship in companies, also called “intrapreneurship,” should be especially forgiving of failure, assuming it’s not stupid or reckless. While large enterprises can innovate, in the digital media world they may be better off buying or licensing from startups. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, put it best when he said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” A good idea is only the beginning of a great startup. Entrepreneurs must appreciate the hard realities of running a business. This is as true for a non-profit as for a for-profit enterprise; making them sustainable is a core mission. I hear about dozens of startups every month. Most will fail, but I have to stress again: This is not a flaw in the system. It’s a feature. If I Ran a News Organization, Part 1 Traditional news organizations have long had a low entrepreneurial quotient, for a wide variety of reasons. Near the top of the list is that their journalists have been walled off from business operations. Management requires them to keep away from the advertising department, as if they’d get a terminal disease if they had much contact. This separation of church and state, as we journalists called it with such hubris, came from good motives: to make sure the advertisers—the main customers of the newspaper, if the people who supply the most revenues are the main customers—don’t dictate or even influence news coverage. This separation was always something of a fiction, given publishers’ and broadcasting station managers’ business duties and influence over the people who worked for them, but it did serve a purpose. My experiences on the business side of life—both early in my adulthood, when I ran a musical enterprise, and more recently as cofounder of a failed startup, as an investor, and as co-founder of a successful startup—have persuaded me that the so-called church-state wall has been one of 20th-century pro journalism’s cardinal flaws. By all means, tell advertisers that they don’t run the news operations (and mean it). But a journalist who has no idea how his industry really works from a business perspective is missing way too much of the big picture. If I ran a news organization today, whether a startup or part of an established company, I’d want to be sure that the journalists understood, appreciated and embraced the new arena we all inhabit. That emphatically Dan Gillmor 117 includes how business works. I’d want them to understand the variety of financial models that support media—especially the organization that employed them—and to be versed in the lingo of CPM (cost of advertising per thousand impressions), SEO (search engine optimization) and the like. I would not ask journalists to grub for the most page views, a new trend that tends to bring out the worst in media, but would very much want them to know what was happening in all parts of their enterprise, not just the content area. Maybe—just maybe—if the journalists really understood their business, one of them would have one of the golden ideas it needs to prosper instead of crumble. There aren’t all that many ways to make media enterprises sustainable. Among them are subscriptions, advertising, donations, memberships, voluntarism and ancillary services that cross-subsidize the journalism. Two examples: A law professor might run a legal blog that’s subsidized by her employer (and thus carries no advertising) and which advances her career. Or a journalistic enterprise might hold moneymaking conferences. I’m intrigued by any number of new ideas I’ve seen from the business side of media lately, and I spend a fair amount of time in the Mediactive blog pointing them out. For the people doing these experiments, the ethical issues are more real than ever. The closer the journalists get to the people paying for the journalism, the more issues they face about holding fast to those basic principles. Transparency becomes more central than ever. If I Ran a News Organization, Part 2 Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe it’s possible to have a news organization that combines 21st-century tools and tactics with the timeless principles of excellence and honor. We are nearly free from the printing presses, the expensive broadcasting gear and especially the topdown approach of the past. Tomorrow’s great journalism practitioners and organizations will believe in—and work in—a culture that embraces the possibilities of this emergent conversational and collaborative space. Although what follows are editorial suggestions, not business ones—I recognize that none of these ideas matters if the business fails— they are essential to my ideal enterprise. Besides, most of these could be implemented with no additional cost, and I’m absolutely convinced that they’d help create news product that’s worthy of audience support. A business that doesn’t respect and value its customers has no future. 118 Mediactive So, here are some of the things I’d insist on if I ran a news organization. First, we would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process in a broad variety of ways, including through crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other means. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labor—and work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a mere pat on the back—and that we want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role. To that end, transparency would be a core element of our journalism. One example of many: Every print article would have an accompanying box called “Things We Don’t Know”—a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting. TV and radio stories would mention the key unknowns. Whatever the medium, the organization’s website would include an invitation to the audience to help fill in the holes—and every story has holes. We would embrace the hyperlink in every possible way. Our website would include the most comprehensive possible listing of other media in our community, whether we were a community of geography or interest. We’d link to all relevant blogs, photo streams, video channels, database services and other material we could find, and use our editorial judgment to highlight the ones we considered best for the members of the community. And we’d liberally link from our journalism to other work and source material relevant to the topic under discussion, recognizing that we are not oracles but guides. We would create a service to notify online readers, should they choose to sign up for it, of errors we learned about in our journalism. Users of this service could choose to be notified of major errors only (in our judgment) or all errors, however insignificant we might believe them to be. We’d make conversation an essential element of our mission. Among other things:  If we were a local newspaper, the editorial and op-ed pages would publish the best of, and be a guide to, the conversation the community was having with itself online and in other public forums, whether hosted by the news organization or someone else. Our website would link to a variety of commentary from the usual suspects, but syndicated columns would almost never appear in the print edition.  Editorials would appear in blog format, as would letters to the editor. Dan Gillmor 119  We would encourage comments and forums, but in moderated spaces that both encouraged the use of real names and insisted on (and enforced) civility.  Comments from people using verified real names would be listed first (i.e., given priority on the page). We’d routinely point to our competitors’ work, including (and maybe especially) the best of the new entrants, e.g., bloggers who cover specific niches. When we’d covered the same topic, we’d link to other people’s work to enable our audience to gain more perspectives. We’d also talk about and point to competitors when they covered things we’d missed or ignored. Beyond routinely pointing to competitors, we would make a special effort to cover and follow up on their most important work, in contrast to the common practice today of pretending it didn’t exist. As a basic rule, the more we wished we’d done the journalism ourselves, the more prominent would be the exposure we’d give the other folks’ work. This would have at least two beneficial effects. First, we’d help persuade our community of an issue’s importance. Second, we’d help people understand the value of solid journalism, no matter who does it. The more we believed an issue was of importance to our community, the more relentlessly we’d stay on top of it ourselves. If we concluded that continuing down a current policy path was a danger, we’d actively campaign to persuade people to change course. This would have meant, for example, loud and persistent warnings about the danger of the blatantly obvious housing/financial bubble that inflated during the past decade. We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute were lying, we would say so, and provide the accompanying evidence. If we learned that a significant number of people in our community believed a lie about an important person or issue, we would make it part of our ongoing mission to help them understand the truth. We would replace certain Orwellian and PR-speakish words and common expressions with more neutral, precise language. If someone we interviewed misused language, we would paraphrase instead of running direct quotes. Examples of phrasing we’d change include:  We would not write that someone “is worth” some amount of money. We’d say he or she has financial holdings of that amount, or that his or her wealth is such and such. 120 Mediactive  We wouldn’t say that health care paid for by taxpayers is free.  The activity that takes place in casinos is gambling, not gaming.  There are no death taxes. There can be inheritance or estate taxes.  Certain violent practices for which America and its allies have successfully prosecuted others on war-crimes charges are torture, not “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  Piracy is what people carrying guns on the high seas do: capturing ships, stealing cargo and turning crews and passengers into hostages, or sometimes murdering them. Piracy does not describe what people do when they post digital music on filesharing networks. We’d assess risks honestly. Journalists constantly use anecdotal evidence in ways that frighten the public into believing a problem is larger than it actually is. We would make it a habit a) not to extrapolate a wider threat from weird or tragic anecdotes, b) to regularly discuss the major risks we face and contrast them statistically with the minor ones, and c) to debunk the most egregious examples of horrible stories that spark unnecessary fear or even panic. Our archives would be freely available, with permalinks—Web addresses that don’t change or disappear — on every single thing we’d published as far back as possible, and we would provide easy digital access to help other people use our journalism in ways we hadn’t considered ourselves. A core mission of our work would be to help people in the community become informed users of media, not passive consumers— and to understand not just how they can do this, but why they should. We would work with schools and other institutions that recognize the necessity of critical thinking. (See Chapter 10.) We would not run anniversary stories and commentary except in the rarest of circumstances. They are a refuge for lazy and unimaginative journalists. We would never publish lists of 10. They’re a prop as well. Except in the most dire of circumstances—such as a threat to a whistle-blower’s life, liberty or livelihood—we would not quote or paraphrase unnamed sources in any of our journalism. If we did, we would need persuasive evidence from the source as to why we should break this rule, and we’d explain why we had done it in our coverage. Moreover, when we did grant anonymity, we’d offer our audience the following guidance: We Dan Gillmor 121 believe this is one of the rare times when anonymity is justified, but we urge you to exercise appropriate skepticism. If we granted anonymity and learned that the source had lied to us, we would consider the confidentiality agreement to have been breached by that person and would expose his or her duplicity and identity. Sources would know of this policy before we published. We’d further look for examples where our competitors had been tricked by sources they didn’t name, and then do our best to expose them, too. The word “must”—as in “the president must do this or that”— would be banned from editorials or other commentary from our own journalists, and we’d strongly discourage it from contributors. It is a hollow word and only emphasizes powerlessness. If we wanted someone to do something, we’d try persuasion instead, explaining why it’s a good idea (though almost certainly not one that originated with us) and what the consequences will be if the advice is ignored. For any person or topic we covered regularly, we would provide a “baseline”—an article (or video, etc.) where people could start if they were new to the topic—and point prominently to that “start here” piece from any new coverage. We might use a modified Wikipedia approach to keep the article current with the most important updates. The point would be to offer context, giving unprepared readers a way to get up to speed quickly and others a way to recall the context of the issue. For any coverage where this made sense, we’d tell our audience members how they could act on the information we’d just given them. This would typically take the form of a “What You Can Do” box or pointer. We’d work in every possible way to help our audience know who’s behind the words and actions we reported. People and institutions frequently try to influence the rest of us in ways that hide their participation in the debate, and we’d do our best to reveal who’s spending the money and pulling the strings. When our competitors declined to reveal such things, or failed to ask obvious questions of their sources, we’d talk about their journalistic failures in our own coverage of the issues. We’d publish no op-eds bylined by major politicians, executives or celebrities. These big names almost never actually write what appears under their bylines, and we’re being just as dishonest as they are by publishing it. If they want to pitch a policy or cause, they should post it on their own web pages, and we’ll be happy to point to those pages. I could offer dozens more suggestions, but the ones I’ve listed strike me as key. More than a recipe, they add up to a sense of duty to the 122 Mediactive communities we serve. Even for organizations bound up in a legacy of “the way we’ve always done things,” it’s not too late to try something with the potential to turn a trend around. Repeat After Me: Journalism’s Future Is Bright As I said back in the first chapter, I’m jealous of my students. I wish I could be their age, starting out when the slate is so blank, when the possibilities are so wide open. They, not my generation, will be among the entrepreneurs who invent the news organizations of the future that will welcome us as co-creators of journalism. The kind of media environment we need, and, ultimately, the kind a democratic society needs to make informed decisions, won’t come easily. The decisions that will make the new journalism possible lie not only with those who try to practice it, or even with their audience—the new era will require changes to the legal, social and economic environment. We’ll look some of them in the following chapters.

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