33°53’S 151°10’E
Outside.in
This is the official name of my City Desk publication. It’s the latitude and longitude for Sydney. I don’t expect it to be said out loud, it’ll just be referred to by it’s nickname, the city desk. It won’t be a paper publication. If I had access to the Outside.in platform in Sydney locations and geotags and co-ordinates would be all I’d need for readers to find my publication. I’d be doing exactly what Fred Wilson (whose venture capital firm invests in Outside.in) said he’d do if he were creating the equivalent to The Village Voice in New York today.
“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.”
My interest is in that “original reporting” and what kind of marketplace can support the hiring of editors. In fact I’d have an entirely different kind of staff, with several editors on staff to work directly with writers and artists, and a lot of freelancers. And I’d have app developers, on staff if I could figure out how to afford them.
Spot.us is helping to figure out how to create and fund the investigative reporting covering community issues, with tips and funding from the community. I learned on Friday from its founder, David Cohn, that there are other people in Australia also looking at applying the model locally and I’m going to see if I can collaborate with them.
The revenue model for the Outside.in publishing platform for local news is still the selling of ads:
“The local site is supposed to aggregate and filter the stuff and sell ads on it. The people supplying the content get more exposure via links from the bigger site. Now back to [outside.in CEO] Josephson’s news site of the future: He imagines that the tiny editorial staff of the model newspaper produces an extraordinary number of page views – 40 million per month, in this example – and then augments it with twice as many page views from a third party network (which could be, but doesn’t have to be, supplied by Outside.in). A sales force of a dozen people sells ads for both buckets of inventory, and uses ad networks to fill in remnant space they don’t sell.”
What I’m looking at is the possibility of a different kind of revenue stream for freelance journalism that’s a co-operation between publishers and local businesses. The original reporting that interests me is arts, science and design criticism that stems from a journalist’s deep immersion in the worlds that they write about, that might expand a blog’s content — as the architecture critic Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG book has done. These writers are constantly researching, evaluating, reading, going to concerts, visiting exhibitions, looking deeply into the collections of museums. What if there was a way for the kind of long form reporting that doesn’t suit the web, to be easily and inexpensively produced in booklet form that could be sold in bookstores and museum stores?
I’d create an iPhone app that’s a deep inventory of all of these little publications. People could order reprints of these booklets, if they were out of print, and have them mailed within a week. The revolutionary aspect would be instant royalty payments, that once the purchase had been made a part of my bookkeeping programme would instantly calculate and pay royalties for the writers and repayments to anyone who might have invested in the creation of the booklet.
For instance approaching the Australian Museum to create a small publication about the Tasmanian Devil based on its research. A writer could be assigned to the relevant researchers at the museum, editors hired to evaluate both the science and the writing. The booklet could be funded by the Australian Museum, or Museum Members, and the proceeds shared between the Museum, the writer, a donation to the programmes trying to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction, and a small amount put back into the operating costs.
