fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Michael Higdon | 09.09.2009

First, sorry for not blogging, I’ve been settling into my job and living space. I now work for  Swift Communications in Carson City, Nev. as a graphic designer for the centralized advertising department.

I made the switch to ad/sales for several reasons. Main one being that many of the problems in journalism come from ad/sales not changing, adapting or participating in the on-going conversation about our industry. The people making suggestions are usually editorial. So why not do something about it, eh?

Alright, carrying on.

In March, I wrote about an idea we come up with during Reynolds School of Journalism journalism week IDEO think tank. One of our groups thought of reviving public spaces, as they’ve detoriated in the last 30 years (see Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone).

Our group wanted to do this by partnering with coffee shops to help distribute local news. At the same time, you’d have reporters at those coffee shops, holding the fort as if the place were their own personal newsroom. The idea is to make that coffee shop into a community hub.

After the think tank ended, it looks like IDEO took the idea and expanded on it. I can’t confirm this, but it’s hard to mistake the similarities. Alex Grishaver presented this idea at #SNDSF09 (Society for News Design San Francisco meet up 2009).

The IDEO coffee shop is like ours but full of technology – touch desks, electronic bulletin boards, interactive web content, augmented reality, plastic paper and other things. The concept is essentially the same though.

In true IDEO fashion, there is no business model. One SNDSF09 attendee asked “How do we pay for this, a $30 cup of coffee?”

Honestly though, how do you convince a coffee shop to partner with a news company and to front the cost of thousands of dollars in equipment? What’s the incentive for the business other than they MIGHT become the community hub?

There are two decevingly “easy” options I can think of:

• The news company starts its own coffee shop and fronts the cost as a start up, then run the business
• Or you do something with much smaller investment cost that has more incentive (or less cost) and more revenue for the news company
  

I asked this question to our brand new CEO, Bill Toler, at his introduction meeting yesterday. He said he’s interested in experimentation. “Fail cheap, fail fast,” he said and I add “fail often.” I can dig that. My boss said once he gets settled, we can aggressively pursue this idea with him.

So I’ll play with the second, more practical answer right now.

In imagination land, we’ll partner with Comma Coffee, a locally owned coffee shop in Carson City. We’ll go with the original idea, where Swift partners to put Nevada Appeal newspapers and a Nevada Appeal reporter in the coffee shop almost all day. We have Online Community Managers (OCMs), so let’s say it’s one of those people.

That reporter/OCM gathers news, talks to people, answers questions (even just common questions about town goings-ons), reports, moderates, etc. He/She is the community hub – the all-knowing journalist. But he/she is only the all-knowing journalist because of time spent with the community members. So really, the OCM is a facilitator between customers who buy coffee for breakfast and customers who buy at lunch.

Also, we buy one of those nice big flat screen TVs (about $1000 to $1600) and start selling advertisements on a rotating screen. As an incentive, it also includes specials in that coffee shop with nice food photography compliments of the ad staff. Nothing is better than a photo of a greasy croissant sandwich or steaming coffee when it comes to making point of purchase sales.

In addition to ads, let’s stick news headlines on that screen. Not unlike Las Vegas Sun’s billboards.

Las Vegas Sun digital billboard posts news headlines throughout Las Vegas. We can do this smaller. (Photo courtesy of Rob Curley)

On top of that, if there’s breaking news using Twitter or Cover it Live (or other live tools) let’s put the Nevada Appeal’s Twitterfall on it too. People in the coffee shop could participate from their mobile phones or laptops and see it live.

This is always a rewarding element at SND Annual conferences.

I’ll stop there for now, because that’s a really low investment set up. You can always add more, like a computer kiosk for people to use – for people that don’t have their own computers – to post classifieds, tweet from a general account “@Carson_Folk” or “#CommaCoffee.” Etc. Etc.

The point is, you’re expanding the reach of the newspaper to different customers. You’re adding value to your brand and you’re doing it outside of usual news-consuming channels. No one is required to pick up a newspaper or go to the website to know what’s happening. And it has revenue connected to it similar to a theater’s pre-movie slideshow model.

And the investment is a $1000 TV, installation and software/web-to-TV service. That’s return you can see in a month. Then you can try other wild ideas or go to other locations.