Good journalism is not enough anymore

In the remote year of 2007, Philip Meyer, a respected American journalist and researcher, predicted in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” that printed newspapers would disappear in 2043. Despite his apocalyptic prediction, the professor of University of North Carolina, an enthusiastic advocate of journalism and its role in the society, also concluded that high-quality journalism was the key for newspapers to survive.

Almost ten years later, with the arising of social media and the escalating presence of Google in our lives, I would have to say: good journalism is not enough – we need to rethink the business model of newspapers in a disruptive way.

One of the best articles I’ve read about the issue was written by Caio Tulio Costa, a Brazilian journalist and professor, during his fellowship in Columbia University in 2013. In “A Business Model for Digital Journalism: How Newspapers Should Embrace Technology, Social and Value Added Services”, he proposes a new value chain for the information business.

In his opinion, we are facing a disruption when it comes to information, shifting from an analog to a digital era (as professor Clayton Christensen had already pointed out in 2011). Therefore, newspapers need a new value chain for its business.

Forget about making money with advertisement, in an era where newspapers don’t have the monopoly in connecting companies and consumers anymore. Forget about selling thousands of printed editions, in times when information is everywhere, even under your fingertips. Journalistic companies need to change their value chain, because they won’t survive out of those old revenue streams.

The author states, in what I consider the great “eureka” moment of his research, that newspapers should become service companies, embracing the production of value-added services.

Trips from The New York Times: a value-added service

These companies not only should rethink their advertising strategies, building advertising networks to gain scale and cope with giants like Google and Facebook, and dive into social media in order to spread their content. They should especially focus on information sub-products, like books, researches, online document archives, databases, online shopping services, web hosting, website development and so on. Basically, everything that is related to the know-how of a journalistic company: information.

In the United States, the non-profit news organization ProPublica is an example: they sell their cleaned-up,refined databases (that have been giving rise to fantastic stories) to researchers and companies. The media legacy outlet The New York Times, besides having an online store and selling trips that are guided by their reporters (both information-related services), is also investing boldly in disruptive technologies, especially with their developer’s team. Here in Texas, The Texas Tribune, also a non-profit organization, has learned how to makemoney out of events, through partnerships and tickets-selling. Their annual festival alone generated $ 700,000 in revenue last year.

The Texas Tribune Festival: last year, $ 700,000 were generated from sponsorships and tickets

Back to Brazil, Valor Economico, our national “Financial Times”, is emerging as one of the well positioned newspapers in terms of value-added services: they created a real-timeinformation service fitted to companies, sell special reports about a specific market and provide an analyticand follow-up service of relevant bills in Congress.

It’s an interesting path for newspapers, that will hopefully become an important revenue stream. I would keep an eye on it.

Bloggers and YouTubers: the new rockstars

I must confess: as a journalist, I spent some years, during college and beyond, learning to underestimate or even disregard bloggers. At that time, and that was not so long ago, we believed that blogs were a repository of junk, not more than worthless personal opinions or a copy-and-paste news outlet.

Today, I work for a printed newspaper, one of the most important and influential ones in the country, but struggling with a shrinking newsroom. I can’t even remember how many massive layoffs I’ve already survived in the last seven years – after the fourth one, I stopped counting. We are still big and influential, and have a growing audience on the Internet. But it’s not rare that our best scoop gets fewer clicks than a video from the catchy blogger of the week.

Yes, bloggers have become the rockstars of the Internet – and also, at least in Brazil, YouTubers. They achieved unprecedented levels of popularity, having videos shared by millions and taking other hundreds to wait hours in line for an autograph. In Brazil, the best example is Kefera, a 22-year-old who has got 7.5 million followers on YouTube (in this article, where she's taken as a celebrity, she poses for a photo wearing a t-shirt that says: ‘Who the fuck is Kefera?’). She is not the only one: Jout-Jout, a 25-year-old, has 665,000 followers. Camila Coelho, a beauty blogger, got 2.4 million.

In the Attention Economy (Davenport and Beck, 2011), bloggers and YouTubers are probably millionaires. Some of their videos are 30-minute long – way more than it takes to watch an average TV story or an article on my paper. Last year, Kefera fans waited in line for until 7 hours during her book signing.

In a world where information is at our fingertips (anywhere, anytime), it is impressive how these stars manage to hold the attention of thousands of people for such long time.

We could learn from them: they are captivating. They reveal their personalities, share their opinions and lives (of course, journalists have a boundary for that, but we could benefit from a more transparent relationship with our audience). More important, they speak the same language as their audience, mastering the art of digital storytelling and spreading their content through social media.

Finally, I raise another question: why don’t we, journalists, become their partners? Why can’t bloggers or YouTubers talk about the latest news, or recommend a news website? Or even more: why can’t a newspaper or a TV channel have their very own ‘YouTuber’, telling stories in a very creative way?

It’s time for journalism to become more dashing and venturesome, if we want to conquer attention in times of information surplus.