OTOH, I’d say that having a gatekeeper does not necessarily imply value.

The value that news outlets offer is not merely information. You can get plenty of that on the ‘Net. The value is that such information is timely _and_ vetted _and_ available. A “community” of amateur news reporters might produce timely voluminous news, but when Joe Reporter says “casualty figure is in the 10,000’s”, do you believe him? Joe R. has nothing to lose if he’s sloppy in his news gathering and fact checking. As for availability: how about news on the Iraq war? Can one (or would one want to) count on amateur reporters for that?

Assuming that (time and vetted and available) news is of value and is what people want, news organizations need to adopt the “indirect revenue” model of other Web enterprises. Offer (time and vetted and available) news for free, which would result in eyeballs, which would translate to revenue. It works for Google with search and for Facebook, Myspace, etc. with social networking; it may also work for news.

Of course, dropping the gates would galvanize participation and greatly reduce the cost of content creation.

If you ask me, ESPN.com has the closest thing to a winning formula with their “insider” memberships. The premium content is always sexy, timely, and exclusive.

Unfortunately, no one is going to buy a membership to read timely bulletins about the latest city council proclamation.

However, local newspapers have something that ESPN.com doesn’t. They’re local. They’re right in the midst of it, seeing it happen, and they can interact with the community at any time. They’re part of our identity. Being mentioned in the local paper still means something. They can develop rich content that appeals to civic pride and touches on local issues; no one else will.

The implementation? That is an exercise left to the reader.

videogame writer guy

@Sanjay Nasta
A robust and active community brings more readers, and that is vitally important to authors.

Popular print media outlets are dying. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small town rag or the world’s best-known brand, progress doesn’t discriminate. How bad is it? The New York Times (which owns the Boston Globe and many regional papers) owes…

The most interesting point, to me, is about community being more important than content. That seems to be true on a certain level. Note the Obama campaign, for instance. They got it that it’s no longer about donations per se, it’s about membership — belonging. But community ultimately is bankrupt and irrelevant to everyone outside the community unless there’s good content, too. If we don’t have anything to say, all of the jabbering signifies nothing. In some ways, allowing only the consumers to direct the coverage enables our natural but unhealthy tendency toward the sensational.

But for newspapers and other news organizations, money is still going to be the bottom line. And I don’t see a complete case here that explains how all of this makes enough money for papers. I would be greatly interested to read further posts along this line, though.

BTW, Whurley, I happen to know for a fact that you still read traditional media. Why do we read traditional media? Because they have to be accountable. They have a reputation to uphold and shareholders to appease. I do believe journalists should be more accepting of user generated content, but someone needs to act as a filter for what is right and what is just crap. A lot of user generated content is useful, but some of it is just self-promotional noise. Why would I want to read that?

Traditional media should be much more accepting of interactivity and community, but creative commons would put a lot of people out of work. How about this: a newspaper puts up something like Qik on their site and says “Ask the Domain developers questions, live at 10 PM at http://www.newssite.com“. THAT’S interactive media and no, I’d never put that up under creative commons. That’s what traditional media has the power and influence to do, they just don’t do it for some reason.

Justin.tv is a good example of this. You can chat w others during a football game. It rocks. Again, traditional media is not doing this.

I compare it to making the movie “Star Wars” as a silent film in my blog post here:
http://www.michell…the-silent-star-wars

Great idea in point #1 on Creative Commons. I’ve thought for a while that news companies should deliver their content to work in any format or device, but I like the idea of extending that to allow for other to add and contribute.

It’s exciting to think of new business models for news companies. Some of the best opportunities lie in combining news coverage and community platforms, or in a reverse syndication model, where instead of charging for sending you my stories, I pay you a share of the ad revenue I get from traffic you send my way.

Two comments resonated: It’s not the content, it’s the community. You’re right, a directed community has tremendous value–it’s what we’re trying to build at elearningcouncil.com (and you can guess what that community is focused on). It has already provided value to the folks who participate. Does a non-focused community have the same value?

Any thoughts on what kind of rewards to provide content creators. That’s my biggest problem at ELC. It’s just a few folks who provide content…being a non-profit it’s hard to provide monetary rewards. We’re not getting enough contributed content to provide recognition based rewards.