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Big paywall announcements in U.K.: As seems to happen pretty much every week now, a few more big paywall dominoes fell this week — two of the U.K.’s biggest papers, The Sun and The Telegraph, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle here in the States. The Telegraph’s pay plan is a metered model, which has become the standard in the U.S. and Canada. But as Roy Greenslade of The Guardian pointed out, The Telegraph is the first general-interest U.K. newspaper to adopt a metered model. (The British business paper The Financial Times pioneered the model.)
Econsultancy’s Graham Martin was skeptical about using the paywall for general content like The Telegraph’s, as opposed to The Financial Times’ specialized content. But Patrick Smith of The Media Briefing was optimistic about The Telegraph’s chances given the loyalty of its readership, but questioned why The Telegraph and others are moving so slowly toward pay plans. Digital media consultant Martin Belam said the pay plan is loose enough that it should only catch heavy users and industry types, both of whom will be likely to pay up.
News Corp.’s Sun, Britain’s largest paper, also announced plans for a paywall this week, though it’s not scheduled to come until later this year. The Guardian reported that it’s penciled in to start September, when the Sun’s valuable rights to show clips of English Premier League football/soccer kick in.
The San Francisco Chronicle also instituted a paywall this week, launching a second, paid site, SFChronicle.com alongside its longtime free one, SFGate.com. The two-site model is patterned after that of The Boston Globe, which has had its paywall in effect since 2011. SF Weekly’s Rachel Swan gave some historical context to the decision, while the San Francisco Appeal’s Rita Hao said the Chronicle is putting the wrong kind of news on its paywalled site: She’d rather pay for news she needs (like city hall coverage) than news she wants. (Meanwhile, Chronicle staffers have been protesting a cut to healthcare benefits.)
As all these paywalls go up, The Media Briefing’s Jasper Jackson outlined the various models being used, and his colleague, Patrick Smith, profiled the free model of Britain’s Mail Online, the most popular newspaper on the web. Journalism.co.uk’s Rachel McAthy, meanwhile, examined the influence of The New York Times’ paywall, launched two years ago this week.
PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy described these paywalls as an attempt to cling to high-cost, high-quality content as reality sets in that the online ad model just doesn’t work. And Reuters’ Felix Salmon described newspapers’ big-picture online strategy: “first get people used to the idea of paying at all, and then, slowly, raise the amount that you ask them to pay over time.” He predicted that newspapers, through consultants, would use each other for A/B testing how much customers will be willing to pay.
Yahoo’s deals in mobile and user content: Yahoo made (or is reportedly about to make) a couple of acquisitions this week that provide some clues to where it’s headed as a content company. The deal that was actually completed was the purchase of Summly, a news-reading app that summarizes long-form stories for mobile readers. The deal made headlines not so much because of Summly’s technology, but because of its founder, Nick D’Aloisio, who’s just 17.
Yahoo will hire D’Aloisio and two other at Summly, shut the app down and incorporate its algorithm into its own mobile technology. Kara Swisher of All Things D reported that the deal was worth $30 million, and while she called it a very high price, she said Yahoo is paying for D’Aloisio to become the face of its efforts to be seen as a mobile-first company.
Swisher wasn’t the only one who saw the price as high, or the move as a publicity grab. Slashdot’s Nick Kolakowski wondered if this was a sign of a tech bubble, and Origami founder Vibhu Norby said the deal made no sense to him. Kevin Roose of New York magazine, on the other hand, said that if you view the deal as a recruiting move rather than a technically strategic one, it makes plenty of sense.
Jack Shafer of Reuters cautioned that the image of Summly as sole work of a 17-year-old isn’t exactly an accurate one — the company’s gotten plenty of help from veteran executives and PR professionals and an all-star list of investors. Cornell prof Emin Gün Sirer downplayed Summly’s work, saying it was merely “bolt-on engineering” based on core technology licensed from another company. NPR’s Steve Mullis said that Yahoo is essentially paying millions for an algorithm — “It bought math” — and worried about an inflated value that kind of product.
The Wall Street Journal also reported last week (in a paywalled article) that Yahoo is in talks to buy Dailymotion, a Europe-based YouTube-esque site. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson reiterated this week that the deal is as good as done, and reported that Dailymotion is part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan to eliminate content creation costs and replace that material with user-generated content and partnership deals, focusing on personalizing consumption for users. Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily didn’t see that as cause for alarm, arguing that Yahoo’s always been more of an aggregation-based media company anyway. “Mayer isn’t dismantling some gem of original content. She’s turning her back on Yahoo’s long-unrealized potential,” she wrote.
Flipboard turns the user into editor: The social news app Flipboard introduced a major redesign this week that includes a few significant changes — a new bookmarklet that allows users to add any content on the web outside the app, commenting, and an extensive content search. The biggest development, though, is the ability for users to create and share their own magazines, turning Flipboard from a consumption tool to something more potentially creative. Walt Mossberg of All Things D has a good review of the new editing feature.
Jeff Sonderman of Poynter said the new Flipboard looks like it could drastically remake mobile news discovery. As Sonderman and Time’s Harry McCracken noted, the obvious comparison is Pinterest, though as McCracken pointed out, Flipboard is still distinct-looking. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said that while the sharing isn’t new, the ability to edit content “picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off.”
Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed characterized Flipboard’s aims as much higher than that. It’s vying with companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to replace the traditional homepage as the gateway to the web. Austin Carr of Fast Company reported that Flipboard doesn’t see itself as a social network like those platforms, but as a “content network.” In a second article, Ingram suggested some innovative avenues Flipboard could go down with its new format regarding advertising and revenue-sharing deals. At The Guardian, Stuart Dredge also looked at the revenue factor, as well as several other aspects of Flipboard’s changes, including scale and the balance between humans and algorithms.
Who’s hurt by Google Reader’s death: A few lingering points being made from the now two-week-old plug-pulling of Google Reader: Ed Bott of ZDNet argued that the real victims in the Google Reader story are not its users, but the companies that Google has muscled out of the RSS market over the past eight years. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman and The Economist’s Ryan Avent both argued that the best way to treat Reader and many of Google’s other services may be as public infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the competitors continue to court Reader users — Digg hinted this week that its Reader replacement will go well beyond RSS — but TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wondered what will happen if RSS dies, particularly for the sites that depend so heavily on its traffic. Instapaper’s Marco Arment made a similar point, saying that RSS’s demise would most hurt smaller, low-volume sites in particular. “Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off,” he wrote. Dave Winer also proposed an open Twitter as an RSS replacement.
Reading roundup: Lots of other stuff going on in media and tech this week:
— The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a column detailing the almost absurd level of secrecy surrounding the trial of WikiLeaks informant Bradley Manning, though CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis said news orgs shouldn’t be let off the hook for not covering the case as extensively as they should. Meanwhile, some in journalism are expressing concern at the reports of impending indictments of top Obama officials for leaking information to the press. New Columbia j-school dean Steve Coll talked to Foreign Policy’s Thomas Ricks about the case, while AEJMC, the organization representing America’s journalism schools and professors, condemned the crackdown.
— One important story from late last week that didn’t make last week’s review: A federal judge ruled in the Associated Press’ favor in its copyright suit against Meltwater, a company that summarizes stories for corporate clients. PaidContent’s Jeff John Roberts explained the ruling, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation called very troubling.
— With the Columbia Journalism School announcing its new dean, Steve Coll, Michael Wolff ripped the school as irrelevant, calling instead for a system based on teaching entrepreneurship values and skills. Columbia student Jihii Jolly explained why she’s going there, and PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie defended the school, and also contended that its dean having never tweeted isn’t a strike against it. (Coll has since begun tweeting.)
— The New York Times’ Daniel Victor went after Twitter hashtags in a Lab post this week, arguing that they usually aren’t useful and are aesthetically damaging. Digital First’s Steve Buttry Storified some of the ensuing conversation about hashtags on Twitter.
— In a Q&A at the Lab, ProPublica’s Amanda Zamora discussed some her org’s innovative efforts to develop deeper participation and engagement across the web.
— Finally, a thoughtful, provocative piece from Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark, in which he argues that much of what we’re calling plagiarism isn’t actually plagiarism, and we need to quit getting so worked up about it.
Photo of Yahoo ice sculpture by Randy Stewart used under a Creative Commons license.
Welcome to the 36th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with Google privacy concerns, Amazon falling short in earnings, and much more. But the dominant news was Facebook filing for an IPO, with demand to read its S-1 crashing the SEC's servers. The startup had $3.7 billion in revenues, with $1 billion in profits last year, and showed tremendous growth in users and advertising. Can anything slow down the juggernaut on the way to raising $5 billion in a public offering? We talked to special guest Nick O'Neill, founder of AllFacebook.com, who was impressed with the user engagement on the social networking site.
This week was also the "Dive into Media" conference put on by AllThingsD in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Special guest Peter Kafka programmed the show and interviewed many of the top execs on stage. He told us about the challenge of interviewing Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a former improv comedian, as well as the mix of old and new media at the show. Finally, Columbia University's Journalism School and Stanford University's Engineering School received a $30 million gift from Helen Gurley Brown to create a new Institute for Media Innovation, marking the largest gift in the history of Columbia's J-School. Has digital media now arrived? Has the revolution been institutionalized?
Check it out!
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Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.
Here are some highlighted topics from the show:
Intro and roundup
1:30: Questions about Google combining privacy policies
4:00: Google, Amazon fall short in earnings
5:50: Rundown of topics on the podcast
Facebook IPO fever
7:00: Special guest Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook.com
10:00: Dorian: Each Facebook employee bringing in $1 million in revenues
11:35: O'Neill: Probably more than 60% of ad revenues from self-serving ad system
14:00: 12% of Facebook's revenues coming from Zynga
16:00: Special guest Peter Kafka
18:20: Advertisers still not sure about ROI on Facebook
D: Dive into Media
21:00: D conference tries out a niche conference for media + tech
22:45: Kafka: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo can zing you if you're not careful
23:45: Great insights from Hulu, YouTube execs
$30 million gift to Columbia/Stanford
28:10: Attempt to bring data and journalism worlds together
31:00: Bill Campbell, "The Coach," is an adviser on the project
32:45: Dorian: Era of digital media is here
Microsoft Attacks Google Privacy Policy With Ads, Gmail Man at TPMIdeaLab
Facebook's IPO Filing is Here at Business Insider
Sean Parker, Chris Hughes And Eduardo Saverin Dumped Their Facebook Shares at AllFacebook
Well, Now We Know What Facebook's Worth--And It's Not $100 Billion at Business Insider
Facebook's Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery at AllThingsD
Reminder: The $5 Billion Facebook IPO Won't Make You Rich at Gizmodo
Facebook's $5 Billion IPO, By The Numbers [CHARTS] at MarketingLand
The Facebook IPO: billion-user ambition at a $1bn price at Comment Is Free
Facebook and Don Graham Have Been Very Good to Each Other at Forbes
Dive into Media coverage at AllThingsD
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: We're Not a Media Company. We're in the Media Business. at AllThingsD
Hulu Boss Jason Kilar: Who You Callin' Clown Co.? at AllThingsD
Columbia J-School and Stanford Eng Nab $30M Joint Gift for Media Innovation From Helen Gurley Brown at AllThingsD
Don't forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time prognosticating what you think Facebook will be worth:
What do you think Facebook's value will be in 5 years?
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+
This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
The Newport (R.I.) Daily News might have been ahead of its time in offering the Frank Rich discount: The newspaper charges a hefty premium for digital-only access in hopes of boosting print subscriptions.
Two years have passed since the Daily News introduced a three-tiered paywall. At the time, executive editor Sheila Mullowney described the move not as a push toward digital, but as the opposite: a “print-newspaper-first strategy.”
That remains the case today.
“The print product is the thing really driving us at this point,” William Lucey, the Daily News’ publisher, told me. “As far the Internet goes, it really has not amounted to a hill of beans yet from a financial point of view.”
That sentiment is borne out in the Columbia Journalism School’s recent report on the business of digital journalism, which digs into the data:
The paper’s site, newportdailynews.com, gets around 80,000 visitors a month. Especially with online ad rates “dropping 20 percent a year,” that’s not enough to sustain the operation, which includes a newsroom of 22 people, Lucey says. Indeed, online ad revenue accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of total advertising for the paper.
After the change was put into effect, “our single-copy sales went up about 300 a day” — a bit less than 10 percent of overall single-copy sales. As the economy improves, “print is coming back. February [2011] was up 35 percent over last year” in ad sales.
As the Daily News has tweaked its price, it has preserved the print-first ethos. Earlier this year, the paper dropped its print+digital subscription price from $245 a year to $157 — a dollar more than the print-only price. A digital-only subscription, on the other hand, costs $345 a year.
The A.H. Belo-owned Providence Journal, the Daily News’ larger rival, has since announced its own paywall, expected to launch in the second half of 2011. Readers of that paper will have to pay for “original and proprietary content.”
It will be interesting to see whether the ProJo’s wall affects the Daily News. Last month I posed a far-flung hypothetical: Would readers pay for news if there were no free alternatives? In Slovakia, nine media companies are experimenting with a unified paywall — pay once for access to all — in an effort to reset years consumer assumptions about free content.
Rhode Island would seem to be (to an extent) a Slovakian analog in the United States. It’s a small, relatively uncompetitive, relatively isolated media market. Take Aquidneck Island (which is officially named, confusingly, Rhode Island), home to the 12,000-circulation Daily News. There’s some competition, sure: An ad-supported blog called Newport Now launched three months after the News’ paywall rose. And a year later, AOL’s Patch made its made its foray into Rhode Island with sites in Newport, Portsmouth, and Middletown — the whole of Aquidneck.
Still, once the ProJo paywall launches, we’ll have an interesting case study: If the only two papers covering Aquidneck are charging for access (and the ProJo hardly covers it like it used to) will citizens be more inclined to pay for online news?
The other question might be: Will that matter? In a piece examining “the uncertain future” of Rhode Island’s journalism scene, media critic David Scharfenberg described the dearth of social networking initiatives, inter-outlet collaboration, and other badges of innovation among the state’s media outlets. “What’s troubling about the Rhode Island mediascape,” he wrote, “is how slowly the players have moved to embrace this project — in an era when speed is nothing less than a matter of survival.”
But it could be that survival is a matter of sticking to roots, not branching out. If you view small newspaper publishing as a business, which it is, there’s still money in print. And it’s not as if the web has suddenly created a global audience for local news about Woonsocket, R.I. (No offense to Woonsocket, “a city on the move!”) Paywall or no paywall, the Daily News’ financial worth may lie in atoms, not bits.
And little Aquidneck Island not alone in that. “There still is value in print, no doubt about that,” the general manager of The Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, has said. ”We shouldn’t be apologetic about it, we shouldn’t be embarrassed by it.”
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that journalism schools, even more than other media institutions, are experiencing an existential crisis under news’ new conditions. On the one hand, schools are upholders of tradition and journalistic principles; on the other hand, their practical mandate — “to prepare the next generation of journalists” — requires them to be forward-looking in ways that would intimidate even the most prescient futurists among us. And the schools are navigating the common anxiety in remarkably unique ways: CUNY, under the guidance of Jeff Jarvis, is bringing a new focus to journalistic entrepreneurialism; Arizona State’s Cronkite School is partnering with The Arizona Republic and 12 News to fact-check politicians; NYU recently launched The Local East Village, a community-driven, hyperlocal site, in conjunction with The New York Times; Columbia has developed its Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which launches this Tuesday, and established its joint master’s program with the university’s engineering school.
To Columbia’s list we can now add another innovation: The j-school is developing a new site that will function as a year-round, standalone news outlet. It will be topic-based rather than hyperlocal — think broad concepts like health, crime, government spending, etc. — but it will be focused on New York City (or, as the j-school’s dean of academic affairs, ex-WSJ.com managing editor Bill Grueskin calls it, “our local hometown of 8.3 million people”). The site is still in its early planning stages, and details are still being worked out; as a strategy, though — and as a symbolic step forward — it has a mission that feels appropriately back-to-the-future: The site, Grueskin told me, will be about “doing journalism that’s of real value to the community.”
Websites featuring student work are nothing new, of course, at Columbia or other programs: Columbia’s introductory reporting and writing courses have web presences that act as training venues and work-distribution outlets, as do many of its content-specific courses (one of which, Columbia News Service, distributes its work via the New York Times News Service and Syndicate). And, school-wide, The Columbia Journalist exists to showcase some of the best student work produced during the academic year. Those products don’t, however, operate year-round; on the contrary, their content yields to the semester system, complete with vacations, interruptions for exams, and, of course, the summer hiatus. “You create these beautiful sites,” Grueskin points out, “and then two months later, they go dark.”
To change that — to create a site that produces content year-round, enabling it to be a destination rather than simply a means of distribution — the school will establish a new post-graduate fellowship program, along the lines of its Columbia Journalism Review and digital media fellowships, both of which currently take two students from each graduating class to work at the school for a year after graduation. (I was one of the CJR fellows after I graduated from the school.) Though the number of fellows to be hired, and their pay, remains to be determined — everything depends on the amount of money the school is able to raise for the project — the influx of journalistic manpower will add to the crop of students who stay on to contribute something and, in the process, extend their education. It will also combat the dark-site problem.
Which is only a problem, of course, if you care about building an audience for your work — if you define a school’s mission not only in terms of educating students, but also in terms of education more broadly: cultivating a community around journalism. That’s where Columbia’s upcoming site becomes especially significant: It’s merging the two goals, broadening its definition of good journalism education to include those clichéd-but-crucial new media buzzwords: “user engagement.” That’s a pedagogical mandate. Understanding the nuances of building and keeping an audience “is a crucial skill,” notes dean Nick Lehmann — particularly given the increasingly common assumption that editorial content will be produced in some kind of partnership with consumers as journalism reinvents its compact with the public. (The people formerly known as, and all that.) So “a big next step for us to take is to have a real audience for one of our sites that we can interact with,” Grueskin says.
That really is a big next step. J-schools, in the “conservatory” model of arts programs, have often regarded journalism not only as a public service, but also as a craft. In that, they’ve prided themselves on their very separation from the vagaries of the marketplace — which is to say, from audiences. The site’s bid for audience alone marks a significant shift in the role j-schools are carving for themselves in the new media landscape. “Journalists love to have impact,” Grueskin puts it, “and you want to feel that the journalism that you’re doing is being read or watched or listened to, and then acted upon.” There’s also the nice education loop a standalone site provides: “If this got up and running, it could actually create a fair amount of data and information that could feed back nicely into the way that we continue to try to improve the way that we teach journalism.”
Part of the work of the outlet — and, from the pedagogical perspective, part of the instruction it will offer to the students staffing it — could be in collaborating with other outlets to customize that content, and those platforms, for their needs. “We are probably less interested in pairing up with a single news organization, and more interested in acting as what you might call ‘a news service for the 21st century,’” Grueskin says: “news, or tools for news, that can be adopted by other media players, large, medium, and small.” (Think along the lines of ProPublica’s embeddable and adaptable news applications, for example — or, from a content perspective, data sets that “can be very easily localized and adapted by either big players or small.”) So “while there would be a website associated with the effort,” Grueskin says, “that wouldn’t be the sum total.”
Indeed, the site, like most news sites nowadays, would be only one aspect of the school’s broader push toward community engagement and journalistic impact. “Because of who we are and what we do and the larger institution we’re located in,” Lehmann says, “we can probably do year-round, meaningful local news coverage more cheaply and sustainably than a standalone, de novo, web-only organization can do. So we may be a more efficient way to meet that social need — and that’s a good motivation for us, too.”
“Even with the state of journalism today,” claims Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman, “most university professors would be loath to meld a curriculum of storytelling with the business side of the equation”. This is not the case at the University of Washington digital media programme though, which aims to become the ‘Columbia Journalism School of digital media and communication’, and teach “a unique blend of digital storytelling, social media and the business of digital media”.
“The three go together,” says Hanson Hosein, the director of the Masters of Communication in Digital Media program and a former NBC News correspondent who covered the Iraq war as a one-man band. “We’re hearing from our applicants that there’s nothing else like our program.”
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“Of the web, not on it”: Emily Bell on the success of The Guardian and what she plans for the Tow Center
At a lunch talk at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center today, Bell shared her insights into what made the Guardian successful in its online efforts, her plans for the Tow Center — and her thoughts about the challenges facing the news industry in an increasingly networked world.
Three reasons Bell pointed to to explain the Guardian’s online success:
Bell took over as the Guardian’s director of digital content in 2006. And “people actually thought, when I said that I was going off to work on the web, that I had been sacked.” At the paper, however, there was a core of people “who really understood the web,” Bell notes. And having that technical expertise didn’t just mean understanding code and web design and all the rest; it also meant understanding, almost implicitly, user behavior — and transforming the Guardian into a digital-first proposition. (It’s about being, as Bell has said before, “of the web, not on the web.”)
One of the most important shifts in mindset at the Guardian came in the form of the separation between form and content (which “now seems absolutely obvious,” Bell said, “but at the time seemed revolutionary”). And a lot of that process involved “freeing ourselves of the legacy mindset” and, in general, “getting the newsroom converged.”
At the Guardian, which until 2008 was owned by the Scott Trust, the profit motive gave way to a broader emphasis on long-term thinking and experimentation. That led, in turn, to “a much higher tolerance for innovation” than the paper’s competitors, Bell said. The two most successful outlets in Britain, online, were the BBC and The Guardian, she noted — “neither of whom had to speak to shareholders.” Guardian staffers had greater financial leeway than most of their revenue-focused counterparts to experiment, innovate, and, importantly, fail.
“I’m not a massive fan of PowerPoint,” Bell confessed. But! Part of what allowed for the Guardian’s nimbleness when it came to innovation, she said, was that it “developed a really clear strategy.” The paper took the original tenets of Guardian journalism laid out by C.P. Scott and fused them, essentially, onto the networked infrastructure of the Internet. “Really, we’re about reaching as many people as possible in the world,” she said — and so the question for the Guardian’s staff became how to extend their reach using the tools of the web.
Part of that came down to a general openness to users. Bell created the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section (“which I think some of the Guardian columnists would like to see me imprisoned for!”) based on the recognition that the future will be increasingly networked, conversational, and participatory. In fact, “I stole it directly from Arianna Huffington,” she said. Through watching what Huffington was doing with her then-new news site — leveraging the unlimited space of the Internet to invite commentary from thinkers both professional and amateur — Bell figured that Huffington had it right. “This was the way that commentary would work under a collective brand for the foreseeable future.”
Bell’s work at the Tow Center is a continuation of that recognition — but also the product of another recognition that innovation, to some degree, requires stepping outside of the industry in order to observe it and affect its course. “As an operative in a daily news organization, it was getting harder and harder to connect” to the innovation side of journalism, Bell noted. Increasingly, “I think the space for doing that in your daily lives, as working journalists, is extremely limited — and the necessity to do it is greater than ever.”
The Tow Center, Bell said, focuses on three things: experimentation and research in the field; bringing the results of that experimentation back into the classroom; and creating a stronger digital presence for Columbia’s j-school. And “how those three things inform each other is important.” Part of the work the center will do will be to extend the purview of news innovation beyond journalism itself — to “expand the skill set” of journalism to include and embrace expertise in law, technology, the digital humanities, and the like.
“The solutions to what will make the Fourth Estate and constitute the press in the future lie largely outside the field as it’s practiced at the moment,” Bell said. After all, it’s not just news outlets that are developing ways of creating communities and connecting them — which is something that remains central to journalism’s core mission. Now everyone’s rethinking connectivity and influence. Looking to industries beyond the news, Bell noted, can help answer a key — perhaps the key — question when it comes to innovation: “what you need to support and guard a free press in the future.”