If you were in the conference hall for news:rewired‘s sessions earlier in the day, you will have heard from several publishers and experts that niche works: restricting editorial coverage to an interest, area or industry and building a real community is a sound publishing strategy.

So what comes next? What works? Here are some snapshot views to round off the news:rewired day….

Permanently out of office

Hannah Waldram, one of the Guardian’s first “beatbloggers” covering Cardiff for the Guardian Local, spoke about how she runs her one-woman, officeless Cardiff blogging empire. In terms of hardware: laptop, smartphone, small digital camera and audio recorder pretty much covers it.

As for software and news sources, Waldram uses Google Reader, Twitter, live video streaming service Bambuser, live-blogging tool Cover it Live, audio editing software Audacity, Audioboo, Scribd… the list goes on. All of these are free, online, connected tools that were unthinkable a few years ago but are now becoming a standard part of the digital journalist’s armoury.

Playing the news game

Phillip Trippenbach, an interactive producer and games designer, has an idea that sounds odd to some, but he also has a compelling argument to go with it: “Video games are the future of journalism,” he declared, to a somewhat sceptical crowd.

As it stands, news is constructed into “stories” but “stories have problems – for a story you need a narrative, you need a location, you need facts.”

He mentioned Budget Hero, a game built by American Public Media that puts players in the shoes of the US government and challenges them to draw up a mini financial plan (play it here). “It’s built on the data that’s available from the US Treasury every year. You want to know how the budget works? OK you balance it.”

This is not as trival an argument as it might at first sound. Newspapers and freedom of speech campaigners have met success in getting governments to release data. So how do you then present it? A really big table? Or how about something different…

It’s important for us to realise that games are a medium just like text and pictures. As complex data sets become more and more available, the interactivity around it becomes more important – video games are a great way of doing that.

Innovate or die!

Kevin Anderson, who recently left the Guardian to go freelance after holding several senior digital roles there, added a vote of confidence to Trippenbach’s games argument, saying: “As long as the atomic unit of journalism is the story, then we are missing many commercial opportunities.”

Someone that knows a thing or two about how to make innovation work in newsrooms, Anderson warns editors and publishers to be wary of anyone that thinks there’s an easy way out of the problems that news titles face. “There’s no easy answer – anyone that tells you that, fire them. Or just don’t hire them. But there are easy wins.

“It’s 2010, we should be a lot further along then we are now… In 2008 (during the US presidential election), for most of the time my main newsgathering tool was my phone.” He adds that his reports and tweets while covering that campaign were geo-tagged, something still not standard across the industry.

But it’s not just about journalists, he says: “The lack of innovation is not just in the newsroom it’s also in the commercial department. The FT is doing some of the most innovative commercial stuff around – like a daypass to go behind the paywall given away through Foursquare check-ins.

“The economic imperative is there but where is the innovation… too many times it’s about ‘who owns the future’. We still have a culture internally that says ‘if I don’t own this, we won’t do it.’ If we don’t get past this news organisations will die.”

It’s not enough to write the news, you’ve got to sell it too. That’s the very simple message from news:rewired‘s second keynote speaker of the day, Marc Reeves, editor of thebusinessdesk.com’s West Midlands edition and a former editor of the Birmingham Post, who stressed the importance of journalists pitching in with business leads.

Reeves took redundancy from the Trinity Mirror-owned Post at the end of the last year and became editor of thebusinessdesk’s new Birmingham office in February – the free, local business-focused start-up was founded by former Yorkshire Post business editor David Parkin in 2008 and now has Yorkshire, north-west and West Midlands versions.

Be niche, be targeted, know your audience

His take on the future of news is that sites need to create niche, targeted content and that mass media publishing on what’s currently regarded as a regional scale has very little chance of succeeding online:

Readers and viewers have always thought of themselves as niches – it’s us publishers that pushed them into the mass media… Regional newspapers have fooled themselves that a community of 100,000 can be thought of as one.

For example, Reeves estimates that as many as half of all regional press readers are only interested in how their local football team is doing. But now readers can bypass the paper entirely and go online. Where does this leave advertisers and readers that don’t care about football?

If you’re serving a niche you have got to serve your audience in its totality… whether it’s a hobby, business or area.

And it’s not just about news: Reeves says niche publishers have to become relevant across a range of media and real-life events that matter to audiences, such as events, readers’ clubs, and one-off products awards. The news part is only one part of this. To get more out of them you’ve got to be more relevant across other parts of [the audience's] lives.

“In business terms it’s never been about content – in print and online it’s about the relationships you build with readers and advertisers.”

All the news that’s fit to sell

Reeves says he’s worked with reporters who regard “passing on a sales lead as defiling the memory of CP Scott”. But these people have got to get business-savvy, he says: “People say ‘I’m not a journalist, I don’t sell advertising’. Well tough. We tried it the other way and [the model] broke.

“Journalists need to grow up and realise they are part of the business.”

As for thebusinessdesk’s progress, Reeves claims the west midlands site now has 5,000 registered users – reaching and beating its full-year target within a month – and that across the entire business there are now 40,000 registered users.

Each of those readers gets a daily regional email every weekday – something Reeves describes as vital to the news operation, bringing in 80 percent of traffic: “We send daily emails just before 9:00am because that’s when people make their decisions for the day.”

Incidentally, Reeves says he was “pretty close to putting together a business plan and finance to launch something very similar” to the site he now runs, before he was put in touch with Parkin.

Returning to a theme he expored in a recent speech to the West Midlands CBI, Reeves warned that regional newspapers may understand and invest in online publishing, but they were “structurally” unable to make money from it:

The saying is you make a pound on the print product and a penny online, and that’s mostly true. That’s only a problem if you’re trying to make newspaper profits from that penny you make online. Of course from that point of view… it’s almost impossible to turn that supertanker around.

Interview with Marc Reeves:

There are no bigger subjects in online news media now than the fundamental question of whether readers will pay for content they’ve previously enjoyed for free. A breakout session at our news:rewired conference is tackling the issue head on, with panelists concluding that users will pay for content if it’s relevant and good enough.

One man that hopes people will pay for news is Tom Whitwell, assistant editor and head of online at the Times, who has been at the centre of his employer’s plans to re-write the online consumer news playbook. He said he’s well aware of the “the challenge of what we’re doing…” and he sheds some light on the thought process in starting the project:

Eighteen months ago we were at a fork in the road: the free option looked a lot less appealing than we thought it would. We were getting 22 million users a month and were making a significant amount of money, though not enough.

We then looked at what we could do to get to 30 or 40 million… We looked at how people were piling high four or five different versions of their stories to get to the top of Google. We saw that some people had a different agenda online than they did in print and ended up getting far away from their brand.

Tom Whitwell at news:rewired

Whitwell continues: “We looked at some of the commercial [solutions], and one option was enormously intrusive advertising. For a lot of sites the barrier between journalism and commercial was getting very thin.”

The Times paywall itself isn’t live yet – users only have to register to gain access at the moment and payment is coming in the “next few weeks” – but Whitwell says the number of people registering is “very encouraging”. Commenters have made the jump from Times Online to thetimes.co.uk, Whitwell says, and he promises “a lot of things coming to the site in the next three or four months” in terms of personalisation.

He told me after the session (listen to the first audio interview below): “There’s a slice of functionality coming that will make for a much more personal experience for people.”

Whitwell won’t put a figure on the amount of money News International expects or hopes to make from the Times paywall project, but he puts it in perspective: “If we had believed that all of our free customers will transfer to paid customers, we would make £2 billion. We’re not expecting to make £2 billion.”

I caught up with Whitwell to ask what it had been like to work on the project and to find about about the personalisation features he says are on the way…

And here’s an audio clip of Whitwell’s talk:

Karl Schneider, head of editorial development at RBI warned delegates against letting the recession determine future digital strategy:

You have to careful about the point in the economic cycle – the way things are going now are not a fair reflection of the way things will be in five years’ time.

Personally I’m very optimistic about content supported by online advertising or advertising-like services. More than half our revenue comes from paid [for] content.

Karl Schneider at news:rewired

Now here’s a niche: Schneider showed slides of “polycarbonate pricing reports” – with comprehensive datapoints that are presumably very useful to people who understand them – from RBI’s chemical industry news brand ICIS

Bur what specifically makes people pay? The perceived value of content; the availability of free alternative and whether other people in the same industry use it. And here’s Schneider’s run-down of the things RBI can and does charge for:

– Data: “Accurate, up-to-date, good quality data, you can absolutely charge for.”

– News: “We are still charging for news, but it’s news you can use. It’s news you can read and act upon it.”

– Workflow tools: “You package up what your journalists do in a different way… turn research into a model policy that customers can pick up use themselves.”

On Journalism.co.uk journalist and SEO expert David Amerland writes on the role of search engine optimisation (SEO) in the future of online publishing and paid-for news models.

“Newspapers and those who run them have not understood that online visitors to generalised news sites will pay not for the quality of the news, but for its convenience,” he writes. Part of this convenience is visibility: making your content available to readers when they need it and when they’re looking for it. If you’re a niche publisher, the content your produce is likely to resonate and have value with a specific audience – using SEO can give this material the visibility it deserves and connect it with the readers looking for it.

The judicious use of SEO in creating headlines which address specific potential visitor needs, and creating content summaries that do the same, has the ability to take a story which has niche value and make it a major global player just by leveraging the niche at a global level. It is this approach which provides opportunities which can bring in the profit required to keep things afloat.

Read David’s piece on SEO and journalism in full at this link.

In the final session at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired event on 14 January, we looked ‘New journalism, new business models: how can journalism support itself online?’ With presentations by James Fryer, deputy editor SoGlos; Caroline Kean, partner at media law firm, Wiggin and Ben Heald, CEO, Sift, we learnt how to claim our copyright, how to develop local and niche content models, and how these panelists had made publishing pay. But the headline-grabbing lines of the session came from Greg Hadfield, head of digital media at Telegraph.co.uk. Hadfield, whose son created Soccernet, publicly revealed that he had earlier that week resigned from the Telegraph, to join Cogapp, a digital agency. Hadfield said he would be “helping to reinvent the future and not just making the mistakes of the past”.

• Read more here: Greg Hadfield – “Why I left the Telegraph”

Video courtesy of City University London and the BBC College of Journalism:

James Fryer, deputy editor of independent arts and entertainment website SoGlos.com, talked at news:rewired about his experiences with launching and running an online news business:

If you attended news:rewired but missed some talks or you couldn’t make the day altogether, below is a round-up of coverage from the sessions:

Kevin Marsh has blogged the full notes of his opening speech.

Nigel Barlow, freelance journalist, has his thoughts on George Brock and Marsh’s openers here; and freelancer Patrick Smith has some additional thoughts from Brock on the role journalism schools can play in news publishing.

Reuters’ Mark Jones has an interview with Marsh after his speech here.

Adam Tinworth, editorial development at Reed Business Information – has liveblogged coverage of:

• the opening sessions;
• the online journalism troubleshooting panel;
• the crowdsourcing discussion;
• SoGlos.com’s James Fryer on making money;
• Greg Hadfield, outgoing digital executive at the Telegraph, on entrepreneurial journalism.

Freelancer Phyllis Stephen on Adam Westbrook’s presentation on audio slideshows.

Alex Walters, journalism student and one of our team covering the event, reports back on the heated session on crowdsourcing. UCLAN lecture Andy Dickinson posts his thoughts on the local media panel.

We’ll be posting speaker’s presentations soon and more posts from the day as we see them, but if you’ve got a write-up let us know.

Why is the future of journalism entrepreneurial?

“Because it can be,” says Jeff Jarvis, and he’s right. [http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/11/01/the-future-of-journalism-is-entrepreneurial/]

Firstly, the economic pressures on the mainstream media and its failure to embrace the internet in time have created gaps in the market for new businesses to exploit. Secondly, newsrooms are haemorrhaging almost as many professional journalists as universities are spewing out and they all gotta go somewhere.

And thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – because it’s never been easier or cheaper to set up a business.

For these reasons, I believe 2010 will start to see “a thousand flowers bloom” as Clay Shirky wrote [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable] creating the first layer of a rich news ecosystem.

The seed of every business is the same, and journalism is no exception. They all begin with an idea. And this is one of the most important things to get right.

1. Serve the market

So what makes a good idea for a news business? Well, every idea will be different, but they must all start in the same place and this is something any journalist-turned-entrepreneur must get to grips with.

They must start in the market. They must start with a problem the market has, which you can fix; a service the market needs, which you can offer; a product the market wants, which you can produce.

Entrepreneur Mike Southon asks “where’s the pain?” and builds a business idea from there: is there something people moan about having to do or not being there?

If you don’t start with the market, and the pain it has, you risk peddling a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Hyperlocal websites which start up in areas well served by mainstream media will struggle, because they’ll be trying to offer an alternative to a market which is quite content. An online, multimedia music magazine won’t get far: there’s no evidence the market wants one.

The best ideas started with the market first. James Dyson realised people were tired of bags in vacuum cleaners and engineered a solution. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thought “there has to be a better way to use the internet to communicate”.

The news start-ups which will fail will be the ones which don’t respond to a market need. Sadly this means some tough choices for journalists. I mean, I sure as hell didn’t get into journalism to redesign hoovers or sell mugs. I got into journalism to tell stories and make films. But does the market want this?

2. Wrap a business around your passion

Before you put down your pen for good, there is hope. It is, believe it or not, possible to get paid for doing what you love – there’s even a whole empire of life coaches, books and courses all trying to convince you of this.

How does that work? Well, it requires a lot of thinking and great deal of which needs to be so far outside the box, you’ve forgotten where you left it.

It starts with really boiling down why you went into journalism. Was it because you really like sports news? Or because you get a real kick out of presenting on camera? Or maybe because you just like writing, no matter what.

Whatever it is, it is the something you can’t not do.

From there it’s a case of brainstorming all the different ways you can apply that skill to serve a completely different market. Think about other non-news markets which still want writers, presenters, producers. Do you have more than one passion you can combine?

I love telling the story of my mate Olly, a film school graduate who loved making TV, loved cooking and didn’t have a job. He combined them, and then thought of new and untapped markets, and now produces the hugely successful studentcooking.tv, which is syndicated round half-a-dozen universities and has won an RTS award.

Or Ben and David, a radio producer and photographer who combined their two passions, then looked for a new market. They now produce multimedia for a burgeoning market of NGOs as Duckrabbit.

Try this formula:

Your skill x your passion + a completely new market = a business

3. The third way

Although there will be countless opportunities, not every journalist will become a business owner; we don’t all need to become Rockefeller. We can always work with or under those who prefer to be entrepreneurial.

But every journalist must start learning about smart business decisions and about the importance of innovation.

Some journalists, I know, refuse to accept this entrepreneurial vision. They worry about ethics, quality of reporting, and holding powers to account. [http://adamwestbrook.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/what-should-we-teach-journalism-students/#comment-10575]

But I don’t worry about those things. The future of journalism landscape still has the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, BSkyB and all the other big names in it – just with other, smaller, businesses around it. They will be complimented – not threatened – by start-ups.

And should any of them fail, and the democratic responsibility of journalism appear under threat, a new enterprise will emerge to fix that pain. Why? Because the market will demand it.

Adam Westbrook is a multimedia journalist, blogger and lecturer.  His personal blog is at http://adamwestbrook.wordpress.com and his website can be found at http://www.adamwestbrook.co.uk. At news:rewiredYou can read more about his thoughts on this in our Q&A post with him. Adam will be talking about multimedia skills for journalists.

David Turner

1. Lawrence Lever, David Turner and Richard Lander of financial news publisher Citywire.

   Citywire was founded in 1999 by its chairman Lawrence Lever, formerly financial editor of the Mail on Sunday and assistant city editor of the Times. Citywire’s chief executive is David Turner who was previously at the Financial Times group where he was publisher of all the FT Group’s business publications. Richard Lander, Citywire’s editorial director, was previously at the Times, Independent and Reuters.

   Citywire is an independent financial publishing and data group, 22 per cent owned by Thomson Reuters. It now has a team of more than 80 staff, producing news, investment ideas and recommendations every weekday. Chief executive David Turner has this advice for would-be journalist entrepreneurs:

   Don’t underestimate the amount of capital you will need to start a business. It usually takes a lot longer to turn a profit than you expected. Be prepared to dilute your equity; better to have a little bit of something rather than all of nothing. And always tinker with your business model and your products, they can always be better.

   Interestingly, Citywire is also an example of a company that started online only and then started producing print publications, including New Model Adviser and Citywire Wealth Manager.



Steve Eminton

2. Steve Eminton, letsrecycle.com:
   

   letsrecycle.com was set up in October 2000 so we are looking forward to celebrating our 10th birthday next year. I would point out that I was fortunate to jump ship from the big brother Emap with a commercial guy as well, Steve Dickinson.

   We felt that there was a gap in the market for an internet-based news and information service for recycling and waste. We had two things going for us, one was that recycling was beginning to take off and the other was that no-one else was taking the web seriously in the sector. The only problem at the time was that many council officers still only had dial-up services and slow PCs and the industry was often cash and a notebook/fax for doing business.

   But, we were lucky to catch the market right and with strong editorial coverage – sharp news and editorial integrity – plus an excellent sales team, we managed to deliver a product which is one of few solely funded by advertising and sponsorship of sections.



Hermione Way

3. Hermione Way, Newspepper.com.

   Hermione Way set up Newspepper in 2007 while she was still studying for a journalism degree at London Metropolitan University. It was partly born out of her frustration at the lack of paid work experience for journalism students and was initially intended to be a YouTube-like citizen journalism site for news videos.

   But she soon realised that: a) many journalism students are not being taught all the necessary skills they need to succeed in a multimedia world; and b) there is an increasing commercial demand for video and people who can provide it cost-effectively. Putting the two together meant a new and viable business model for Newspepper: to provide paid work experience and training to journalists with broadcast experience and hire them out to organisations who need value-for-money media services.

   Way has only one other full-time member of staff and does not even have an office, preferring instead to operate out of a private members club, so her overheads are low. She also has the advantage of mentoring from her angel investor, Michael Smith and from her equally entrepreneurial brother Ben Way, as well as Paul Walsh, founder and CEO of Segala.

   Way now has a team of 16-17 staff working remotely, part-time, using their own equipment. While they start on a relatively low rate (equivalent to what they might otherwise earn for bar work, for example), as they gain experience they can earn a lot more and will gain enough experience to eventually gain full-time broadcast jobs elsewhere.

   She did sacrifice some equity in her company early, but remains a majority stakeholder and has no regrets about it. “It’s definitely worth it. You need a big name behind you and, in an increasingly noisy online world, you need to be making the biggest noise.”



Rick Waghorn

4. Rick Waghorn, myfootballwriter.com
   

   For 13 years I was the football writer on the Evening News, Norwich, and on my 40th birthday – 16 January 2006 – had my ‘Road to Damascus moment’ when I read a piece in MediaGuardian with Clay Shirky. He drew the analogy between the record industry and the newspaper business that just as people still want to listen to good music, but not on a CD, by the same token people still want a good read, just not on a newspaper.

   On that basis, we launched www.rickwaghorn.co.uk in the summer of 2006; this then became a generic network model in 2007 with the launch of www.myfootballwriter.com. Having earned the princely sum of $140 for 400,000 page impressions out of Google AdSense, in the summer of 2007 we built and launched www.addiply.com – a simple, open, transparent DIY advertising system that rewards the publisher for his/her efforts by giving them 90 per cent revenue return.

   It empowers publishers to set their own advertising rates, be it pay-per-week, pay-per-month, pay-per-click. And, equally, it empowers the local/niche advertiser to place an advert themselves in three clicks. And where they want to place it, not where Google thinks they should place it. Adopted by Trinity Mirror this winter to help monetise its micro-local sites in the north east; a dollar version has been trialled out of the University of Berkeley’s J-School. Right under Google’s nose.



Sally Whittle

5. Sally Whittle, Getting Ink, Who’s the Mummy?, The Great Toy Guide Sally Whittle’s entrepreneurial journalism differs slightly from the other examples above, in that her blogs mostly act as shopfronts for her PR training and consultancy services.
   

   I started blogging in 2004 at Getting Ink which is a platform for discussing media, PR and journalism. It serves as a shop window for my training workshops, which I run for PR agencies, looking at how to work more effectively with the media. I then set up Getting Ink Requests, a media request service, again this puts me in touch with small businesses who may go on to buy my media training or copywriting services.

   In 2009, I set up the Great Toy Guide, a collaborative toy review website written by 25 parent bloggers. I edit the site, which will be moving to an affiliate model in early 2010. I also blog at Who’s the Mummy which has provided a home for my training workshops on how to pitch to bloggers, as well as being the home for the MADs, a major award scheme which will launch next month.

   After five years of blogging, I’ve now reached a point where the majority of my work comes via the blogs. But I’m not specifically selling content or products online.

Are you a journalism entrepreneur? Tell us your story in the comments below.

1. Decide what your ultimate goal for your business is. Is it a) to make you rich or is it b) a lifestyle choice, ie a business that will give you a reasonable income and the lifestyle you want, where you want it? If a) is your sole aim, think seriously about basing your business on something else other than journalism.
2. Don’t assume anything you do will be unique. No matter how clever the idea or the underlying technology, someone else can easily set up in competition to you. The internet makes it much easier to self-publish, but it makes it easier for everyone not just you! Being the first to do something is not necessarily good. You will do all the work creating a marketplace that others will then exploit. But if you are in a niche and fairly innovative space, competition is a good thing. It spreads the burden of building consumer confidence in your business model and should prevent you becoming complacent.
3. Don’t risk any of your own money in the business unless you can afford to lose it. Launching any new business is risky, journalistic enterprises are likely to be riskier than most. And if you want to maintain some control over your business, also avoid risking other people’s money, at least until you have got yourself off the ground. Instead you could take a minimal salary from the company and supplement it by freelancing or other part-time work. And structure sales targets so that your sales staff are effectively self-funding.
4. Avoid investing too much money in online technology, at least at the outset. You might be re-inventing the wheel; you will be rebuilding everything again from scratch within three years, probably sooner as web technology and design rapidly evolves. Unless you are planning to launch something revolutionary, chances are there are existing solutions out there that will do the job for you, either very cheaply or for free.
5. Do some or all of your own accounting. It’s a lot easier than you might think if you use the right software packages and it will help you to keep on top of your company’s finances.
6. In the current climate, you are unlikely to be able to charge for your journalistic content and, unless you expect very high volumes of traffic (millions of unique page views a month), you won’t make much money from display advertising. One answer is to sell related products or services to the community you create around that content. Be prepared to have to make high volumes of sales on low-profit-yield services or goods. Don’t expect the money to flood in overnight; you will have to build your community first.
7. Get good sales people on board as soon as you can. Selling might be an alien culture to you, but you won’t get anywhere without it.
8. Never give up on your main idea (even bad ideas can be made to succeed with stubborn determination), but be prepared for many of your supporting ideas to fail. Get used to failure (all entrepreneurs experience it) and make sure you have plenty of ideas surrounding your main idea at the outset and keep having them as your business evolves. You cannot afford to stand still online.
9. KISS – keep it simple, stupid. Start with a simple, low-cost business framework that is deliverable using your current skills and build on that as you gain experience. Attention spans online are limited, so simple ideas will be the easiest to get across.
10. Beware of false prophets. As an online business, you may find yourself deluged with offers of win:win contra deals where no money changes hands or offers to sell products or services on your site on a commission basis – don’t waste your time with them. The benefits are almost always a one-way street in favour of the other party; stay focused on the deals that put money on your table, up front.

These are just some of my own thoughts based on my personal experiences as founder, owner and publisher of Journalism.co.uk and should not be taken as gospel. I am sure many will disagree with some or all of my points or have better advice of their own to offer. But please feel free to ask me questions in the comments or to share your own advice if you are already an online journalism entrepreneur.

Meet and learn from other entrepreneurial  journalists at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired digital journalism event, City University London 14 January 2010 – book your tickets now