As I write this, I am 30,000 feet above Northern Canada and on my way to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to talk to Chuck Peters and his team at The Gazette. So I thought it’d be fitting to use my time on the plane to take a second look at Steve Buttry’s insightful A blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, which most of you guys have probably heard about. Steve wrote the report for The Gazette, saying “This is a vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general.”
Newspapers should reach into the very heart of communities if they’re to stay relevant — that’s the one-sentence summary of Steve’s thoughts. Newspapers should support and stimulate ongoing discussions. Local news media especially should be the glue that ties together all the different parts of a community. They should think beyond news stories, and offer services to enrichen the lives of those they serve.
I love it. But it’s not going to be easy. I see three pitfalls we should be sure to avoid if we want to become the community hosts Steve wishes newspapers and their reporters to be.
1. Beware of the kitchen sink
Newspapers are in a unique position to contribute to their community: they have some political leverage, they have resources to do things no individual can hope to achieve, they have an overview of what’s going on in their community like no one else, and they have an attentive audience. So it’s easy to find opportunities. Ticketing services, online marketplaces, hosting for local schools, experience networks for business owners — these might all be things that we can do and Steve urges us to consider them, but I’m not sure he has me convinced.
In certain ways, we really should strive to become ‘ambient’ in the communities we serve. But it’s easy to overdo. We need focus. We need to find a few key ways in which we can best serve our readers. To me that means helping people in ways that excercise our core competencies as journalists: our knowledge, our connections, our skillful reporting. Ticketing? Hosting? I dunno.
Newspaper companies should strive to be lean and mean. They should strive for the flexibility to adapt to any challenge they may face. You can’t do that if you take the kitchen sink approach and try to be everything to everyone.
Have a few strong points where you can really make a difference for a community, rather than halfheartedly having your fingers in just about anything.
2. Please don’t talk about user-generated content
If you really care about a community, don’t talk in terms of user-generated content. User-generated content means appropriating other people’s work for your own profit. But that’s not a real community connection. And
Yes, user participation is important. It can take the form of crowdsourced news or larger projects, like what The Guardian did with MP’s expenses. It can take the form of contributions for readers. User reviews. Whatever. But in the end it should be about empowering people and getting more people talking, rather than getting them to do your job.
There’s obviously a thin line between user-generated content and a real community connection. But you’ll know the difference, and your readers will too. If you don’t respect them, they won’t respect you. Good luck monetizing that.
3. Become a connector, not a middle man
There are two ways to help people get what they want: either you become a middle man, or you become a connector. It might be enticing to try and monetize the “glue” you offer in a direct way. And that might bring in some money initially. But the internet is all about disintermediating. It’s about cutting out the middle man. Helping people to navigate the important parts of their life — housing, education, work, mobility, culture and play — is important, but it should add value, rather than skimming it off the top. eBay might turn a handsome profit, but that doesn’t mean people like it. Newspapers can’t afford to squander their cultural capital like that. There has to be a better way.
It’s an oft-heard mantra in technology circles that ideas are worthless; it’s the implementation that matters. I’ve always felt a bit ambiguous about that statement, especially in journalism where so many executives and journalists could use a healthy dose of vision. We need more people like Steve and we need more blueprints. But Steve’s work does feel very much like it’s only halfway there. I’m curious to hear where both TBD (where Buttry works now) and The Gazette take things next.
6 comments
Thanks for your thoughtful response to my C3 Blueprint. I appreciate the skepticism as well as the praise. I wish we had tried to implement more of C3 when I was at Gazette Communications, so we would know what works and what doesn't.
Responding to your points in order:
A newspaper historically played multiple roles in a community and Google successfully plays multiple roles in the digital marketplace. I think the broad approach of C3 is a valid goal for a digital organization to pursue. Obviously, though, you don't start out trying to do it all. You pick a project, or a few, to start moving in the C3 direction. I expect that we will use some C3 approaches at TBD, but don't expect we will try to implement the full C3 approach.
I'm not going to split hairs with you over terminology. Whether you call it crowdsourcing, participation or user-generated content, you need to engage your community and provide a pleasant and useful place for community conversation. A whole section of the C3 Blueprint focused on conversation: http://bit.ly/9FQ84x And crowdsourcing was an important part of the "enriched news" section: http://bit.ly/vOS6B
A key piece of advice in Jeff Jarvis' "What Would Google Do?" is "Do what you do best and link to the rest." This is exactly why many businesses in a community want a middleman to help them succeed in the digital marketplace. Yes, the local merchant who repairs cars or sells pizzas can sell directly without C3's help. But just as those merchants may outsource such jobs as payroll or benefits so they can concentrate on what they do best, they may see value in using C3's digital tools and expertise and in connecting with C3's audience.
I hope in addition to reading C3, you will read my mobile-first strategy: http://bit.ly/6WnABX It is an update of the C3 vision. C3 is more than a year old. I would advise any organization trying to pursue C3 today to update the approach, adjusting to new opportunities, new tools and new developments in the mobile marketplace.
We welcome Stijn Debrouwere to Iowa -looking forward to a great discussion http://stdout.be/2010/c3/
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
“user-generated content … should be about empowering people and getting more people talking” http://stdout.be/2010/c3 /users not stringers
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Good post and welcome to Cedar Rapids.
I especially like Point 2. Community members aren't stringers in the sense of how newspapers used to use them. In reality, if we are trying to get to C3 we need to look at them as community members and not stringers that we call to "cover" something.
On your intro, I hope you'll be talking to more aspects of the company than The Gazette.
Christoph
Hi great posting, and some comments from me. I believe that we in the media transformation age have to focus on one statement that I first heard from Kevin Kelly. "The value is beyond free". Building sustainable business models are needed if the institutions in the media business are to survive - and find a new role. I'm working on this, and discussing these topics with a wide range of people, including Chuck Peters in Gazette Communications. I'll provide you all with a presentation on the subject at my blog soon. Building connections in the communities are needed, I agree with Steve Buttery - viewing the community as participants are one of several topics that have to be met in order to transform. The benefits of sharing and the added value are very well described in the book "We Think" by Charles Leadbeater and can be adopted into concepts fitting the media industry. There is no doubt in my mind that professionals are better to tell a great story, than amateurs, Therefore I’m not worried by user generated content. The value of user generated content, crowd sourcing and communications between masses are all parts of what journalists, storytellers and so forth can participate in, research from, refine, evolve into feature and in depth stories and so forth. I don’t, and from what we experience how user participant think, they don’t seem to think of their content as doing a professionals job. I assume no one believe that user generated content, such as a blog – is something that should replace news? More interesting is to see the change in how a news story start, how it evolve, and how it becomes yesterdays news – in other words, how the dramaturgy and timeline of a story have changed, because of a shift from mass communication , towards a relational communication form. All these aspect have to be seen in connection to each other and the product developments will include a wide range of ways of communications, of distributions, channels, business models and so forth.
Thanks for the comments, guys!
@Steve: I just worry that a broad approach, regardless of its merits overall, may not suit the newspaper industry today, because the sheer logistics of it all would run counter to the need to experiment and try out new things and abandon other things just as quickly.
With regards to "Do what you do best" I would wonder if newspapers actually are the organizations that are best placed to implement some of the broader community services that you suggest. What it boils down to, it seems to me, is: could any other player do the same thing while lacking a newsroom and print and web outlets? If so, then you're incredibly vulnerable to any kind of competition from outside of the newspaper industry. If the fact that you're a media organization does actually enhance your abilities to provide a service to a community, though, then yeah, by all means, go for it.
@Christoph: I meant The Gazette as a pars pro toto :-)
@Geir: cool, I've added your blog to my RSS-reader so I'll be sure to follow your take on this. Hadn't heard about the Charles Leadbeater book before. I'll be sure to check that one out.