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I recently had the good fortune to talk at length with Sven Egil Omdal, a journalist from Norway who is in the US on a sabbatical and is studying journalism’s digital transition. We talked about newspaper economics, new models and experiments, the future of public media and the role of public policy. I was intrigued by the similarities and the differences in how this debate is unfolding in Scandinavia as compared to the US.

In an article he wrote earlier this year, Omdal describes a series of government inquiries in Denmark and Norway examining journalism’s digital future. In many ways they mirror the proceedings currently underway at the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission here in the United States. Omdal writes, “The entire state media support system is up for revision and is likely to be subjected to a complete restructuring. The department for culture set up a committee in 2009 under the leadership of former state secretary Yngve Sletholm and is to present suggestions for future media support by the end of 2010,” roughly the same timeline as the FCC and FTC inquiries.

However, the substance of the debates illustrates some dramatically different assumptions about public policy and public funding for journalism in both countries. Omdal argues that the most important question in the debate over public funding of the news “is the discussion about whether support is to be moved from the product to the producers.” He argues, “The Norwegian committee should take this one step further and consider the possibility of moving financial support all the way to the individual journalist.” While Omdal acknowledges the important role journalism institutions can play, he says that “most top investigative journalism around the world is already carried out by freelance reporters who earn their income from a variety of sources,” and asks why government shouldn’t be one of those sources.

He describes a system already in place in Norway similar to the National Endowment for the Arts in the US that supports “writers, visual artists, musicians and filmmakers.” By his calculation, repurposing money currently spent on media production support and using it to support journalists “who work in investigative fields, who ask questions and refuse to take no for an answer” would fund 1,000 new journalism jobs.

Omdal also points to The Danish committee’s inquiry into these issues, which suggested that funding for all “journalistic proposals; documentaries, debate series, large-scale productions or new journalistic products” should be evaluated “independent of the platform used.” Thus, “new net-based quality journalism will compete on equal terms with traditional newspaper production.” In short, both Norway and Denmark, like the US, are dealing with a public funding system designed primarily to support public broadcasting. While the debate about public funding for journalism has progressed further abroad, due to its long and successful history there, Omdal points to the US for its innovation and experimentation with new models and collaborations in both the commercial and non-commercial sector. It’s clear from this article that we need to take the international conversation about the future of journalism across borders and into the luminal space between models.

Now is the time to open up debate and draw on the lessons from other nations. Omdal writes, “This debate must not be gagged by the predictable shouts about press independence and the threat to free expression such a system will inevitably entail. A lot of the best journalism in the Nordic countries is already publicly financed.” At this time of such change, Omdal seems to suggest that we should explore all forms of “journalistic renaissance” and open up space for debate and experimentation, not foreclose our options before we have all the facts.

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As we debate the future of news, we need to keep in mind what this debate is really about. We need to ask ourselves, “What is it we’re trying to save, protect or foster?” Or asked another way, “Journalism for what?” Identifying what we mean by journalism and why we care about its future is central to figuring out what solutions might get us there.

The most common response to these questions is that journalism is fundamental for our democracy. It's hard to argue with that, but how does it help guide us toward a new vision for news?

In the fall of 2009, Bill Mitchell (who leads the Poynter Institute’s Entrepreneurship and International programs) was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and this question was at the center of his research. Up to this point, Mitchell had been – like many others – studying new business models for journalism, but had found nothing that he was convinced would sustain a new era of robust civic journalism in the digital age. So he turned his attention away from “the how” of journalism and instead focused on “the why.”

In the paper he wrote for the Shorenstein Center, Mitchell proposes a new way of examining the future of news and a “user-first” model that re-centers our debate about the people journalism is meant to serve. “The best prospects for sustaining journalism in the future are rooted in the most important stakeholders of its past and present: that collection of readers, viewers and listeners also known as users,” he writes. Whatever happens with nonprofit news, online journalism, crowdsourcing, hyperlocal sites or media policy, “intervention is needed at the ground level,” in communities and with people.

Mitchell applies this “user-first” approach to a number of the central debates happening within journalism right now, including:

• Paid Content: Shift the debate from what publishers might charge to what users actually want;
• Ads: With ad supply swamping demand, advertising that interrupts users—as opposed to serving them—can’t last long;
• Partnerships: Sustaining local news is not just about revenue. To survive, news organizations will need to partner with all of journalism’s stakeholders; and,
• New Ventures: “If you’re going to be in the news business, you need to be in another business, too.”

For Mitchell then, the question is not how to pay for the news, it’s how to “find ways to affix new values to news.” Mitchell is careful here to use the plural, highlighting the fact that there are multiple kinds of values we have to address in a “user-first” model for news. “Values play several roles,” he writes. “There’s public value in the economic sense of public good. There’s the civic value that news brings to community members who need independently reported facts. And there are journalism values—accuracy, fairness, transparency—that differentiate quality news from unverified rumor and guesswork.”

At about the same time Mitchell was at Shorenstein, I wrote a blog post seeking to shift the debate to focus more on the question of values. “Similarly, conversations about the future of journalism spend far too much time focused on the question, ‘What’s the cost of journalism?’ instead of the question, ‘What’s the value of journalism?’” I wrote. I end that post arguing that, “by shifting the conversation to the value that local news organizations provide, we get closer to finding actual solutions to the problems facing journalism.”

Mitchell takes that idea and expands on it exponentially. Mitchell quotes a 2006 essay from media analyst Robert Pickard, in which he notes that, “News organizations today are experiencing a continuing crisis of value destruction and if they are to sustain themselves, they must find ways to create new value to replace that which is being destroyed.” For Mitchell, a “user-first” framework can help guide news organizations in rebuilding value through new ways of relating to their readers (through models like co-ops and membership programs) and new ways of relating to each other (through partnerships and collaborations).

In my earlier post, I wrote, “Time and time again, however, we have seen that cutting costs means cutting value. We may need to address the cost of journalism, but if we do so without also considering journalism’s value, then we are doomed to kill the product we are trying to save.” Mitchell ends his paper with the issue of cost-cutting. He shows that not only does a “user-first” approach reframe the way we think about the future, it also can help guide the difficult decisions newsrooms have to make right now.

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Have a great idea for better media? We want to hear it.

Free Press is excited to announce the call for suggestions for the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform. It's your chance to submit your ideas for sessions, presenters or topics for next year's big event.

Go here to submit a suggested session, speaker or topic.

The conference is a time for thousands of people to gather and work together to change our media system. We want the conference to reflect the broad sweep of media reform — from policy to journalism to social justice to technology and innovation. We need your input to make this our best conference yet.

Below are the conference details. Don't forget to mark your calendar!

What: 2011 National Conference for Media Reform. Submit your idea now.
When: April 8-10, 2011

Where: Boston

Info: Sign up for updates or visit http://www.freepress.net/call-for-suggestions for more information.

The conference will be a one-of-a-kind opportunity to strategize, network, share skills, swap information and inspire one another during three days of workshops, panels, caucuses, keynote speeches, meetings and parties in Boston.

This is your chance to help us shape the event from the start. So if you have an idea for an exciting session or have recently seen an inspiring speaker, tell us about it. The call for suggestions will be open through September 10.

And spread the word! Let your everyone know about the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform by forwarding this e-mail and sharing details on Twitter and Facebook.

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I have spent a good deal of time recently looking at two new trends in journalism - the tendency toward journalism collaborations, and the increased emphasis on community engagement. Obviously, neither of these ideas is "new" in the sense that they’ve never been tried, but the rate at which they are being adopted is a clear sign of some fundamental shifts in the way reporting is done.

Recently, however, a few bits of information came my way and reminded me that everything old is new again.

Community Engagement, Commenting, and Sharing

Some of the hottest debates at conferences I have attended recently have been around how news organizations can build affinity with their audiences and deepen their engagement with local communities. A key part of this debate surrounds policies related to commenting and how to encourage (or restrict) sharing on social networks.

These seem like contemporary debates, brought on by recent advancements in technology, but then a non-journalist friend sent me this note:

I'm reading "A Short History of the Printed Word," by Robert Bringhurst, and I just came across something you might find interesting:

"The first American newspaper was not attempted until September 1690, when Publick Occurences Both Forreign and Domestick was published in Boston by Benjamin Harris. It was small in format, 6 X 9 1/2 inches (15 X 24 cm) when folded, and consisted of four pages. The third page was left blank in case the purchaser wished to write in a news bulletin before passing it on."

So, basically, the first newspaper in the U.S. was designed to encourage community participation in journalism. And it's not hard to imagine that blank page being used for "commenting," too. Sort of like internet journalism.

I couldn’t agree more. Even though the technology has changed, the impetus is the same. Jay Rosen may not have coined the term “the people formerly known as the audience” until a few years ago, but clearly the publishers of Publick Occurences understood the value of crowdsourcing and made space for people to be a part of news creation.

Journalism Collaborations

At the recent Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT, I led a discussion on journalism collaborations. Scott Rosenberg, the co-founder of Salon, captured the tone of the conversation well: "There is a professional transition in the field from an environment where competition was the dominant mode of interacting with other organizations to an era where dividing labor and sharing might serve the public better."

Indeed, I have been trying to capture evidence of this shift in my ever-growing inventory of journalism collaborations, and this summer I’m working on a few case studies. However, it was recently brought to my attention that collaboration was a key element in launching the New York Times.

Matt Schafer, fellow researcher, writes:

In 1848 a political organizer by the name of Thurlow Weed suggested to New York banker George Jones and New York politician and journalist Henry James Raymond that an endeavor of “journalistic collaboration” could have great advantages for the city of New York. In 1851, Jones and Raymond’s collaborative effort created The New York Times.

Obviously, the newsroom collaborations we are exploring now are of a different nature than this, but the fact that the New York Time’s founders thought of their endeavor as even remotely collaborative is interesting. In developing the idea for the Times, they each brought specific resources and talents to the table that made the it a success. That’s one of the defining principle regarding how we talk about collaboration between newsrooms today.

In thinking about the rise of new newsroom collaborations it is useful to think about how a newsroom itself functions. Journalism is seldom done in solitude. Journalists, sources, editors, copy-editors, printers, web-designers and others work together to see each piece through. In thinking about what lessons we can learn from these new journalism partnerships across organizations, we should also be aware of what we can learn from the collaborations that happen within newsrooms as well. They are just as messy, complicated, and rewarding as many outside collaborations.

Aggregation – Journalism’s Oldest Profession

Finally, earlier this spring I was at Harvard Law School for a conference on the legal and policy debates shaping journalism. Josh Benton from the Nieman Journalism Lab gave a fantastic talk on the history (and future) of aggregators. The role of news aggregators is, of course, another ongoing debate within journalism. Some argue that aggregators help bring context and clarity to the 24 hour news cycle, while others claim that aggregators are little more than leeches getting rich off of other people's work.

Benton reminded us that, in fact, journalism is the original aggregation. Journalism has always been about pulling together information from diverse sources and helping make sense of it. More specifically, Benton pointed out that in the early history of the press in America, postal rate policy allowed newspapers to exchange copies of their papers with those in other cities at no cost. Why? Because it was key to the distribution of news. Papers would regularly "cut and paste" news from papers around the country into their local editions, aggregating the news of the nation and reprinting it locally. Benton also offered many other examples of how aggregation in its many forms has been a part of journalism in America. Watch the whole video here.

Community engagement, commenting, sharing, collaboration and aggregation. These debates are as much about the history of journalism as they are about its future. It’s worth looking back as we move ahead. There are lessons to be learned from the past - both in how these ideas were implemented at the time, and in what has changed since. We are undoubtedly facing uncharted territory as we imagine journalism in the digital age, but the fundamental values that inspire our concern for the information needs of communities and democracy remain the same.

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