The following is the last part of a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at:

“How to fund quality local journalism”

The bottom has fallen out of the traditional publishing business model–and with it goes the hefty dividends expected by shareholders (e.g. £48.4m in 2008 for the Trinity Mirror Group). The future of local quality journalism can only remain with the current crop of regional newspaper publishers if they radically change their expectations, and innovate.

That might not happen. If it doesn’t, they will die off, and the future of quality local journalism will take a huge – but not definitive – blow. Then the future lies with new initiatives and the local communities themselves – passionate and entrepreneurial people, only some of whom will be journalists. What about local council initiatives to publish newspapers and local information? That’s not the way to go – covered in Part 3.

But how to fund it? Here are eight suggestions for the future of local journalism funding:

1. Save the big regional publishers through a public subsidy? The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has already ruled that out: no state subsidies for beleaguered local newspapers. In some ways, that is good. Let’s not shore up businesses that have met requirements of shareholders over those of the local community, and which have – with a few notable exceptions – failed to innovate.

2. But… as Andy Price argued on this blog yesterday, “The regional press is the only institution with enough professional journalists to really cover civic Britain successfully.” So where public money is available, e.g. through the Digital Britain programme, efficiencies in government funding are necessary. As the authors of After the Crunch, published last week, write, “The DCMS, BERR, DCSF, Treasury, DIUS between them, spend a lot of money in the name of ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’, but much of their effort is frustrated by the lack of a coherent approach.” If quality local journalism is a public service, then what portion of the public service budget could go to newspapers? And only on the basis that they reform their structures (as suggested by @Geoffrey Gevalt).

3. That could be knitted together with a second point made in After the Crunch: that “the small-scale nature of creative industry enterprises connects more easily, and more productively with smaller-scale government.” The government could streamline legislation and funding frameworks for supporting media organisations at local levels without the baggage of outdated business models. They can work with Business Link and entrepreneurship schemes to offer many more bursaries and small business grants to new ventures that establish in their business plans a commitment to produce quality local journalism covering local democracy issues. These will most probably be started by two groups of people: those local journalists who have been made redundant, and who are deeply passionate about local democracy and community; and new entrepreneurs who can see the potential in investing in a portfolio of local media products using new, free technologies and mash ups.

4. Where regional publishers can prove they are adapting to the new media environment, individual papers or sub-regional groups (similar to what Peter Preston called for in the Observer last Sunday) could be cut out of the dying corpse of their parent company, and given subsidies to see them through the migration to a new business model.

5. Reduce costs through ditching daily print routines. Newspapers become professional news magazines published once a week but constantly updated online by continuing to grow community engagement and news as a conversation, and by investing in non-traditional ways to access information, e.g. these maps empowering social change (h/t @JoshHalliday).

6. Media organisations, both new and traditional, turn to community-owned, community-sourced local journalism.  Two-hundred years ago it was pampheteering. In 1932, it was nine interested individuals fed up with newspaper oligarchs who raised £40,000 and set up their own local paper, the Bristol Evening Post. Crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding have always been a part of the future of media. As argued for by former Northern Echo editor Peter Sands this morning on the Radio 4 Today programme.

7. Take a leaf out of new magazine membership models, as developed by numerous brands but articulated here via Alyce Alston: sell bundles of information.

8. Fund training programmes for current (recently redundant?) journalists in new technologies and entrepreneurship. This gives the next generation of media entrepreneurs preparedness for the need to adapt to rapid media change – and that means more money into projects such as Infuze at the University of Central Lancashire (h/t Laura Oliver)

What the typical local media organisation might look like?
So how about this? The future of quality local journalism is published immediately online and weekly in print, probably in magazine format.

• A small group of editors, journalists and community managers work with a network of contributors to develop feeds in a number of formats, e.g. news stories linked to local maps, for geographical and issue-based hyper-localities: all of this online, using APIs to mash together maps, local government records, planning information etc.
• A printed version provides a format for the weekend read and brings in advertising—similar to the ways the best Teesside hyper-local content gets published in weekly papers.
• The media organisation supports investigative reporting through entertainment, sport and feature copy that attracts advertising and sponsorship.
• The magazine is distributed freely around the local region.
• This local brand was set up with a government grant, including ongoing training in technology and entrepreneurship.
• The magazine is owned by the community through a crowd-funded structure (ten thousand people each pay £20 as a yearly debenture – not a subscription) and that community then have a vote on the governance and issues covered by the magazine… Want journalists to prioritise investigations into local planning decisions? Then pay for it.

Think of it as a combination of The Age of Stupid meets Spot.Us.

What other ideas are there?

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The following is the first in a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at the first:

“The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information”

The final views of the committee will depend on how much the inquiry sees local newspapers responsible for local journalism – a little, a lot, or completely.

Writing in the Observer on Sunday, Henry Porter pretty much called them the same thing. For many who work there, the death of newspapers is disastrous for access to local information, not least due to the historical positions those papers have held.

The closures of the Glasgow East News and Ayrshire Extra, the Black Country Mail Extra, Wolverhampton AdNews, Daventry Post and Ashby Herald, the Lincoln Chronicle, the Northallerton, Thirsk and Bedale Times, and dozens of others that have either closed or felt the swingeing impact of mergers and office cuts, are devastating for their communities. These papers have been the homes for ‘hard’ journalism – reporting of the essential court and council stories that really matter to local lives.

Los Angeles Times reporter, Joe Matthews, quoted widely on this, has made clear the dire implications for democracy of the loss of quality journalism. Matthews wrote: “Much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom.”

Those trained ears may have left the newsroom – but are they the only ears open to the whispers of local corruption?

Active participants, not passive recipients

The problem for existing traditional newspapers is that it is not part of their business model to innovate ways for local people to engage directly with the democratic process. The newspaper model is one of a journalist doing the work – being the eyes and ears of the local community. But the online model is one of seeking out direct democratic action. Of having direct access to information, rather than waiting for someone else to report on it. To report on it yourself (not simply to have an opinion, but to fact-find, and fact-check).

Other (and often better) ways to access information within local communities, including news and issues of local democracy, already exist. It was not a local newspaper that developed www.theyworkforyou.com, which, with its team of volunteers and email alerts, is perhaps the best way to keep track on what your local MP is saying and doing.

And every day innovators are opening up access to information – just last week, MySociety launched ScenicOrNot, which took a crowd-sourced image project and put it to local democratic use.

One impact of the closure of local newspapers could be to open up the space (and revenue opportunities) for media organisations based, from the outset, on community engagement and crowd-sourced gathering / production / distribution. Where the local community are active participants in, rather than passive receivers of, the local information that matters to them.

Does that explodes the idea that a patch has no ears if it has no ‘newspaper’ journalist? People are on that patch. Innovative, passionate and entrepreneurial, and nosy. The people for whom that information matters – a geographical community who wants to hold local powers to account over planning decisions, education provision, bins and holes in roads.

Some of them will be journalists. The future of local journalism is so pressing that it’s persuaded Roy Greenslade to go back to basics and cover his neighbourhood – Kemp Town in Brighton – for the local paper, as a community reporter.

Most of his fellow community reporters won’t be trained journalists. But all of a sudden they are all in the same category: the people who want access to the information and who are willing to work for it. In this, and many other cases, such as the award-winning Teesside postcode hyper-local sites, the community reporters are producing local – quality – journalism.

Journalism need saving, not newspapers

What is important here is not the newspaper’s historical position. It is not the paper’s brand that make this local journalism worthy of the stamp ‘quality’. It is the standards of journalism itself, which can exist independent of the structures of a local paper: the fact-checking, the transparency, the reporting for the public good. And that can be done by Roy at No.53 on his own blog, or by a crowd-sourced MySociety project. (So what about the money…? There’s a post coming on that, this Friday.)

What is important is that it offers a structure to innovate and create community. Although, very little of what the community contributors produce actually gets printed on paper itself.

This new-newspaper activity must be supported. One of the worst impacts of the closure of local newspapers would be the end to this support of hyper-local communities, the empowering of engaged citizens with tools, in local democratic action. It would be a blow to the work done in encouraging journalists to see news as a conversation with readers, rather than as a one-way flow.

Where this work is developing, local newspapers should be given as much support as possible to survive. That’s because journalism is crucial to local communities. It needs saving. Whether in the form of large organised publishing groups is up for debate.

Local newspapers hold a privileged position. As the guardians of democracy and access to local information, but also as established competition to potential new initiatives, new ways of approaching democracy in local communities. If their demise is to be seen as a disaster, it will be because they found ways to make sense of journalism as a participatory process, engaging with and opening up access to information, and not a static product.

What are your thoughts on the future of local journalism?

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The government has launched a new inquiry into the future of local and regional media – and there’s just six weeks to have your say on the subject.

None of us (yet) have the answers to the question of new journalism business models, and the local and regional press is suffering some of the hardest hits.  But ideas and initiatives are presenting themselves everyday. And now the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is looking for views on a range of tough issues, including:

• The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information;
• How to fund quality local journalism;
• The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level;
• The opportunities and implications of BBC partnerships with local media;
• Incentives for investment in local content;
• Opportunities for “ultra-local” media services.

We’re thinking about a collective response from journalism educators and OJB readers to the key questions, coordinated from here. So to begin with, what are your ideas, links to the best think pieces you’ve read or examples you’ve seen? Do you agree with the call to relax competition laws to allow local newspaper publishers to merge? Or what about Andy Burnham’s statement that there will be no bailout for local papers.

Let’s use this as a starting point to develop a collective, crowdsourced response to the inquiry.

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The widely respected #CollegeJourn is coming to Europe. #CollegeJourn was established as the real-time online discussion for members of the college journalism community in the US. But it runs in the early hours of Monday mornings, which often stops people from this side of the Atlantic attending.

So Sunderland journalism student Josh Halliday, editor for www.injournalism.co.uk, is launching a chat for Europe at a more amenable hour. #CollegeJourn Europe will launch this Sunday 22nd March at 8pm GMT.

Josh said: “It’s  a great chance for those in journalism education who are either worried or excited about the state of journalism today to come along and see what others think.”

If you want to share some ideas for the discussion in advance, you can send any topic suggestions towards the #collegejourn hashtag on Twitter, to Josh directly or the deceptively named @florida_mike. To read more about plans and topics that might come up then take a read over at Josh’s blog.

The mission of #CollegeJourn is to provide a meaningful and resourceful forum of conversation for college journalists. University journalists, journalism professors, and journalism professionals, are all welcome. Josh is hoping to attract some big names in j-education to the opening debate. The chat takes place in Meebo. Put it in your diary now, and spread the word.

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“The future of magazines is glorious,” said Simon Wear of magazine house Future UK, wrapping up the industry event ‘What Happens to Magazines?’ held in London lon Monday. “Both print and online,” he added.

He would say that, though: Future has been selling a successful 1.7m magazines a month through the recession with its hobby and geek-lad magazines. As written elsewhere, you could call 2008 the Year of the Niche title as people look to do things at home, cheaply, or the things they love most during the economic downturn.

Others were not quite so confident. Louise White, Group Marketing Director at B2B publisher Incisive Media was clear that the publishing business model was broken and needed fixing: classified and recruitment revenue was dead, a sentiment echoed by a number of editors in the b2b market.

And Ashley Norris, founder of commercial blogging network Shiny Media, emphasized the fact that the new generation of media consumers just aren’t in the habit of buying a magazine, or buying media in general. That meant organised packages of content from one media product–such as a magazine–were going to end. “The world has changed, guys.”

But the panel provided six reasons why magazines as brands, whether print or online, do have a future:

1. Andrew Davies of idiomag, the music content personalisation site, emphasized the possibilities for each unique user building their own magazine of content through companies, like his, using software sophisticated enough to be ultra-niche; and the advertising opportunities that provided were unrivalled for consumer relationships.

2. Mike Soutar, founder of Shortlist Media and “pioneers” in quality free magazine content, was confident that print magazines had found a model (brand-to-hand distribution and outsourced costs, keeping magazine teams very small) that would mean print magazines could continue to be there where a screen wasn’t.

3. Sarah Clegg, chief executive of John Menzies Digital and provider of magazinesondemand.co.uk, delivering digital editions of top brands, believed they had passed the tipping point and, critically, persuaded publishers that they couldn’t charge their normal cover price for a digital magazine that had no transport, printing and retail costs attached to it.

4. Ashley Norris of Shiny saw a future of 20-30 blogs in a network doing the work–and replacing–the work of 2-3 magazines, and brokering creative sponsorship between brands and social media as central to the business model for producing great experiences online.

5. Simon Wear of Future, perhaps the most positive and persuasive, believed that his magazine company would be growing as they had a) remembered they weren’t software companies, and also b) had remembered how to write realy strong, probing news around their niche interest sectors, whichs translates well online, and meant their nice-to-have content had found its way back to need-to-have status.

6. Finally, the most hopeful and most sceptical at the same time, Louise White of Incisive said their b2b titles were not magazines any more, but information providers that found their way into their audiences’ work flow–”platform agnostic” content that was as important to be on someone’s Blackberry than online or in print.

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Shaun Milne, founding Director of digital publishing company Planet Ink, shares his decisions and ambitions for new online-only magazine ecoforyou.

Why did you go for a turn-page magazine format?
There were a number of good reasons, not least it is a fairly straightforward skill to learn. We purchase the technology on license so we don’t need to know much about coding, we can just concentrate on the journalism and design side.

Also we think it adds a familiar process to the art or reading. People are used to turning the page of a newspaper or magazine, and this allows them to retain the ‘idea’ of that. We see it as combining the traditions of print with the best of the web and hope to build a community around it. At this stage not everyone has had a chance to play with digital magazines yet, so there is a certain novelty factor.

Is this your vision of what Web3.0 will be?
Not completely, no. I do think it’s a step on the right path to where Web.3.0 will lead us in terms of greater interactivity, tracking and understanding of user habits. But as technology adapts further, so will publishers. We’ll have more touchscreen availability which will allow people to turn pages with their fingers; we’ll have mobile phones with five inch pull out screens; and e-paper itself, all of which if done the right way can have huge eco and financial benefits.

But the Holy Grail will be whoever can crack the best way to let readers decide themselves what content they want delivered to their handset or computer on a daily basis.

Is it to prepare for a paid content model, or will revenue come through advertising and sales, e.g. merchandise?
We could easily DRM protect the content and charge for it, but that’s not the plan at all. Given that we’re linking to a lot of content and video already available for free on the web, it would be a bit cheeky, and goes against trying to get people to share the magazine, forward it onto friends, colleagues and clients.

We hope that it’s an enjoyable, maybe even useful read, but it is in many ways something of a Trojan horse. By having a digital magazine, we expect people will read it who have never come across the format before, and won’t even realize they’ve broken their duck doing so. If we can educate people that digital is an easy, viable alternative to standards sites and print, then it can only be good for our business. Potentially it could be a loss leader for some time. But if we get the content right and attract the readers, then hopefully advertising will follow and at least cover costs.

What kind of user community are you building with the site?
Feedback so far suggests we are attracting a lot of hits from people at various levels of Government in Scotland and around the UK, quangos, charities, campaign groups, specialist businesses, dozens of PR and marketing companies – the target market you’d expect.

We’re thrilled with that, but we also want the general public to get involved. We want anyone and everyone to feel they can use the magazine. That could be a parent who wants to educate their child; it could be a business wanting to adopt the mag for their customers for CSR uses, or simply those interested in the environment.

That’s why we’ve set up a Facebook Group, a blog and Twitter alerts to sit alongside the website and, ultimately, the digi-mag which it’s all about, and begin to mould the content accordingly.

How will people interact with your content?
We hope people will start contacting us with their own ideas, stories and letters, but for now we’re just presenting information in a readable form. We’re using lots of Flash for interactivity. With the Facebook Group and blog, we’ve opened up a forum of sorts that they can use down the line, or simply keep up to date by signing up to Twitter or our subscriptions on the main site.

We’ll be able to track the way people read the pages, how long they spend on an article, what links they click, if they download, print or forward a section on; that way we will learn to understand what areas are popular and which are less so.

Is eco your thing, or was it a commercial decision?
Essentially we thought there was a gap in the market for a title like this and thought well, we keep telling our clients and future prospects how eco friendly these things are, why don’t we do something ourselves.

The result has been dramatic on everyone in the office. I’d say we have all in some way become greener. I live by the beach and felt I was fairly aware, but we’ve done all sorts of things in the past few months from starting a compost bin, to recycling our waste, turning the heating down, walking to the station rather than drive. It’s just made us more aware of the eco benefits, regardless of whether it eventually turns out to be a success in its own right.

Why did you choose to go solely online?
We’re all former national newspaper journalists so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to stick to the programme. But we felt strongly that, since we could use the technology, there would be little point trying to do something promoting the environment while using newsprint, ink and heavy machinery, long before we look at distribution issues.

There are drawbacks in trying to alert people to the fact that the magazine is there. It’s much easier to, say, flood the supermarkets and newsagents with copies, or put them in dump bins, to make the product easy for people to find.

And apart from the eco benefits, there is so much more you can do with digital – include video, audio, moving images and links. The way we consume news is changing, digital will be part of that, just hopefully without destroying the planet at the same time.

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What’s the BBC’s approach to training for online journalism? Alex Lockwood spoke to Nick Shackleton-Jones, the BBC’s Manager for Online & Informal Learning and lead behind the BBC College of Journalism.

What is it you do, and what’s the BBC’s approach to multimedia training, development and learning?
I’m responsible for online learning for BBC staff, as part of the Training & Development department. I can’t answer for the BBC as a whole, but we are certainly shifting our activity away from the more overtly top-down courses towards initiatives – either face-to-face or online – based around knowledge-sharing.

What’s been the reception to multimedia learning?
The reception has been positive, largely because a great deal of care was taken in the construction of BBC-wide multimedia learning packages such as ‘Editorial Policy’ and ‘Legal Online’ ensuring a rich, engaging experience.

Can you give an example of an achievement where multimedia learning has helped the BBC achieve its remit?
Yes, ‘Legal Online’ in which a community of 8,000 journalists was trained in complex legal issues, the ‘Creativity Portal’ which allows anyone in the BBC to upload their own video productions or share links to inspiring content.

In terms of the graduates you’ve come into contact with, are they leaving colleges/universities with relevant enough skills? Where are their skills gaps?
On the one hand we need to ensure that we are making the most of the skills that they bring with them into the BBC, on the other there are significant areas where we feel that we need to train them further (such as Journalism). In terms of our own recruits, their formal training actually has little bearing – we look first and foremost at attitude and secondly at portfolio – what have they actually done?

Do you train broad and wide, and then build up individual specific skills? Or do you train on specific packages, without first developing the broad-base knowledge of new media?
A very interesting question. The College of Journalism has been able to identify a core learning curriculum (as in this image) which I imagine constitutes a broad base. Specific skills will vary. In the case of my team, I look for brilliance in one area – on the basis that this is usually readily transferable.

How do you approach attitudes of media literacy, or do you stay with the practical vocational skills? (Or are the people you work with already very media literate?)
The BBC is still strangely media illiterate – or rather individuals still have legacy ways of doing things: if I ask someone for a video on CD, I will quite often get it as a DVD – which I then have to rip and compress. In fact, one might expect sharing of video to be networked and standardised (e.g. as .movs). The BBC runs workshops around these sorts of issues, but there is no company-wide media literacy training programme that I am aware of.

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