How are you going to make money? By changing your relationship with your community

I get the same question again and again as I explain our innovation efforts at Gazette Communications: How are you going to make money doing that?

When I explained our plans to separate content from product, people could see that we were moving to an organization built for the future rather than the past. But they still asked: How do you monetize that? (Yes, even journalists have started using the M-word.)

I answer in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, published this week on my blog: We need to move beyond advertising.

Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen, the foremost authority on disruptive innovation, says established businesses take two approaches when faced with disruptive technology: They ignore it or they try to cram their existing model into the new opportunity. The newspaper industry did both. When we realized we couldn't ignore the Internet any longer, we tried to cram our newspapers into our websites.

...Continue reading "How are you going to make money? By changing your relationship with your community"

1 comment Archive Link

South Los Angeles community news website offers lessons for all

By William Celis, April 29, 2009

A century ago, The New York Times routinely ran short items on its inside pages about church socials, fund-raising efforts by community groups, programs at public schools. These news nuggets defined the robust neighborhoods of Manhattan and the city's four other boroughs. Though eventually lost as the daily emphasized foreign and national news, these news blurbs from neighborhood are in vogue again a century later, this time on hyperlocal news websites.

These intensely local news sites, now firmly established on the emerging journalism landscape, offer readers more than news about chicken dinners and church functions, of course. Many of them devote energy and money to produce meaningful journalism from and about under covered urban neighborhoods and isolated rural communities. These places are not the easiest communities to write about; distrust of the media runs high, especially in urban communities of color. But enhanced coverage of urban, working-class neighborhoods of color -- long ignored by mainstream media -- is one of the emerging trends of hyper local news sites, including the new USC Annenberg School for Communication news site, Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, recent winners of a $25,000 grant from the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism through its New Voices program, a community news initiative funded by the Knight Foundation