The conference brings together past winners of the foundations’ News Challenge program (of which I was one) along with some other folks working at the edge of new journalism forms. The News Challenge program funds innovative ideas to build new news tools. I’ll be posting some summary thoughts from the sessions over the next few days. But to start things off, the foundation is announcing the 2010 winners of the News Challenge program.
Each of the grantees provides a little glimpse at how people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds looks at the future of news: video games for news; local wikis; community video editing tools; live news maps; community funded journalism. I wanted to highlight a two from the Bay Area:
Last week, the biggest social media service most people have never heard of came out with a startling announcement. Ning, which allows you to build your own social networking site, was going to end its free service and focus on its paying customers.
The news was broken last week by Techcrunch which snagged a copy of CEO Jason Rosenthal’s memo to employees about the big change:
“When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business.”
Rosenthal has just replaced Gina Bianchini as CEO. She co-founded Ning with Mark Andreessen. The company confirmed the change in a blog post the next day:
“As many of you know, we made a decision yesterday to focus 100% of the company on enhancing the features and services we offer to paying Ning Creators. The tens of thousands of you who already use our paid service represent over 75% of our traffic, and we’ve heard repeatedly from you ways that we can deliver a killer service to help make your Ning Network more effective.”
This announcement touched off a wave of panic among users of Ning, particularly educators and non-profits. But it also set off a round of smug “I-told-you-so” posts from developers who didn’t like Ning because it was a closed, proprietary system. They had long been warning people of the risks of putting so much content and resources into a service run by an unprofitable company with no sense of what might happen to all of that information should the company go kaput.
But the reality is not so simple. And while I’m generally a fan of open source and the open Web, I also became a big fan of Ning. And I think in that seeming contradiction, there’s a lesson for people who are building Web services and tools that they want regular folks to use.
So let me talk about my experience and what I plan to do with my network going forward.
In the search for new business models for journalism, one of the most intriguing experiments underway is Spot.Us. Founded by David Cohn, Spot.Us creates a marketplace between reporters and communities to try a new paradigm for funding journalism. Cohn was among the most recent recipients of the Knight Foundation News Challenge Grants last spring for this project.
After several months in quiet beta, Spot.Us officially launched today.
The concept works like this: A reporter posts an idea for a story along with an amount they need to produce the work. Members of the community can then donate money through the Web site to fund that work. The checks aren’t cashed, so to speak, unless enough money is raised. Spot.Us has already funded a few stories while the site was still being built. The stories are then available for any publication to run for free. A news organization can have exclusive rights if it contributes enough money to fund the story. As Cohn explains, this can be a great way to stretch the freelance budget.
At the moment, Spot.Us focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area. So if you have an interest in supporting quality journalism, then think about making a donation. The concept really works around micro-finance, so the donation doesn’t need to be huge. Lots of little donations can really leverage the network effect and make things happen.
Will this work? I hope so. It’s off to a strong start. Is it the answer to all of journalism’s problems? No, and Cohn doesn’t claim it is. But it represents the right kind of thinking for this era: Something that harnesses the network power available through the Internet while also thinking progressively about what the underlying business model looks like.
“The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is a 15-member commission of luminaries assembled to recommend both public and private measures that would help American communities better meet their information needs.”
The forum is being held on the Google campus in Mountain View starting at 9 a.m. local time. I’m speaking on a panel in the afternoon on “technology and innovation.” I’ll post a link to a copy of my remarks after the event.
I think this is critical work, given the changing landscape for news and information. If you have time, you can follow the live Web cast here.
Last week, the biggest social media service most people have never heard of came out with a startling announcement. 
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