Benjamin Franklin’s business involved both news and community media services.
The digital revolution has had a gigantic impact on community media,* and we need to find new business models to support it.
The reasons for the decline are fairly straightforward. Display and classified advertising used to be the mainstay of the “penny press” business model since the 1830s.
But in the early 21st century, search engines like Google have allowed shoppers to zero in on the best prices while Google keeps tabs on them. The Internet made the market more efficient, but it also meant that it was less efficient to advertise in traditional media, and news deserts began springing up all over the country.
In light of all this, it’s important to recall that advertising isn’t the only way that community information systems used to work, and it isn’t the only approach that we can take in the 21st century.
Let’s take a page from the “Ben Franklin” community publishing model. This is the business model that came before the penny press model, and was used between the 1700s to the 1830s. Franklin’s community publishing model had two elements:
• A profitable printing services operation that churned out books, legal notices, accounting ledgers, minutes of local organizations, wills and deeds and a thousand other essential record-keeping tools for the public and private business; and
• A not-so-profitable newspaper that provided a public service, and also helped the main printing operation stand out from its competitors.
Of course, these days, we don’t need so many legal notices, accounting ledgers and so on. Most of that gets done electronically. But every person, and every community, has information needs. And proposals to fix the system don’t go far enough.**
Media services could replace advertising revenues
Every person and community has information needs, whether its just the humble bulletin board at the local library or an organized community media cooperative or non-profit media group. These co-ops and nonprofits can be structured for both consumer and producer services.
Some services will probably be too expensive, and may need to be delivered by volunteers trained by community media editors.
A list of profitable media services might include:
- Shared hosting platforms for local business web, social media and podcasting;
- Video production and live streaming equipment for sports, community theater, or other community events; ***
- Transfer of photos, film, VHS and tape to digital files for family heritage and preservation work;
- Photocopying, scanning and document handling for business and family records using high volume scanner / processors. These can be too expensive for an individual or small business, but are often needed to clear away old files.
- Imaging equipment for home and business, such as: cameras for security systems; thermal cameras for energy audits; time-lapse photography for construction; ground penetrating radar; drone video, and other advanced digital imaging services.
Lower profit services could be delivered by community media volunteers. These kinds of services might include:
- Support for audio books, in connection with local libraries (Hoopla, Libby, Librivox.org) and Audible. This is especially important public service outreach for nursing homes and vision impaired.
- Educational animation software & studio space using Dragonframe or other animation application;
- Computer video editing equipment at a community media center or available for home use;
- E-sports such as video game contests and drone races (ideally including training of parents to also participate in video games);
- Small business marketing and web design consulting and support;
- Individual, family and community book publishing assistance and local market pooling for low-cost online books, audio books and books-on-demand printing.
- Assistance with community blogging for additional information outreach from church, ag extension, small business development and other local civic improvement groups.
Much of this would be in service to better circulation of community information. One of the problems with a community newspaper is that it is usually thrown away after a week or two, so it might be worthwhile to more or less re-invent community information services.
Among other ideas, an community information / news service should be:
- Ethical, in service to democracy and to community, rather than private profit;
- Independent, with the ability to transmit and analyze critical information;
- Permanent but correctable, like Wikipedia;
- Transparent, with an open agenda that would probably be debated too much, (although that would at least be an improvement on opaque news organizations);
- Biddable, so that co-op members could initiate and build fact-finding efforts
Overall, we could move in the direction of MORE, rather than less, democracy and citizen involvement in our information systems.
As Henry David Thoreau wrote in his book Walden, published in 1854:
“Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers … to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, genius, learning, [or] wit … so let the village. Do not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions …”
* Traditional local and regional newspapers are in sharp decline, according to the Pew Research Center. Many newspapers have gone bankrupt; television news is up in the air with MMJ (multi-media journalism); and all have become far less relevant to daily life. Today, only a handful of journalists are keeping a public eye on local and state government, and the small amount of local news has meant measurably more polarization and less civic engagement.
The Roanoke Times, for example, had a newsroom of about 120 reporters and editors in the 1990s. Now it has less than a dozen.
** Proposals to fix the traditional media don’t go far enough
In the near-vacuum of community news, we have seen a surge of new media functions, but they often have serious problems. Facebook moderators have editing styles that are not informed by a tolerance for open debate or any knowledge of where the actual limits of debate are (or should be) according to US tradition and law. Craigslist has no social responsibility, and using it can be risky. Fake news is endemic at the national level and promoted by people with all kinds of motives. “Cheap speech” has eroded trust in the news.
The responses have not been encouraging. If we use an aviation analogy, we might say that a lot of the new non-profit journalism ventures amount to a “better pilot” model. If we could just have better pilots flying better routes, we’d have more people paying for air travel. Often these “better pilot” news models are non-profit organizations that depend on public generosity and have no real hope for long-term financial success.
To extend the analogy, we need to envision not only new kinds of pilots and airplanes, but also an entirely different approach to aircraft design. We need to think about new kinds of community airplane hangers that can encourage new kinds of pilots. Maybe we need to rethink what it means to fly, and what airframes and engines and new theories can help us achieve more, and what it is we’re hoping to achieve in the first place.
*** Professional switching and mixing equipment is much cheaper these days. Check out the Blackmagic MiniPro, Tricaster Mini or Livestream HD 51 Free open Broadcasting Software is used for streaming on various channels such as Zoom, YouTube, Twitch.tv, Instagram and Facebook.