Nearly 50 philanthropists and funders squeezed into the breakout at the annual Media Impact Forum conference held at the National Constitution Center.
Our panel’s focus was on newsroom-creator relationships, which we at Technical.ly have dove into — both with creators, and with our own newsroom and, in a sense, because looking back my start as a “blogger” sure sounds a lot like the creators of 15 years ago. My moderator Liz Kelly Nelson wrote up more here on the conference here, and she previously wrote this piece which fits into my writing on ‘journalism strategy.’
Below I share a few notes from the discussion.
Our kindly moderator sent over a few example questions beforehand so I dashed down notes, though I’, not sure if we actually discussed most of these
- Technically was founded in 2009 – when we were talking about bloggers disrupting the traditional news ecosystem. What have you learned in the intervening decade and a half that we should be thinking about as the number of journalists building direct-to-audience channels continues to grow?
- We did learn to be far more welcoming to creators than we were of bloggers
- Incentives for distributing news and information are clear (the web rewards it), but the incentives for gathering the news and information, and ensuring it’s of high-quality are far less clear. New distribution changes nothing about the gathering.
- New distribution tools are treated by pure journalism champions like freshly fallen snow. We can pretend for a moment that no money has to sully the quality. But if we want these to last we need to engage with those models. And there’s no mystery
- What have you learned about making niche or independent news models work — especially when it comes to revenue, scale and surviving burnout?
- In some sense there is absolutely no mystery about sustaining any organization. You need to bring in more income than you spend. Most commonly we all do that by solving some problem that enough people want to solve with money.
- Philanthropy is effective for depth, but get specific: Our subject matter on entrepreneurship and jobs of the future and economic mobility hits for some
- You need to build a data-case: We are multi-local, and our first customer in a given market is an economic development organization that wants its state or region’s entrepreneurs more attention.
- How is technically dipping its toe into the creator space?
- A couple years ago we started doing one-off paid social videos with creators. A year ago we launched our Creator in Residence program.
- In some sense I now think that in a way I started as a creator, a blogger, of 15 years ago
- Local vs national
- What are you being compared against?