Cyrillic Partners

1. Is it worth fighting content commodification? Most local papers feed on content pulled from the Associated Press newswire and offer little in the way of context or local significance. Do people still need a local spin or a verticalization of the content to reflect its impact on their interests?
2. How do you make investigative journalism work now? It’s harder to allocate resources to do the work of investigation with staffs shrinking and budgets tightening. Investigative digging takes time and lots of effort. There’s another factor at work here too. The journalists that remain in the business are often viewed with trepidation instead of trust by would-be sources. The profession regularly ranks just above used-car-salesman on trust polls. A journalist’s best scoops typically come from someone whom she or he already knows and trusts. Maybe this is a sub-point to number one of this list, since it might be considered a side effect of commoditization.
3. What’s the best way to separate signal from noise? Traditional advertising has been, for many companies, supplanted by spending on “public relations.” A large corporation may have more PR executives on staff than any one of the business magazines that cover it. How do you pick out the real news from the processed and packaged crap that’s pushed out to already over-extended journalists? Citizen journalists, bloggers, pundits and others now weigh in on everything, often without adding any new details or context.
4. What’s the best way to monetize online content? Every news publication struggles with this. People don’t want to pay for things online. Online advertising is growing, to be sure, but many small publications are left out when the cost of securing advertising outstretches the benefit. Studies show that most people don’t even see the advertisements served online.
5. What community does a news organization target and how does it interact with that community? The internet has radically changed the way many people classify themselves into communities. Left-handed lovers of Dungeons and Dragons may find others online with whom they have more in common than the person who they live next to. The comment thread underneath stories and social networks aren’t adequate for one major reason: they don’t make money.

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