A business model for 21st Century news

As a teenager volunteering at my local community radio station, WVOX, I would routinely walk by a poster featuring a slightly less snarky version of A.J. Liebling’s famous observation, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”  WVOX – along with its imposing, bombastic owner - aimed to give everyone a voice, a mission reflected in its call letters, short for Vox Populi, the voice of the people.  

That teenager was given a half-hour weekly time slot on WVOX, and a life-long love affair with the news media and journalism.  But as anyone who has ever worked as a professional journalist can tell you, reporting is a difficult mistress; a livelihood that is almost constantly threatened.  

As I grew up and graduated into a career in network television news, the threats against the viability of a free press shifted.  As the Internet grew and platforms popped up offering anyone with a computer a soapbox, the cost of a press – in Liebling’s words – dropped to zero.  Unfortunately, those newsrooms behind the presses suddenly had far more competition, and it was not entirely beneficial to news consumers.

The promise of social media meant that anyone could post anything; the downside, we soon discovered, was that anyone could post anything. 

The ground war

Let’s go back to a time that seems almost fantastical now – yet it was just a few decades ago.  Catching up on the news meant subscribing to a newspaper, or buying a copy at a newsstand.  You could turn on the television and watch the local or national news, or listen to the radio on your drive to work.  Regardless of the medium, interspersed between reports would be advertisements, whose fees would pay for the reporting, and make the underlying business financially viable.

As the Web gained popularity and prominence, major news outlets began publishing their reporting online, for free.  After all, they had no reason to think the economics would be any different:Advertising would support the reporting, and if anything, the costs would decrease – no more printing presses!  

But there was a snag: Consumption works differently online.  

The daily ritual of opening the newspaper or tuning into a newscast was really what was monetizable, not the stories themselves.  When flipping the pages of a print newspaper, ads and articles all stand independently.  Read a long article start to finish, or just glance at a headline – it is all irrelevant to the ad next to the article. You will see it regardless.

Social media, news aggregators, and SEO changed that consumption.  Savvy users could now crowdsource article recommendations, eschewing news website homepages.  Those ads - sold against website traffic – would only be valuable if editors could win those clicks one-by-one.  News became a ground war.

We know what happened next, because we experience it every day as online news consumers.  Some publications shifted to outright clickbait - a summary of a story can no longer generate traffic, so they withhold or sensationalize information (what happens next will shock you!).  Some shifted their ever-more limited resources to cover stories that would get the biggest audience at the expense of wonkier topics.  Local news – which almost never trends, and has fewer people searching for it by its very nature – struggled more.  All outlets feeling the pressure had no choice but to bombard users with more ads, or paywalls.

Information wants to be free; reporting is expensive

It’s almost a paradox; as news grows more ubiquitous online, journalism becomes less viable.  Getting through a day in the 21st century involves a never ending barrage of information and distractions,  Seeking out multiple publications covering various beats seems downright quaint when there are feeds pushing all sorts of headlines to users constantly.  

As loyalty to outlets wane, journalism becomes a commodity.  Others rewrite stories with zippier headlines or better SEO, or in the most egregious cases, practice wholesale plagiarism.  

News consumers often articulate this behavior by complaining about paywalls, especially on enterprise stories, with a sense of entitlement.  Why should I have to subscribe to read a single article? Or seeking a way to bypass the paywall, because I wasn’t going to pay anyway, so why does it matter if I still read the article?

The painful truth is that without those subscriptions, enterprise reporting – the digging into something that no one else is looking into – cannot exist.  Journalism will homogenize, or be replaced by those who are funded by more lucrative models and fewer ethics and standards.

Even with an Internet commercialized to the extreme – the one anarchist hacker ethos that remains is the idea that “information wants to be free.”  Unfortunately, uncovering that information is usually expensive.  

On the local level, real journalism is quickly being replaced by apps like Citizen and Nextdoor – still broadly engaging in what is happening nearby, though without the digging or editorial standards of a traditional newsroom.  There are still great local journalists doing the work, though as generations who matured in households without a local newspaper subscription or even a cable hookup, will they seek out local news?

What we are doing about it

Forth is a company of journalists.  We want to tackle this problem because we want to save the industry we love before it is too late.

At its core, Forth is the news feed for news.  We are leaning into the ways we see our audience consuming reporting rather than dictating how we think it should be done.  We know audiences are increasingly getting their news from social media – even though we know they don’t trust social media – so Forth has the look and feel of the platforms they are currently using.

Our feed features only verified journalists who abide by an editorial policy, to ensure accuracy and reduce misinformation. But we know it is not enough.  

Our goal is to become big enough – both in breadth of coverage and with a deep enough user base – that we can change the rules of the game.  If we can become the initial destination for news for enough people, we can sell our own sponsorships, or even explore the ever elusive subscription model.  We can change the atomic unit of monetizable journalism from the article to the headline, and we can pay our partner newsrooms and reporters a fair price to keep their reporting viable.  We can interweave local news with national stories, and mix in the verticals that audiences want. 

We’re not there yet.  

But with your support, we can succeed, and make news work for everyone again.

Please sign up for free at https://www.forth.news/signup

And if you are a journalist or newsroom leader, we would love to bring you on to share your reporting.