Jeff Jarvis Asks Audience To Correct His New Business Models for News

The City University of News York Graduate School of Journalism is working on a new set of business models for news. Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at CUNY, today in Aspen presented the first results of this ongoing study. Although the active director of CUNY’s Interactive Journalism Program showed himself optimistic about the chances for such models, he fervently challenged today’s audience to question his findings where they could. And well, they did.

Jarvis’ presentation (made with interesting new software from Prezi) was at the Aspen Institute Forum on Communication and Society (FOCAS).

Jarvis and his associates have been focusing on (hyper)local newsmedia, assumpting that one day the newspapers will be gone and these new newsorganisations would have to be able to come up with something to replace them – not only in content but also businesswise. All the details about CUNY’s strategy can be found at newsinnovation.com. It is already promising to hear Jarvis declare (after a lot of research, he says) that in a non-newspaper world a group of related newsblogs in a metro area of about 5 million people (like the city of Boston) could get a yearly turnover of almost 50 million dollars. Profits would reach the amount of around 17 million dollars. After three years, that is. They would have a staff of more than 400, half of it editorial.

It is Jarvis’ firm belief that íf such a structure would exist, it would not only attract the new bloggers, but “all those many many journalists that are about to lose their job or have already lost their job. It will inspire these people to go into this business and just do it.” It’s like the city that just has to be built in an inspiring way in order to attract all those people that want to live in it and make it even more pretty.

Also interesting – but on a totally different level – was the long list of revenue opportunities that Jarvis presented. Among it the expected micropayments and subscriptions, but also things like education, memberships, gift card exchanges, donations, premium products, ecommerce, ad networks and even cafes.

Most of the critical remarks were about Jarvis’ “unthinkable” assumption that there would ultimately be a society without newspapers. He had better focus on both worlds, some participants advised him. Jarvis himself didn’t seem to be very upset by these remarks though. “Anyway, there will be a lot of chaos, but out of that chaos something beautiful will come up.”

There is much more, including video, on today’s FOCAS sessions on twitter and The Ground Report. FOCAS will go on until wednesday. Goal is to come up with several other sustaining new businessmodels for journalism.

UPDATE: interesting views on Jarvis’ models on Techcrunch. “Saving Local News with Spreadsheets”