Why there can’t be a journalistic version of WhatsApp
Journalism startups have a problem: They can’t scale.
Hearing the word scaling, startup founders and investors get both big eyes. It is the reason why WhatsApp could develop a communication channel for 500 million people — with only 60 employees.
A small staff was enough to make a product and to maintain it at heavy growth rates. This characteristic is a problem for journalistic startups and publishers at the same time.
Journalism is bounded-scalable.
Scalability means that a unit of input has an over-proportional output. For Steve Blank, one of the founders of the popular Lean-Startup method it is a defining moment for a startup.
For him a startup is an “organization that is looking for a replicable and scalable business model”.
Journalism doesn’t fit into this scheme because creating content is labor-intensive:
- doing interviews and research,
- write,
- cut,
- editing
It is really hard to imagine that all these tasks could be done automatically.
From there we can derive an economic rule of thumb:
To increase output while maintaining a constant quality is only possible if the input of human capital is increasing, too.
Or as Nicholas White put it in his article “Caveat emptor: Why the current VC/Media marriage may be bad for journalism” in June 2014:
“The minimum viable product for a media company has way more human bodies in it at the beginning than the typical tech startup comprising 5 guys in the proverbial garage (read: industrial-chic coworking space with ‘free’ beer in the kitchen). Great content requires great writers, editors, and producers. You’re writing much bigger checks on day 1, and you don’t have the same opportunity to validate as cheaply.”
In online journalism only technology is scalable.
And the Content management system is a secret weapon.
Economically said: Due to strict budgets it is even more important for journalistic startups to use technological potential wisely — therefore optimal.
A website of an online magazine has two jobs to do:
1. To organize the content in the backend
2. To output the content as flexible as possible in the front-end.
The content management system is a decisive variable, writes the former blogger at Reuters, Felix Salmon:
“It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the CMS when it comes to the question of who’s going to win the online-publishing wars.”
One step ahead is in this competition Vox Media, the company behind magazines like “The Verge” or “Vox”, with its famous founder Ezra Klein.
The secret weapon of Vox Media is a CMS called “Chorus”.
Not only can Chorus organize content, but also to communicate with users, to show stats and integrates ad management. Chorus is the reason why Ezra Klein came to Vox Media in the first place: “They had the technology, we wanted to invent”, said Klein to the New York Times, in a really appreciating article.
Klein says “we wanted”, because it was not only him to leave the Washington Post. There were also people like Yuri Victor, their Developer, who seems to do really a lot of great stuff and who is a star in the small universe of news nerds.
See also strong words from New York Times journalist David Carr about this platform, Medium.com:
“Not to go all nerdy on it — well, a little — the content management system is destiny.”
Make content reuseble
Structured data are a second way, to make content reusable — and therefore scalable, because they can be kind of published more than once.
For example: Instead of reporting of an accident, you can save location, date and the number of injured as meta data. These information can then be easily displayed in one way or another, e.g. on a map or as a graph.
Lauren Rabaino, product manager at — surprise, surprise — at Vox Media — is more radical. “Kill the article” is writes about a concept she is thinking about with two ex-collagues (Ben Turner and Justin Mayo) at Seattle Times: Set an individual article in to context to other already published content.
With respect to make money: A piece of content can generate revenue more than once. The slogan “Nothing is older than yesterday’s paper” from a printing era looses ground in the digital world of saving, organizing and publishing.
So, wait: There is some scaling, but on a much slower rare. I let the journalist Reg Chua explain:
“I agree that news organizations are much less likely to be able to scale up quickly, if only because part of what they do involves slow-moving humans rather than quick machines. But that doesn’t mean we should handicap ourselves by throwing away much of what we do on a regular basis. Politifact, Homicide Watch and Connected China all build and keep data that has — at least theoretically — infinite shelf-life. And that should be value that scales over time.”
Roboter journalism as dictum
The embodiment of scaling is only one species of journalism: roboter journalism. Algorithms or sensors do the work for journalists, fully or at least partly. Human capital is not needed in the production process, therefore there is a high — sometimes nearly infinitely scalability.
In April, for example, Aexea, a agency from Stuttgart announces to automatically create sports news in eight languages. Sports news are not the limit. “It’s like a robotor-car that can only drive on a straight road without other traffic”, writes data journalist Lorenz Matzat on netzpolitik.org, one of the leading german blogs for digital politics.
Technology is resource, but not (the only) product
Growth is important step for every startup to get to a working business model. In journalism you cannot reach this by direct scaling: (high quality) content is too labor intensive.
To find a business model is hard work, using technology as much as possible is a direct way to influence the economics of a startup.
But: In contrast to less labor intensive startups, technology alone can never be (the only) the product in journalism startups.
Except for, of course, roboter journalists.
This text is a translation of “Warum es ein “WhatsApp des Journalismus” nicht geben kann” onNetzpiloten.de.
