A future for local journalism? I’m all in
Fretting doesn’t help. Time travel isn’t a thing. Let’s get to work.
Postmedia announced this week that more newsroom cuts were coming, and that as big as the challenges up to now have seemed, bigger challenges are ahead. It’s not just Postmedia, either. Buyouts and layoffs are everywhere in newspaper-land, not to mention outright closures.
I’m hearing a lot of worry and upset from journalists and people who value journalism. People are afraid of losing their jobs. People are afraid of what the work will be like with fewer to do it. People are unhappy with what those left behind are producing in the wake of cuts.
I get it.
But I also sort of don’t get it.
None of this should be a surprise. Clay Shirky saw it in 2009. I saw it when I quit the Edmonton Journal in 2011. The massive cuts here and elsewhere in Postmedia in January didn’t feel like they would be the last. The trend in this chart has been steady and obvious for a long time, and is as applicable to Canada as the United States.
The problem is not, as it is often phrased, “People just don’t want to pay for news anymore.” People never really paid for news. Our subscriptions or the coins we plugged into the box were a signal to advertisers that people with money would see their ads. And it brought in some money, which paid for printing presses and delivery trucks and some of the overhead. But journalists’ salaries were largely paid by advertising revenue. And many advertisers, whether it’s a private citizen trying to sell a used car or a big company trying to sell shoes, have found better ways to achieve their goals.
The big guys — the New York Times, Buzzfeed, that lot — are finding ways to carve out a future for themselves on a global scale. Their solutions are likely not applicable to the local context, because of the scale they need, whether their businesses are based on subscriptions, advertising or both.
If you’re in local journalism and you want to keep doing local journalism, I see three options:
- You can try to get a job at a place that seems more stable because it has other sources of funding (who knew the CBC would be that, but for now, it is);
- You can ride it out for as long as they’ll let you at the cost-cutting company you’re at or one of the other cost-cutting companies (that’s pretty much all of them right now, including privately owned broadcast outlets);
- You can go out on your own and try to help build the future.
My friend and wise counsel Sonja often tells me, “Control what you can control.” So I did. I chose Door №3. No severance. No buyout. Just the conviction that I was employable somewhere if things didn’t work out, and the knowledge that I was willing to trade security for the power to try to effect change in this field I feel so passionately about.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Sure, easy for you to say. I’ve got responsibilities.” Well, it’s not easy. I’ve got two kids and a husband who is not able to work (though he helps me in innumerable other ways). I’ve got a mortgage and bills and no benefits beyond Blue Cross, and more guilt than I can handle sometimes about the financial consequences of my choice. But I did this on purpose, and I own that choice.
My first foray into entrepreneurial journalism was a local podcast network. It’s kind of journalism-adjacent, but I could see the potential for creating system to support local podcasters in their work while providing local advertisers with a new way to reach customers, and maybe spin that into something that generates enough revenue to support a new kind of local journalism. It’s still a good idea, but I’ve learned over the past year and a half that it’s going to take more time and money than I have access to right now. A plan is in the works to see about solving that. The dream is far from dead, but it is deferred.
When I could see I would run out of savings before I could get that idea off the ground, it would have been wise to get a job. But something else came along that I didn’t want to say no to.
After Postmedia amalgamated newsrooms in January and sent many journalists out the door here in Edmonton and in other Canadian cities, my friend Mack Male came to me and said, “We have to do something.” We’ve been talking about the future of local journalism ever since we met, when he was a blogger and I was running edmontonjournal.com. It was time to stop talking and start doing
He had this idea to create a way to pay for the kind of local journalism that would be increasingly rare as the cuts kept coming. Something that wasn’t advertising-supported, as digital revenues on local stories are minuscule. Something that wasn’t paywalled, because good stories should be read by as many people as possible. Something different, drawing on the growing movement in local journalism in North America that values curiosity and community and sees the potential for a business in that.
We started meeting regularly, and I would often say, “Mack, I love this idea so much. And I can’t do it.” I could not afford another venture that was too young to pay me.
And yet.
Every meeting was so invigorating. We believed the same things. We could see the same path. He knew how to do things that I didn’t know how to do. I had editorial experience he valued. The idea kept taking shape despite my protestations.
But sometimes you have to kill your darlings, right? I almost did. Stretched to the max, scared about money, exhausted by the hustle, I went to my mentors and said, “Help me decide what to drop. I can’t keep this up.” We made a weighted matrix, evaluating everything I was involved in by the factors that were important to me, to help me prioritize. I thought this as yet unnamed project with Mack would get the boot, and I could say, “Look, great idea, but I have to drop it, because science.”
When I looked at the scores, though, it ranked high enough to survive. Did I subconsciously put my thumb on the scale? Maybe. Even if I did, I’m glad. Taproot Edmonton was born.
Mack put up the landing page in time for me to plug it at a future-of-journalism event I was involved in at the end of May. I managed to speak coherently enough about it even though I was sleeping at the hospital at that time as my daughter recovered from back surgery. And we just kept putting one foot in front of the other, testing our hypotheses every step of the way:
- If we ask people to pay for a membership in Taproot, will they? Yes, some did before we had anything more than an idea and our reputations.
- If we ask members for story ideas in the form of a “how” or “why” question about Edmonton, will they ask good ones? Yes, lots.
- If we ask members to upvote other members’ questions to signal to us whether to assign the story, will they? Yes.
- If we invite freelancers to join Taproot and take on stories that members are curious about, will they? Yes.
- If we publish a story, will more people join? Yes.
- If we talk about Taproot, say in a blog post or in a video or at DemoCamp or at Launch Party, will people join? So far, yes.
- If we show the whole process, will we get feedback that leads us to other revenue streams? Things are looking promising.
- If we build a financially sustainable business that publishes curiosity-driven local stories here, can that method be transplanted to other cities where mainstream local media is shrinking? That’s the hope.
And so it goes. We have more stories in the works, some funding requests awaiting answers, a plan for improvements to the member experience. We have enough money to pay our writers a decent freelance rate, but not enough yet to pay ourselves, so progress is slower than we’d like. But we’ve made such great headway in just a few months. Something is better than nothing. We’re going to keep going.
I can hear you. “How is that piddly thing going to save local journalism? Where’s the scale? If it doesn’t even support you, how’s it going to support all of these people who have lost their jobs?”
All I can tell you is that everything starts small. The Edmonton Journal was three guys in the back of a fruit store when it started. I believe in Taproot. I believe in Mack. I believe that if this isn’t the answer, it will lead us to the answer, or at least part of the answer. And even if it doesn’t work at all, I’d much rather do this than wring my hands and wonder how much worse things will get.
Of course, I wish I’d started sooner. I wish I’d started when I still had savings, or when I had a steady contract, or when I was still working at the Journal, pulling down a good salary and benefits. But I didn’t. The second-best time to start, and the only time available to us without a Tardis, is now.
You can help us go faster if you join Taproot. If you think this is a dumb idea, but you still care about local journalism, then start your own thing. A lot of space is being vacated by the big players, and that means a lot of us can move in and grow. Is there security and stability in this world of a thousand flowers blooming and crazy ideas that just might work? No. But there isn’t much security and stability in legacy media either. And it’s way more fun to be growing than shrinking.
