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News on a diet

Don’t be too shocked, but a panel hosted by the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting recently mostly agreed that the saviour of traditional media will be – investigative reporting.[rssbreak]

Thing is, though, few of the speakers at the meeting held at the NFB Mediatheque had a clue how to pay for said journalism.

Paul Jay, founder of the Real News Network (RNN), an independent media outlet based in Toronto, that may soon be coming to a TV set near you (he’s applying to the CRTC for a digital channel), summed up the gist of the meeting. While investigative stories might not boost profits, they’re an essential force that can “make people feel the media belong to them.”

The audience out there is hungry for meaty stories, Jay said, as murmured agreement spread through the crowd.

“But a new funding model has to be created. People should pay for good content,” interjected CBC producer Bruce Livesay.

There’s the rub. Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank recalled his days at the Chicago Tribune, where investigative stories toppled Mafia bigwigs despite the fact that there was, alas, “no circulation or advertising benefit.” Still, he assured us, at the very least investigative reporting brings a “social good” to the media climate.

Pricey, good for us, but where’s the cash to come from?

RNN, the indie online news site, it turns out, relies on content partnerships (where companies and individuals pay for a particular story), viewer donations and selling products like DVDs. In 2008, the firm received almost $200,000 in donations. Its videos attract around 3 million views monthly.

But exactly how much will media consumers pay for in-depth, particularly online, journalism? We’re about to find out.

A call to Barry Parr, media analyst at Jupiter Research, experts in digital advertising, reveals this problem: “The news audience is so general and ordinary that it is very difficult to sell [online] advertising based on it,” he says. “Most advertisers are reaching those folks with dirt-cheap network ads.”

Recently, the Financial Times announced its new site will charge for all online access within 12 months. Editor Lionel Barber told the Guardian that the paper was seeing growing revenue as a result of premium pricing for “quality, niche global content.”

Could investigative reportage be part of other sites’ online portfolio, perhaps sweetening the deal for surfers bored with the Huffington Post’s cut-and-paste hacks?

Case in point is the online-only Boston-based GlobalPost.com. Since its January launch, it has published investigative stories on Afghanistan’s political campaigns, thieves raiding supermarkets in Spain and the fight for Nigeria’s oil wealth. Reporters are professional and get paid per story.

Users can access most of the site free, but a section called PassPort allows buyers to pay $50 U.S. a month year to read exclusive content and interviews with reporters and suggest stories reporters should cover. It’s a radically different business model, and the jury is still out.

“We want to build a news organization that has a high volume of traffic and a high standard of journalism,” says Charles M. Sennott, GlobalPost editor. “When we accomplish both, that’s when we attract the right kind of advertisers.”

Sennott says GlobalPost derives revenue from advertising, subscription fees and syndication. For next month’s G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, the company’s reporters in 20 countries will file articles about each nation.

Then there’s the non-profit model, like the Kaiser Health News, produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and non-profit bigwig ProPublica, which funds articles to be published in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Jim Barnett, who tracks this business model on his blog, The Nonprofit Road, says it answers to a different bottom line: “Non-profits measure success not by the revenues and profits they generate, but by yardsticks such as how many people read their work and the impact it has on decision-makers.”

Most of the experiments in new media business models will, of course, fail, though some will flourish. In the meantime, shouldn’t media companies fighting for eyeballs compete better with more intriguing, in-depth articles?

Sure, that might cost more money, but to paraphrase a cliché, if the model’s broke, it’s time to fix it.

news@nowtoronto.com

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