Here’s my (quick and dirty) notes taken during the morning sessions of the Mediafabric journalism conference in Prague. Follow it via the hashtag #mediafab
First speaker is Peter Kahler, station director of West African Democracy Radio.
Community Radio set up to provide an alternative to the ‘bad news is good news’ approach to reporting Africa.
WADR is on on air 24/7 in French and English; FM, Satellite, Online with live streaming, soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, Affiliates.
Has input from local grassroot’s people – ‘It’s you speaking’
The challenges for the station include dwindling resources, funding for audience survey/perception study, technical and training.
The opportunities include growing web traffic, the huge sense of ownership/influence, service-oriented rather than a profit driven nature.
Soundcloud gave them more than 25,000 followers and all clips are pushed to Twitter and Facebook. WADR as been awarded the Knight Batten Award. Using social media has made them into an emerging key player on the media landscape of West Africa.
Second speaker is Kunda Dixit talking about journalism for citizens.
Started by telling us that he’s was no lover of tech and a sceptic of anything with E in front of it but that things have changed: “I have gone into the with the zeal of a born again technorati”
Flicked through the television channels and what was on every channel news – cricket. Not just in sport.
“Is there any point in training students any more. They just end up feeding the voracious appetite for this. Doesn’t deal with the fact it’s keeping us poor. The public service role of media is vanishing. Unspoken contract between advertisers and journalists.”
Mainstream has abdicated its public service role. We sometime get carried away by the medium itself. We lose track of what the technology is there to do. Citizen journalism is a wake up call to the mainstream. 200,000 Nepali young woman are trafficked yet the only sex the papers cover are adultury. People who die have to do so in sufficiently large numbers, have good visuals and the victims have to speak English.
Let’s not get distracted any more by the analogue V digital debate. There’s a school divide, a health divide – these are all divides that the mainstream media should be finding solutions work.
He makes the point that to protect our freedoms we have to ensure we are relevant to our audiences.
Third speaker is James Breiner talking about digital entrepreneurs and new business models.
Journalists need to be paid. Going to talk about how ‘newsmedia have to sell the magic’.
Example of someone who has found the magic given. 19 year old American started blogging, ten items a day on coverage of the Iraq war by looking at cable networks. Did it anonymously at first because he didn’t feel people would believe him. Was bought by MediaBistro who then paid him a salary – started to get fed info, leaks. He was doing bettter coverage of TV news industry than any other publication. Independent journalist, reliant on his audience, self-made and now hired by NY Times.
Alternative revenue sources: special events, premium content, direct sales eg. retail (Telegraph mentioned), SMS services, memberships (Texas Tribune has multi levels of membership), daily deals (Groupon), marketing consultant, web consultant (examples of this across Latin America), foundations, angels, contract publishing.
Unprepared entrepreneurs: At 54 Latin American web journalism sites; 20% have no revenue, 75% were not covering their costs, 57% launched with no financial plan.
Projects that can’t work (but have done)
Capitales.com pay to find out to south American economies. Costa Rica %300 yr subscription. Sells data to 3rd parties.
Malaysiakini.com pay for English, free versions in Chinese, Tamil and Malay. $48 a year for subscription. 1.6m uniques a month.
El Observatodo $2m annual revenues.18 localised news sites up and down Chile. Each site has mix of paid journos and citizens.
Guatemala sell premium headline service via SMS. 40,000 subscribers. 6 headlines a day. $60,000 USD a month.
Elfaro. Investigative journalism in El Salvador. Has found advertisers.
A non-digital example. African Eye News Service – co-op where journalists write articles and co-op sells them. Each piece to five different non-competing media.$2.5m USD revenue. No web presence.
* These notes were compiled using the beta version of www.n0tice.com – if you’d like an invite to use the social local mobile community noticeboard too – sign up for an invite at the address above.
Dim Sum Digital 