EFTA01122724.pdf

Page I of 41 SyzygyCon Pre-Reading Materials Contents: 1. Prizes overview and ideas 2. Journalism overview and ideas a. Crowdfunding idea in depth 3. Capitalism and LIFG overview a. Moral nature of capitalism in depth EFTA01122724  Page 2 of 41 SyzygyCon Prizes Conversation Explore creating a uniquely designed prize that leverages our assets to address an issue that Reid cares about, such as entrepreneurship, public intellectualism, and human ecosystems. PRIZES, PRIZES, PRIZES Whether we're recognizing superior acting performances or the most significant contributions to economic theory, or attempting to spur innovation in the realm of robotic cars, prizes are an effective mechanism for capturing the public's attention, spurring innovation, and encouraging various kinds of behavior. In its 2009 report on the prize sector, "And the Winner Is...," McKinsey & Co. notes that there are now more than 200 prizes with awards of $100,000 or more each year. More than 60 of them, with a cumulative purse of more than $250 million, have debuted since 2000. Since this report was published, several even larger prizes, including the now-largest prize in the world, the Fundamental Physics Prize, and a related prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, have debuted. In addition to all this activity in the private sector, the Obama Administration officially endorsed prizes in 2009/2010 as a way of solving problems and increasing government agency efficiency. Awards, Honors, and Prizes, the main annual directory of prizes, now lists more than 30,000 different prizes each year. Here's a few reasons they're so popular, especially as a form of philanthropy: • Prizes are extremely efficient forms of investment as they reward only outcomes, not efforts. • For a prize purse of X dollars, you generate substantially more than X dollars in terms of output. In other words, when you establish a prize to invent some new kind of technology, the individuals and companies who pursue the prize may collectively invest more time and money into pursuit of the prize than that total amount of the prize offered. EFTA01122725  Page 3 of 41 • Innovation and incentive prizes motivate everyone who participates to develop and improve skills, not just those who end up winning. • You generate more interest from more possible innovators thanks to the competitive nature of the "grant" and because of the status boost afforded to the winner. While the popularity of prizes is a testimony to their efficacy and appeal, the increasingly crowded prize sector also means it's harder to stand out and easy to duplicate coverage. As the McKinsey report notes, the burden is on the philanthropist to explain why the world needs another recognition prize! Still, the positive results that many prizes produce suggest that this is a powerful mechanism to leverage, with the potential to create substantial social impact. PRIZE TYPES Prizes tend to fall into two major categories: Recognition and incentive. Recognition prizes are present for specific achievement involving effort initiated independently of the prize competition. Some popular examples include: • Nobel Prize • Pulitzer Prize • PEN Award • MacArthur Genius Prize Incentive prizes encourage participants to pursue a specific goal that the prize-offerer has set. Some examples include: • DARPA driverless car challenge EFTA01122726  Page 4 of 41 • Netflix algorithm challenge (improve Netflix's recommendation engine performance by 10 percent) • Google Lunar X Prize ($30 million prize to first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon and have it conduct a specific series of tasks) • Ansari XPRIZE (competition to build a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the earth's surface twice within two weeks) In the case of incentive prizes, there are also at least two ways to structure them to achieve different ends: • You may ask participants to engage in some specific quest that will ultimately lead to an innovation (usually product-based) that has some societal benefit. ("Invent a $200 robot!") • You could ask participants to engage in some kind of behavior that promotes social good. (Imagine a contest that gives a prize to the town that achieves the greatest reduction in energy usage over a given period.) Either a recognition or an incentive prize can potentially be the right choice. INNOVATE IN PRIZE REWARD One reasons prizes are popular is because they give such clear-cut rewards — most often a large sum of money. As large-purse prizes grow increasingly common, however, the ability to attract attention and interest simply by offering a million dollars diminishes some. In addition, McKinsey's research shows that the size of the purse is generally not the greatest motivating factor — the chance to compete and win is. All of this suggests that one way to appear distinct in the prize sector would be to offer some kind of twist or innovation in terms of the reward, instead of just relying on the sheer brute impact of money. Other potential creative rewards include: EFTA01122727  Page 5 of 41 • Equity in a start-up • Bitcoins • Highly desirable job (similar to The Apprentice, but would have obvious synergy with LinkedIn) • Experiential reward, such as a future trip on a commercial space flight, coaching from elite mentors, etc. • Unique work of art created by some acclaimed artist to your own specifications • Other rewards that would allow the prize-winner to essentially capitalize on their own ingenuity to increase the value of the prize through their own entrepreneurship or public intellectualism. (In other words, if the prize is that some famous artist or super-smart coder is at my service for X number of hours, I can theoretically determine the value of my prize depending on how imaginatively/shrewdly I direct them to work on my behalf.) INNOVATE IN PRIZE FREQUENCY Most prizes have the worst "publishing" frequency in today's current media climate -- i.e., they happen once a year. That's one reason for the huge increase in prize sized. To get attention for your once-a-year media op, you have to make the reward huge. Another strategy is simply to increase prize frequency. For example, it may be more effective to create a prize that happens on a monthly or even weekly basis than one that happens once a year, even if the greater frequency results in smaller rewards. American Idol, which is arguably the most popular "prize" created in the last few decades, works on this principle. While it doesn't actually award a final prize every week, each person who makes it through a given week is essentially winning a prize of sorts (the invitation to continue competing for the prize). EFTA01122728  Page 6 of 41 Thus, it becomes an event that happens for months on end, rather than just a single evening or span of a few days, and as a result, huge numbers of people eventually become aware of it. INNOVATE IN USE OF TECHNOLOGY/ MOBILE/ SOCIAL INNOVATIVE IN HOW YOU ENGAGE THE MEDIA, RUN EVENTS, OR OTHERWISE GENERATE BUZZ INNOVATE IN PRIZE JUDGING (IF RECOGNITION PRIZE) With many incentive prizes, there are relatively clear-cut guidelines for determining a winner. With recognition and some incentive prizes, judges are usually called on to determine a winner. In the realm of entertainment- oriented prizes, the public sometimes serves as the judge (People's Choice Awards, American Idol, etc.) Since raising awareness and creating engagement is often a key goal of creating a prize, asking the public to serve as judge is perhaps an underutilized aspect of the prize landscape. This is especially true for realms like science or humanitarianism, where in large part the purpose of the prize is to engage the public, model specific kinds of behavior, raise awareness about various issues, etc. Asking the public to make determinations about the most significant scientific breakthroughs of a given year might undermine the prize's authority if the public ends up honoring individuals or innovations of dubious value. But such a prize would also transfer responsibility and authority to the public in ways that Nobels, Pulitzers, and other similar prizes have never done, and thus could result in unprecedented engagement as well. SOME SPECIFIC POTENTIAL PRIZE IDEAS TO DISCUSS • Prize that rewards elected official for an act of political courage. Essentially, the prize would be designed to reward acting on principal EFTA01122729  Page 7 of 41 and in the interest of the public instead of acting on behalf of political expediency, party loyalty, etc. o Engage a broad group of journalists to be the curators and promoters of the prize, to help with subsequent media buzz. o Have the event on the 4th or 5th of July to reinforce themes of 5ch of July Speech by Frederick Douglass • Prize that rewards micro-entrepreneurship. The goal would be to encourage best practices that would increase the productivity of all participating in the contest, so that even those who don't win would see positive results because of their engagement. The prize would also ultimately showcase services/products/processes that others would then be likely to emulate, and provide capital to those micro- entrepreneurs who are best positioned to expand their businesses. • Prizes that rewards intellectual discourse o High school student version ■ Prize for best essay from high school students. ■ The top essays are all assembled into a book, which is donated to libraries. • Prize that rewards corporate ethical behavior • Prize for the immigrant who creates the most U.S. jobs in one year • Prize that rewards the organization that can upskill a cohort of people most effectively in a 6 —12 month period. This prize would attempt to spur innovation and activity in addressing the skills gap that has left us with both high unemployment numbers and lots of unfilled jobs. While there are a number of organizations, including the Department of Defense and a national non-profit called Year Up that have had strong success creating accelerated learning programs that aim to imbue participants with high-value skills within a year or less, these programs aren't as wide-spread or as well-known as they could be. Creating a competition that encouraged these and other organizations would help publicize the fact to potential participants and potential employers that suggest programs exist, and it would also encourage new organizations to enter the field. (This prize suggested by Andrew EFTA01122730  Page 8 of 41 McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, co-authors of the book The Second Machine Age, and principals at the MIT Center for Digital Business.) • Art prize. A prize that rewards outstanding painting, sculpture, photography. Yet more ideas... • A weekly prize that promotes news readership. (I.E., a quiz that asks questions based on news stories that happens that week. If you get all the answers right, you earn an entry into a drawing for the prize, which is $10,000.) • A prize that awards the top student, or students, in a set of MOOCs. Ideally, this prize would be co-sponsored by a specific company. The goal is to promote MOOCs as a viable alternative to college as a means of giving people the skills that employers are actively looking for. So, Company X might select six MOOCs that could reasonably prepare a person to fill a job at the company. The person who gets the highest cumulative score on the final exams of these six courses would win the prize — a large sum of money $50,000 to $100,000 -- and an internship at the company who co-sponsored it. • Prize that rewards personal networks/mentorships: If you are the winner, you have to distribute a majority percentage of the purse to others who have been extremely helpful/influential in your life. [This could also be a twist on any other themed prize: the winner must give a portion of it to their network.] Prize / Journalism Hybrid Idea: Silicon Valley Review of Books. Silicon Valley is the most important place on Earth now. It has the world's greatest concentration of brainpower. It needs an explicit, vibrant intellectual life, people thinking in incisive, entertaining, and illuminating fashion about all the issues technology is bringing to the fore (income polarization, EFTA01122731  Page 9 of 41 individualism, privacy, automation, etc.) and a venue in which to think about them. An ideal way to do this is through the lens of books, which have always been the medium most associated with intellectual thinking. Pairing Silicon Valley, land of the iPhone and Twitter, with old-fashioned books will grab people's attention via the intentional irony. But more than that, thinking about books through the lens of Silicon Valley will create a unique outlet in the realm of book reviews: one that is devoted primarily to books about technology, entrepreneurship, privacy, hacking, and innovation, topics which traditional book review sections have usually given short shrift. How It Would Work Silicon Valley Review of Books is a digital publication. Every Sunday, it publishes five book reviews on five different books, from contributors who've been assigned the review from an editor. The reviews are approximately 1000 — 2000 words long. Each contributor is paid $500 for his/her review, and is also competing for a $5000 weekly prize. Determining the winner is a matter of metrics. Page views, social media mentions, user comments about the review, and Amazon.com purchases of the book, through an affiliate link attached to the review, all have different point values and all contribute to the review's overall score. The review with the highest score at the end of the week is the winner. Its author gets paid $5000 instead of $500. Why It Would Work These days, the chance of earning $500 for a book review is relatively rare. Getting paid $5000 for a book review is unheard of. Since there are only five reviews each week, each contributor has a 20 percent chance of getting a very generous return on their efforts. This will compel them to do their very best work. In essence, this format generates 5000 - 10,000 words of content for $7000 - or 50 cent to 70 percent words. Overall, that's below-market rates for what the New York Times pays for book reviews -- $1 a word. And yet because contributors would be paid something for their efforts, and have a reasonably good shot at being paid as much as $5 per word, which is a rate few writers will ever earn for any kind of freelance assignment, much less a book review, they will deliver their very best work. EFTA01122732  Page 10 of 41 In addition to writing at their highest levels, contributors (and their fans) are likely to try to promote their efforts as much as possible. So that $7000 isn't just a payment for content. It's a payment for marketing and promotion as well. Because of this unique facet, the Silicon Valley Review of Books isn't just a publication. It's a contest too. It generates interest through the spectacle of paying $5000 for a book review -- something no one has ever done — and creates drama through the weekly suspense of seeing who is going to win that week. All of this will lead to more buzz and more readers, which in turns leads to more exposure for interesting new books and facilitate intellectual discourse in the realm of Silicon Valley. Over the course of a year, this venture would cost between $400,000 and $500,000 — i.e., substantially less than the prize amount of many of today's top-level prizes. And yet it would likely attract more attention overall than many $1 million prizes, because of its frequency, ongoing competition, and uniqueness. It would also help restore an aspect of culture that has been lost with the decline of newspapers: The superbly written book review. EFTA01122733  Page 11 of 41 SyzygyCon Journalism Conversation If the organizations that once provided the newsgathering that is considered vital to the properfunctioning of democracy are no longer economically viable, what can be done to ensure that citizens continue to have the ability to obtain accurate, contextualized, and comprehensive knowledge about the issues, institutions, and events that impact them? NEWSPAPERS ARE DYING. SO WHAT? Democracy works best when there is an informed citizenry. Throughout U.S. history, the news media has been the primary producer and distributor of content about issues, institutions, and events that shape American life. While TV, radio, and now the Internet are all part of the overall news media ecosystem, printed newspapers are the institutions that have traditionally invested the most resources in reporting on government, business, schools, and other cultural institutions on a systematic and daily basis. Daily newspapers produce around 85 percent of all serious public affairs reporting. At their best, newspapers have held the rich, powerful, and famous accountable while simultaneously contained the "madness of the masses." They've been able to do this primarily because they maintained much larger staffs than magazines and local TV and radio station news departments. Traditionally, these staffs were largely supported by advertising. By the late 1980s, circulation accounted for only around 16 percent of the average large daily's revenue. Most of the nation's 1500 or so dailies operated as advertising monopolies/duopolies within their specific regions thanks to the high barriers to entry to the industry (printing plants, truck fleets, etc.). In their heyday, because they could charge their advertisers such high prices, they could simultaneously support editorial staffs that numbered in the hundreds and sometimes 1000s and still enjoy annual profit margins between 25 and 40 percent. In just a little over a decade, however, the internet destroyed this model. The ability to transmit information digitally, without the need for printing presses, truck fleets, newsstands, or paperboys led to the end of the advertising monopolies that once funded reporting in America. EFTA01122734  Page 12 of 41 Suddenly, newspapers found themselves with insufficient revenue to support their substantial physical infrastructure and huge staffs. That has led to layoffs and sometimes even shutdowns. Over the last decade, the newspaper industry has shed approximately 28 percent of its editorial jobs, and around 100 daily newspapers have folded. Hundreds of papers publishing on less frequent schedules have folded as well. While thousands of professional news outlets have emerged on the web during this time, relatively few of them cover local governments, state governments, Congress, and other important business and cultural institutions in the systematic way that daily newspapers have done throughout the 20th century. WHAT KIND OF COVERAGE IS DISAPPEARING In their heydays, large local dailies used to maintain city hall bureaus, statehouse bureaus, Washington bureaus, investigative bureaus, and foreign bureaus — i.e., separate units with dedicated staffers reporting on these specific beats. Typically, the national and international coverage these bureaus provided was filtered through a local lens. The Washington bureau of the Omaha World-Herald would pay particular attention to Congressional matters related to the agriculture industry, the Detroit Free Press's Washington bureau would be focused on transportation policy legislation, etc. In any given city, a local daily was most likely the greatest producer of local coverage pertaining to all of the following areas: • Local and state government administration, legislation, and services including coverage of courts, state and local agencies, school boards, local commissions, funding debates, corruption, incompetence, waste • Public health and healthcare • Industrial developments • Labor relations • K-12/Higher education administration • Energy issues EFTA01122735  Page 13 of 41 • Environmental issues Over the last decade especially, newspapers have been eliminating foreign bureaus, Washington, and even state-level coverage. According to the American Journalism Review, for example, the total number of full-time statehouse reporters declined from 524 in 2003 to 355 in 2009. While online publications and citizen journalists can actually expand coverage in many ways (think of Yelp), few new Internet news outlets give reporters the time and resources it takes to produce substantive investigative reporting and comprehensive and well-contextualized coverage of local government institutions, large corporations, etc. BUILD A BETTER BUSINESS MODEL? OR BUILD BETTER KINDS OF REPORTING? Much of the discussion around "saving journalism" has centered on the broken business model described above. I.E., if we could just find a way to pay reporters to do the work they've always done, that will suffice. For example, a common hope is to save money on print and delivery by distributing content online and then use the extra money to pay journalists. But some observers believe news media companies should take this opportunity to more substantially re-imagine how we define, produce, pay for, and distribute investigative reporting, to better engage and inform the public. (Currently, Internet users spend just 2.7 percent of their time on news sites according to Nielsen Media.) After all, today's reporters are equipped with word processors and other content management tools, phones that can record audio and video and take photos, send email, access Google, etc. In theory, any single reporter from 2013 should be far more productive than a reporter from 2003, and virtually an entirely new species than a reporter from 1993. While changes in technology have boosted productivity, and news organizations have begun to produce new kinds of content (slide shows, podcasts, data-driven infographics, etc.), most still function very traditionally. For example: EFTA01122736  Page 14 of 41 Their standard unit of content is the story (i.e. they present content in discrete chunks that are usually chronologically driven) • They emphasize urgency/immediacy over context. While a site like Wikipedia draws huge traffic in part because of its emphasis on context, virtually all digital news site continue to employ interfaces that give 99 percent of space to what happened yesterday. • They largely depend on their staff to assign and initiate reporting (No news site of any note asks their readers to determine the bulk of what they should cover) Could we rethink any of these component parts? WITH THE RISE OF SPECIALIZED NEWS S/TES, WHO WILL READ THE IMPORTANT BUT NON-SEXY STORIES? The demand for substantive civic journalism could and should be higher. How do we get more people interested in consuming important journalism? Historically, newspapers exposed the otherwise uninitiated to stories about local mayoral corruption or D.C. budget discussions by bundling celebrity gossip, horoscopes, comics, and Dear Abbey stories in the same product. They did this in part in a bid to attract the widest possible audience and taking advantage of economies of scale (and thus obtain a broad set of advertisers). The cash cow content like classifieds or lifestyle puff pieces subsidized the "serious journalism" that was bundled in to serve the public good. Online news publications don't have the same incentive to bundle disparate types of information together. Instead, publishers tend to focus on specific verticals, delivering finely segmented audiences to potential online advertisers. Many (most?) of the other specialized content sites do not focus on substantive original journalism. Consider juggernauts like TMZ, Gizmodo, or SBNation. Some new content verticals are devoted to public affairs and investigative journalism and do away with lifestyle reporting or other fluff. Two notable examples are Pro Publica and The Texas Tribune, both of which forsake profits. They distribute their original investigative reporting in local editions of EFTA01122737  Page 15 of 41 publications like the New York Times. On the for-profit side, there's Politico. In the modern media landscape, the hypermotivated read Politico; the masses read TMZ. To be sure, there are general news sites which defy this trend of specialization: Buffington Post, Buzzfeed, Yahoo News, to name a few. Each contains photos of crazy cats and important reporting on civic issues. And some people's Facebook newsfeed is a similar bundle of cats and serious news. Is bundling cats with corruption the only way to expose Americans to important stories? Or are there other ways you can increase demand for substantive journalism? (Gamification, interactive video options, etc.) CHANGE CREATES CHALLENGES AS WELL AS OPPORTUNITIES While journalism is in flux at the moment, journalism has been in flux throughout the history of this country. And new technologies have always demanded the development of new news media business models. In addition, these new technologies have also determined what constitutes news, how we value news, etc. Thus, just because certain types of newsgathering institutions are dying doesn't mean that journalism itself is dying. Instead, it simply means that journalism is changing, just as it always has. These changes are creating opportunities along with challenges. SPECIFIC IDEAS There are three pieces of the supply chain that an idea can address: the production/creation of content; the funding of that content; and the distribution of that content. Next to each idea CREATE A CROWD-FUNDING PLATFORM FOR JOURNALISM (All three) See standalone document for more comprehensive coverage of crowd-funding's potential. EFTA01122738  Page 16 of 41 BROKER SPONSORED, OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM (Funding) Keeping editorial separate from business concerns has always been a foundational concept in the newspaper industry. As a result, newspapers have never used their editorial talent to directly serve advertisers. Instead, newspapers paid journalists to create content, that content was used to aggregate eyeballs, and access to those eyeballs was rented to advertisers. But while advertisers paid newspapers billions of dollars for this privilege throughout the 20th century, they also paid ad agencies billions of dollars to create display advertising for them to run in the newspapers. In part, advertisers pay for display advertising because they want visually oriented ads. At the same time, many marketers believe editorial coverage is far more valuable than advertising, because of the perceived trustworthiness and objectivity of that coverage. Currently, professional PR people outnumber daily newspaper editorial staff by about 4 to 1, a ratio that attests to how much marketers do covet editorial coverage. Advertising that mimics the look and feel of editorial exists, but this kind of advertising, known as "advertorial," gives the advertiser complete control over the finished content. Most readers know this, and thus don't value it as highly as they might. (And yet some do value it, or are at least fooled by it. Otherwise it would not persist.) The advertorial approach don't truly take advantage of the perceived value of editorial, however. Newspapers and other news outlets could take more advantage of this perceived value by offering a new kind of content: Sponsored objective journalism. In such a piece, an advertiser would pay a news outlet to report on its products and/or services. But the advertiser would have no control over the finished product. Instead, it would simply pay the news outlet a fee to initiate coverage, and the news outlet would then proceed as if it were doing a story it had initiated itself: Assign a reporter to the piece; conduct interviews and perform research; write, edit, and fact-check the piece; publish the piece. The resulting story would be labeled differently than traditional editorial, so that readers would know the party that had paid for its coverage. EFTA01122739  Page 17 of 41 Thus, it would exist as a new form of content, and more importantly, a new form of revenue. Instead of simply existing as a cost area that needed to be subsidized by some other source of revenue, journalists would actually generate revenue through their work, and that revenue could then be used to subsidize public affairs reporting that the news outlet itself initiated. DEVELOPING BETTER NETWORKED TIPS SUBMISSION SYSTEMS (Production) Traditionally, newspapers have paid reporters to go out into the world and look for news. Essentially, they function like low-tech web crawlers, regularly scanning local institutions (courts, city hall, sports teams, local businesses) for new information. In recent decades, as communication technologies have changed, reporters have spent less and less time physically going out into the world, and more time reporting from their desks, whether by phone, email, chatroom, or Twitter. A large percentage of news stories are no longer initiated by reporters going out into the world and looking for leads, but rather by PR people pitching stories to reporters. Some stories are initiated from without as well, by whistleblowers, eyewitnesses, and other non-PR sources who have information that serves as the basis for important coverage. But while this inward-bound information can be the basis for the most important and relevant stories - see Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA — very few news outlets do much to encourage it. This is true of both digital natives and traditional newspapers. At most news outlets, any interest in obtaining information from outside sources typically manifests itself as a [email protected] email address buried somewhere on the main page. Instead of simply adding a [email protected] address to their main page, news outlets should be devoting substantial resources and website real estate to systems designed to orchestrate and automate information collection from sources (both anonymous and on-the-record). Every news site, for example, could theoretically feature a submission system that essentially mirrors its editorial architecture. There'd be a page that looked a lot like its front page, with sections for Business, Politics, Sports, etc. Thus, sources would EFTA01122740  Page 18 of 41 be guided from the start to start inputting information in a methodical and ultimately comprehensive, with no interaction with live journalists necessary. At each level, the source would be guided with questions designed to get all the relevant who-what-where-when-why context regarding the information they were submitting. Eventually, editors and rewrite staffers would vet the information, do whatever additional reporting was required, and turn it into stories. Over time, trusted sources would emerge, their submissions would move through the system faster, etc. The same motives that compel sources to cooperate with reporters now (both anonymous and on-the-record) —the prospect of mild fame, a relationship with a reporter, a sense of justice around the topic, and a status boost — would continue to compel them even though they would be initiating the information exchange process. But newspapers could also experiment with paying sources for their contributions through these automated systems, albeit at lower rates than it would cost to employ full-time reporters. In general, paying sources for information is considered journalistically unethical. But some news outlets (TMZ, the National Enquirer) do so regularly and others (the New York Times, ABC News, Gawker) have done so when the information they were able to obtain seemed especially compelling. While there are some situations where paying a source would turn the exchange into a crime, or rather, an additional crime (such as when selling classified government information), there are many instances where it is perfectly legal to pay for information. Doing so might erode the news media's cherished ability to obtain information for free, in the current climate, but it may be that paying for sources is more cost- effective than paying for reporters. Anonymity is an important variable. You could imagine a scenario where the source stays anonymous, even if he's paid, and even if he avails himself to on- going back-and-forth with the journalist through some online message system. This would facilitate whistleblowing. EFTA01122741  Page 19 of 41 AD NETWORK MARKUP LANGAUGE (Funding) Create a system whereby publications can tag stories with certain advertising attributes that make it easier for relevant and appropriate ads to appear next to the stories. E.g. "This is a positive story on Cisco" or "This is a negative story on Cisco" to better ensure that a Cisco ad doesn't appear alongside a huge negative story (thought it might incent Juniper to buy an ad!). This has some corruptive effective, of course, but it's limited because the advertisers don't influence the actual story. HELP EXISTING JOURNALISM ORGS WITH TECHNOLOGY, CONTENT MANAGEMENT, AND BIG DATA (Production) For example: "Knight-Mozilla Fellows spend 10 months embedded with our partner newsrooms. Our Fellows are developers, technologists, civic hackers, and data crunchers who are maid to work with the community inside and outside of their newsroom to develop open-source projects. Fellows work in the open by sharing their code and their discoveries, helping to strengthen and build journalism's toolbox." Another focus area could be Big Data. FOCUSING ON WAYS TO INCREASE READER CONSUMPTION OF EXISTING NEWS/INFORMATION (Distribution) Because job cuts, shrinking news holes, and disappearing publications are the most tangible effects of the changes occurring in the news industry now, solutions to the journalism crisis typically focus on creating new publications to replace those that have been lost, figuring out ways to automate the production of journalism, etc. While steps like these may be necessary, it's also important to remember that a huge amount of substantive public affairs reporting is published every day, and the public has easier and cheaper access to it than ever before. But much of the reporting that gets produced is not read as widely as it might be. Instead of focusing on producing new publications and better news creation tools, it may make sense to focus on new sharing tools, a la Upworthy.com, which uses viral techniques to promote content (not always hard news) with progressive themes, or Longreads.com, which curates outstanding examples of lengthy, well- written feature articles, or other social platforms like Reddit, Fb, and LI. EFTA01122742  Page 20 of 41 Currently, there are countless opportunities to better filter and package information that could help individuals become better informed citizens if they just had easier, more contextualized access to this information. A few ideas: • A site/service like Longreads that showcases reporting that emphasizes the best examples of investigative/public affairs reporting rather than simply elegantly told features. • A Wikipedia-like site for infographics. I.E., instead of organizing a news/information site by chronology ("what happened today?"), this site would organize itself by subject matter. And the contents under each subject would consist of curated infographics. So there'd be one site where it'd be easy to find dozens of infographics about the federal budget, for example. • A system for rewarding people who drive traffic of news stories through social sharing. People who post links to news stories on Twitter are effectively the newsboys of the 2l st century. Those who have a knack for consistently driving traffic to news stories through social sharing should be rewarded. The potential to obtain rewards would increase sharing on everyone's part. SUPPORT OTHER KNIGHT FOUNDATION PROJECTS The best way to leverage energies/investment may simply involve collaborating with someone like the Knight Foundation, which has been issuing grants to a wide range of journalism start-ups over the last half-decade, or offering support to a specific publication that could potentially benefit from more resources. A few examples that fall into this category: • Open Data Institute builds economies and businesses around open government data. With for-profit businesses depending on this data flow, it becomes harder for anyone to "turn off' the data for political reasons. • Mapbox is creating an open-source mapping system that will provide a strategic alternate platform to Google Maps for building journalism/information apps that people will come to rely on more and more on mobile platforms. EFTA01122743  Page 21 of 41 • Measures for Justice is developing an index of standardized performance metrics with which to monitor and assess the nation's court systems on a systematic basis. THE DISCUSSION... • Commentary on these ideas, either in challenges or potential for improvement or elaboration? • Other ideas that should be on this list? • References to important projects, writings, or people working on these sorts of ideas? EFTA01122744  Page 22 of 41 KICKSTARTING CROWDFUNDED JOURNALISM Build a new economic playbrm for journalism that supports democracy and promotes public intellectual culture By Ben Casnocha and Greg Beato Premise #1: Substantive journalism is critical to democracy. It's the most reliable way to move the needle in Washington D.C. and one of the best levers to improve public intellectual culture at large. Premise #2: The market for substantive journalism, whether it's investigative or just in-depth/literary, has always been a niche market with passionate advocates rather than a mass market. It has rarely been profitable for news organizations. Premise #3: The old revenue models that allowed the subsidy of this kind of journalism (classifieds, etc.) have disappeared. With the indirect subsidies gone, media companies are producing less long form journalism because it's hard for them to directly monetize this content via attracting more advertising or by luring new paid subscribers or newsstand buyers. Tens of thousand of freelancers are having a harder time being hired to report serious, in-depth pieces. Premise #4: New funding models of journalism are needed. A common solution is a philanthropist buys a media organization or subsidizes entirely a brand new news gathering organization (Bezos, Omidyar, Hughes). A more innovative approach is a hybrid philanthropist-crowdfunding model, where the audience that consumes the content bears more of its costs alongside the philanthropist. Premise #5: ReidCo possess unusual expertise in thinking through marketplace dynamics, crowdfunding, web sites and social media, and building new economic models. Elevator Pitch: Create a Kickstarter for journalism that enables freelance journalists and public intellectuals to raise money to produce writing on important civic issues. Journalists pitch ideas; the crowd funds; the organization partners with publications who can distribute the stories. Crowdfunding sites largely rely on the ability of project creators to bring funders to the site. Therefore, we seed seed the marketplace with big-name journalists who have loyal followings by offering them annual fellowships on the condition they use the marketplace to raise funds for EFTA01122745  Page 23 of 41 their stories. SAMPLE SCENARIOS Scenario I: Steve Silberman, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, wants to write a piece about corruption in the U.S. Patent Office. It would require significant travel and research time, so he posts a pitch to raise $20,000 for the piece. After reaching the funding goal, he takes a close-to-complete draft to the New York Times magazine, which publishes it with light edits. Those members of the crowd who contributed more than $500 to the campaign receive all the content on the "editing floor" that couldn't fit in the final piece, and an invitation to a conference call where they can ask questions of the author. Scenario 2: Robert Wright wants to write a 10,000 word piece on friendship in the networked age. The Atlantic is interested but cannot pay his market rate for that long of a piece, and without getting his market rate, Wright can't do it. Because he is a Fellow in our organization, he raises $15,000 from the crowd and $15,000 in matching funds from us. After finishing the piece, the New York Review of Books publishes the essay, and 24 hours later it is published on our own web site as well. Scenario 3: Steven Johnson wants to write a piece about privacy in Japan. His goal is to raise $25,000. As the crowd begins to fund the piece (Johnson's 1 million twitter followers are regularly encouraged to donate!) Wired magazine notices the activity. Wired decides to contribute $7,000 in exchange for the right to publish the story first and to be more involved in the editing process. CROWDFUNDED JOURNALISM ON KICKSTARTER AND INDIEGOGO TODAY There are journalism projects that find success on Kickstarter, where one of the categories is "Publishing," and one of "Publishing's" sub-categories is "Journalism." The Journalism sub-category has launched a number of successful projects, but it is not a hugely active part of Kickstarter. As of June 2012, Kickstarter users had posted approximately 45,000 campaigns in all areas of the site. Out of those 45,000, only 431 were posted in the Publishing/Journalism sub- category. While journalism-focused publishing projects are not a major facet of Kickstarter, a number have been fairly successful. The most striking example is a campaign from earlier this year: Planet Money, an NPR show affiliated with This American EFTA01122746  Page 24 of 41 Life, pitched a project that consisted of them having a T-shirt made in an Asian factory and reporting on the entire process. The "reward" for pledging is the shirt, which will include a QR code on it. Scan the code, and you'll get access to Planet Money's story and various other materials documenting the production of the shirt. The requested pledge was $25, and the project attracted 20,000-plus backers, over- funding by more than $540,000. I.E., they were hoping for $50,000 to complete the project, and they got $590,000. Indiegogo, for its part, hosts dozens of submissions in its writing category, primarily ideas for complete books or fundraising attempts from independent book publishers. SEED THE MARKETPLACE WITH FELLOWS AND GUARANTEED MATCHING FUNDS All marketplaces rely on seeding to gain initial traction. So a journalism-oriented crowdfunding site should partner with name-brand journalists who can bring their followers to the platform. The primary reason for Planet Money's success on Kickstarter was that Planet Money is a well known brand with a devoted audience. Planet Money directed its audience to Kickstarter to back a topic with strong appeal. In the early days of the platform, there should always be campaigns on it being run by A list journalists/thinkers who can bring their own fans/supporters to the site. "Here's a platform where you can help Michael Pollan, Michael Lewis, Robert Wright, Tyler Cowen, Steven Johnson, etc. pursue their dream assignment, exactly how they want to write it (as opposed to conforming to specific lengths, budgets, etc.)" To do this, we create year-long fellowships for a dozen name-brand journalists. They'd get $X amount for a year, and during the course of that year, they'd pitch Y number of stories/projects on the crowd-funding platform. The fellowship funds would match the crowd's funding. For example, a Fellow pitches a story that's budgeted to cost $10,000 —the crowd would have to come up with $5000, and the organization running the platform (us) would put up the other $5000. To be clear, the majority of writers who use the platform would be mid-tier freelancers (i.e. most journalists) and independent public intellectuals and academics. But the famous people help drive attention to the platform. EFTA01122747  Page 25 of 41 Don't the big name journalists already have a good economic basis? Yes. George Packer is getting paid several dollars a word to report very long word pieces. He would participate in the Fellowship program to be able to write the piece he wants to write. He may have a pet project that is not timely or seen as having wide appeal. Or perhaps he or she wants to go long on a given piece — but not long enough for a book. Very few magazines these days publish pieces longer than 10,000 words; even a 5000-word feature is a relatively hard sell for all but the most notable writers. Finally, there is the lure of more comprehensive editorial control over a piece. PARTNERING WITH NEWS OUTLETS FOR DISTRIBUTION AND FUNDING Currently, magazines like The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair serve at least three key purposes in the traditional journalism process: they pay reporters, they pay editors to edit the reporters' work, and they establish a distribution platform to get the reporters' stories in front of a large audience via print and online. If the crowd funds an article, the traditional news outlets still play an important role in distribution. Early in the funding process — or perhaps before a pitch is even posted -- someone in our organization goes to a relevant media outlet to see if