Journalists’ micropubs vs. big publishing
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 12 October 2006 at 12:18
Tags: Blogs, Journalism, micropubs
Shane Richmond at Telegraph.co.uk is on a roll this week. Following his much-discussed two-part post about the future of his newspaper, Richmond yesterday posted about how journalists can go it alone online.
The post focuses on Rick Waghorn, the sports journalist who left the Norwich Evening News to set up his own site covering Norwich City Football Club, rickwaghorn.co.uk. Waghorn’s bold move, Richmond writes, was inspired by a typically insightful quote from Clay Shirky in a Guardian story about Craig Newmark:
In the same way that there’s a split between the music industry and the recording industry, there’s a split between writers and the newspaper industry. The recording industry is in trouble but the music industry is not, because musicians still make music and people still care about music enormously. The people who sell plastic circles with the music on it, on the other hand, are in real trouble.
Shirky is right: the Internet’s disruption to the newspaper business model may make this a terrible time to be a publisher — but in theory, at least, a wonderful time to b journalist. As the Guardian’s Ben Hammersley has pointed out on several occasions recently, the same technological developments that are “unbundling” newspapers online and are making online, independent self-publishing an economically-viable for entrepreneurial journalists.
Cheap web hosting, simple open-source blog content-management systems, consumer electonics that produce professional-quality recordings, and high-speed residential broadband access have put the tools once only available to those with deep pockets within reach of the average hack. Google advertising gives them an instant revenue stream.
A publication run from a bedroom can now have the same reach, at least in theory, as a global publisher. As Tim O’Reilly said at the AOP conference last week, the era of “Web 2.0″ is the age of “asymetrical competition”.
Waghorn has picked an ambitiously-narrow niche to try this: But the 260,000 weekly page impressions he claims suggest that it just might work.
The viability of doing this will not rest on Waghorn’s sucess or failure: There are plenty of of success stories for journalists like Waghorn, but they are mainly on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
Om Malik quit his staff job on technology industry magazine Business 2.0 to concentrate on his successful business blog, GigaOm. His 2003 blog post about the emerging phenomenon of “micropubs” is still a great primer on the subject. His examples included the gossip blog Gawker, and specialist technology sites like Gizmodo, WiFiNetNews and PVRBlog.
Perhaps the best-known micropub is the global new media industry media site PaidContent.org. The site, founded by unemployed journalist Rafat Ali out of his east London flat in 2002, the site now makes far more money than he earned as a staff reporter on technology magazines. The site is expected to announce the launch of UK-specific edition of the site next week.
But the micropub business model doesn’t just work for the Internet’s high-traffic topics of celebrities and technology. Serious political journalism can also work this way.
Joshua Micah Marshall, who started as a freelance writing for some of America’s highbrow political magazines, now runs a mini media empire centred on his hugely successful political blog, Talking Points Memo. For one of his sites, TPM Muckraker, Marshall hired journalists who are now doing original investigative reporting on American politics.
Rick Waghorn may not be the first to take this approach to journalism, and he certainly won’t be the last.
Update: See also Roy Greenslade on the same topic.
Tags: Blogs, Journalism, micropubs
