[I first published this entry on one of my earlier blogs, 'JosSchuurmans.com', powered by Blogger.com, on December 12, 2001]

::ADVERTORIAL::

Internet journalist seeks Nordic partners

HELSINKI, December 2001 – As a journalist-entrepreneur living and working in the Finnish capital Helsinki, I am currently setting up a partner network for context provisioning over the Internet, with an appeal to colleagues in the Nordic countries to get in touch.

"Journalists don’t scale very well," reads the infamous quote by Nick Denton, a former correspondent for the Financial Times and The Economist, initiator of First Tuesday, and founder of Moreover.com, one of the Web’s most popular news syndication services.

Nick is quite right – it is a serious business challenge for independent journalists to scale their produce so that they could capitalize more than once on the same research effort. As a rule, their copy has to be timely, exclusive, and tailored to the tone, style, and length required by their portfolio customers. Therefore, their output is nearly non-scalable by nature and their regular customers can often be counted on one hand.

Journalistic content is abundantly available on the Internet. News is becoming a commodity, and as European online publishing strategist Monique van Dusseldorp has accurately pointed out, the willingness of originators to pay for the distribution of news seems greater than the willingness of end-users to pay for it. This means that both online publishers and independent content producers like journalists, will have to rethink their business logic.

The value proposition of journalism is shifting from quantity to quality. From coverage to interpretation. Small and medium-sized content producers will have to do what the larger media houses have done for several years now: standardizing editorial workflows and repackaging output. "Independent content producers have two great advantages.

First, they are more flexible and service-driven than many a nine-to-five salary journalist. Secondly, they often have a higher-quality network of sources, and they likely have a niche expertise. Charles Darwin said that the most adaptive will survive. In this industry, the survivors will be the ones able to shift their mindsets from regarding freelance colleagues primarily as competitors, to seeing them as potential partners in a content offering of complementing value.

There is a window of opportunity in the Nordic region for independent journalists who want to scale their content offering without turning into software engineers or dot-com sales reps. The Nordic region is interesting because of a combination of properties. It is a large geographical area with a fairly homogeneous culture, way of life, living standard, political system, socio-economic structure, population density, and focus on high-end design and knowledge-intensive industries.

This is where the networked information societies are being invented in a more socially sustainable way than in most of the rest of the world. The world has a lot to gain by understanding this region. With people ‘on the ground’ in these countries, very neat and round content service packages can be put together. Such a window to the Nordics seems particularly viable since each of these countries has its own language, and lacks the scale for a wide availability of English sources.

I would encourage colleagues from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to explore the possibilities of building a network that could provide each partner with the following added value:

• An opportunity to publish "beyond the news" and to offer context from an insider perspective – providing greater personal satisfaction, and fostering the reputation of the niche expert writer.
• Sustained independence.
• An increased Internet presence for the contributor, by joining an innovative partner network and interactive publishing community, with the possibility to provide autobiographic and contact information.
• The opportunity to enhance the exposure among their target customer community by participating in online discussions and collaborative productions.
• The network to build partnerships that can produce and market content products and services together – in a scalable way.
• The professional information, the target community, and the application tools to build a scalable business – that is, to handle more customer demand than one could manage without the network.
• An opportunity to share or outsource the effort and cost associated with ideation, research, production, marketing, acquisition, sales and after-sales.
• First and foremost: to be part of an exciting new venture with the ambition to push the concept of interactive context provisioning beyond its current borders.