Sustainable journalism, that’s what we’re all looking for. Quality journalism that will survive and thrive despite and thanks to the Internet.

Jeff Jarvis today explained his insistence on having his journalism students develop for-profit businesses. Apparently, this raised some eyebrows among an audience of teachers of entrepreneurial journalism.

In his piece, Jeff asserts that “there is not enough charity in the nation for the journalism it needs.”

First off, this begs the question: “How much journalism does the nation need?” Free market advocates will argue that the nation needs as much journalism as there is market demand for. Charity curmudgeons and other journalism idealists may argue that there is no end to how much quality jourmalism the nation needs.

My point is, how much (quality) journalism a society needs is a subjective matter.

This is what I replied to Jeff on Twitter, and what Jeff replied to me:

. @josschuurmans Right question. I wrote about the market demand for journalism here: buzzmachine.com/2008/12/15/gua…

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 19, 2012

Now, what I’m hoping to get out of this discussion is a better grasp of the new sustainable models for (digital) quality journalism.

Commenting on the 2008 post, Bob Wyman argued that, “of course” there is demand for journalism. On the high end, people are willing to pay serious money for specialized information. On the low end, demand for free news is greater than ever.

Just to be clear: when we talk about the “need” for quality journalism, we actually talk about an ideal, a subjective measure and notion of how much and what kind of journalism our societies need.

To me, that’s the ideal of journalism as in the Fourth Estate, checking and balancing the legislative, executive and judicial powers. Journalism that is a necessary and integral part of how our systems of representative democracy work.

Of course, such journalism does not limit itself to checking the trias politica, but is equally vigilent towards any other force in society, including special interest groups, commercial entities and criminal organizations.

That’s the journalism we are talking about, at least as far as I’m concerned. If you’re talking about publishing, media, or content as a business, no offense but please take your conversation elsewhere.

I like the way Jay Rosen has compared journalism to usability. The journalist’s task is to make it easy for citizens to use their system of democracy.

So within this scope, we can omit the “high end” journalism Wyman was referring to. Specialized information that people pay serious bucks for is not the kind of journalistic produce which progresses the workings of our democracy. Y’all agree?

If it’s up to the free market – and to a large extent it is! -, there will be a severe shakeout among media entities that hold on to traditional business models too exclusively, that are too invested in traditional media infrastructure (printing presses, mainly), and whose editorial cultures don’t allow them to embrace the Internet and see digital opportunities before it’s too late.

Is there, then, enough charity and market demand combined in our societies for the journalism they need? Again, that’s a somewhat subjective and philosophical question. One possible answer is: well, it will just have to do.

The challenge, I think, lies in how the new lean-and-mean, charity-and-for-profit business models will work without being too vulnerable to corruption by political, corporate or criminal forces.

Some suggested ingredients:

• Radical transparency about the media entity’s financial interests and editorial biases.
• Radical accountability: offer meta-data with all your content, link to your every fact and claim.
• Editorial independence: produce for your users, not for your advertizers. Outsource or syndicate the placement of ads on your site. Build safeguards that deprive you of the possibility to manipulate your advertizing stream through your editorial produce, and that prevents your advertizers to influence your editorial produce. (tough one)
• Bootstrap cost structures. Customer development before product development.
• Let your users vote with their money. Freemium subscriptions and pay-per-view micro-payments.
• Charity and subsidy, why not? As long as you stay transparent, accountable and independent.
• Think local, is what I keep hearing…

Maybe the brand perception has to change from:

“the media entity whose applied standards of journalism people trust (independence, integrity, relevance, completeness, accuracy, speed…)”,

to:

“a brand that is capable of facilitating open conversation about topics relevant to its community of users, while helping to surface the facts and viewpoints that those users need in order to operate various systems within our society effectively and efficiently”.

Of course there are great challenges and catch-22s. How do you build community and engage users? How do you compete with users who prefer to cut out the middle man? How do you compete with “Internet users don’t want to pay for news”?

Some argue that there is no demand for ads. Ads are relatively easy to ignore and if you make them too intrusive, you’ll scare people away. If people want ads, they’ll go to Craig’s List. And if you inform your users really well, there will be nothing left for the ads to inform. Also, how do you serve your advertizers’ ads when people read your content via RSS or on third-party social networks like Facebook, Google+, or via third-party mobile applications?

I don’t know. Perhaps the metaphor of the club house offers some inspiration.

Anywho… I didn’t quite find what I was hoping to find from Jeff’s two blog posts. Jeff, how do you and your students deploy profitable business models for quality digital journalism? How do you assess my suggested ingredients above? What’s missing?

I’d be most obliged for your suggestions in the comments – even if your name is not Jeff

UPDATE, February 20, 2012:

@josschuurmans many start businesses, their businesses

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 19, 2012

“(…) It is only few days before the winner of the Uutisraivaaja contest will be announced.

The finalists have developed their concepts since March, and now you can enjoy the results. Watch the finalists’ presentations, and you’ll see the variety in projects and fields, and a ton of great job done! (…)”

via Uutisraivaaja-finalists, developed. | Uutisraivaaja-blogi.

Hello and welcome to Eleet!

Eleet suggests links to you that you might be interested in, based on links that you and other people have shared on Facebook.

Please, have a look. The more active you are at sharing links on Facebook, the more interesting links we will be able to suggest to you.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yKuLTyrg4&w=480&h=303]

‘Eleet’ is Finnish for ‘gestures’. http://eleet.fi is the first public link recommendation service built on a recommendation engine that is being developed through a project called ‘Project Gestures’.

Facebook is the first social web service from which we source shared links – or ‘gestures’ in our jargon. We plan to roll out similar integration with other major services on the Social Web, next up Twitter. Also, we want to enable you to submit any blog or RSS feed as a source of your on-line gestures. Just watch us

We will publish the source code of the engine’s core technology during September 2011.

During the spring of 2011, our project received recognition as it was selected to the finals of the first-ever ‘Uutisraivaaja’ (‘Newsplorer’) innovation contest sponsored by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

The Foundation is linked to Helsingin Sanomat, one of Finland’s most influential daily news papers. Inspired by the Knight News Challenge in the United States, the contest “(…) seeks ideas for improving and renewing the distribution of information. (…)”

Our project was in part inspired by a tweet from New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who wrote while linking to one of our earliest blog post on the topic:

“Imagine a personal recommendation system for news based not on consumption habits but on your gestures: authoring and sharing.”

So, the fundamental underlying principle of our engine is that we don’t analyze what you click and read on-line, but what you write and share. When you share a link on Facebook, Twitter or on your blog, that is a very strong indication, or ‘gesture’, that the topic behind the link is relevant to you.

Well, ‘nuff said. Please, take our engine for a spin a let us know what you think!

Online news reading has become very popular as the web provides access to news articles from millions of sources around the world. A key challenge of news websites is to help users find the articles that are interesting to read.

In this paper, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system in Google News. For users who are logged in and have explicitly enabled web history, the recommendation system builds profiles of users’ news interests based on their past click behavior.

To understand how users’ news interests change over time, we first conducted a large-scale analysis of anonymized Google News users click logs. Based on the log analysis, we developed a Bayesian framework for predicting users’ current news interests from the activities of that particular user and the news trends demonstrated in the activity of all users.

We combine the content-based recommendation mechanism which uses learned user profiles with an existing collaborative filtering mechanism to generate personalized news recommendations.

The hybrid recommender system was deployed in Google News. Experiments on the live traffic of Google News website demonstrated that the hybrid method improves the quality of news recommendation and increases traffic to the site.

via Personalized news recommendation based on click behavior.

On http://eleet.fi we try to emphasize the analysis of authoring behavior over consumption behavior. At this stage we don’t recommend based on content. We do apply collaborative filtering.

(Hat tip to KP)

The invite goes something like this:

Hi!

I hope you are well.

Over the past few months I’ve been working with some friends and colleagues on a project called ‘Gestures’, or ‘Eleet’ in Finnish.

We are building a website that will offer users recommended links based on the links people share on-line on the Social Web, such as on Facebook.

With this project we are taking part in an innovation competition sponsored by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. The contest is called ‘Uutisraivaaja’ (‘Newsplorer’). We’ve made it to the finals and the August 1 deadline for showing what we’ve accomplished so far is approaching fast. We will publish our source code in September.

In a recent release we have implemented Facebook integration. This means that if you log on with your Facebook account, our system will offer you some recommended links based on what you and other people have shared on Facebook.

So, this is my invitation to you to come to http://eleet.fi and see what you think of it.

It’s very early days and the system is far from perfect. You are actually among the very first people I’m inviting to come and test it. The quality of the recommended links will improve as we get more people to use the service.

Also the user interface may show some glitches as the site is still heavily under construction. Don’t hesitate to use the feedback form, even frequently!

I look forward to hearing what you think!

Cheers,

Jos

P.S.: Feel absolutely free to spread the love

P.P.S.: Looking at some initial feedback, it appears that when new people log on to http://eleet.fi , they may not immediately see links recommended to them, but in many cases they do when they come back after an hour or so. Our system needs some time to match you with other similar users, and to collect interesting links to recommend.

But in some cases, depending on the links you’ve shared on Facebook, no links can be rcommended even then. Then it’s just a matter of time when people similar to you will start using Eleet.

“(…) Minna Ojamies Pitäjänuutisten päätoimittajaksi

Paikallislehden pitää olla mukana kaikessa, mitä paikkakunnalla tapahtuu, Minna Ojamies toteaa.Ympyrä sulkeutuu syyskuun alussa, kun Minna Ojamies aloittaa Pitäjänuutisten päätoimittajana. Minna tuli lähes suoraan lukiosta lehden kesätoimittajaksi 1985, kävi Otavan opiston tiedotus- ja viestintälinjan ja palasi Pitäjänuutisten vakituiseksi toimittajaksi jo seuraavana vuonna. (…)”

via Pitäjänuutiset verkossa.

And what do I read in my local news paper this morning? My wife will be its new head editor starting September 1st. Neat!

“(…) brands need to use paid media (display ads, search, out of home, broadcast), earned media (influencer and advocate outreach programs, events) and owned media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs) to reach consumers with the same and or similar messages.

Secondly, their messages have to be relevant. The Edelman Trust Barometer indicates that individuals need to hear/read/see things three to five times before they actually believe it. (…)”

via 3 Reasons Why Relevant Content Matters | Social Media Explorer.

Interesting. So, only “secondly” do messages sent out by brands need to be relevant?

“(…) Petra Söderling, Chair of the Board of Directors at Mobile Brain Bank, tells me that there are “tens if not hundreds” of ex-Nokians who have gone on to form their own companies. In particular, from the round of job cuts that took place at Nokia in 2008/2009.

And Hanna Manninen, founder of Finnish PR firm in2PR, directed me towards a plethora of startups with former Nokia employees at the helm, such as Marko Anderson/Futureful, Jos Schuurmans/Cluetail, Kari Laurila/Newelo & Bjong, Heikki Ailinpieti/Saagatec, JP Salmenkaita/Osumus Recommendations, Harri Honko/GreyCrunch, Yasin Hamed/Sfonge, Oliver Bremer/Founder2be and Risto Suoranta/Notava, to name but a few. (…)”

via Nokia’s former employees are building Finland’s future – TNW Europe.