Chris O’Brien

What Can Virtual Goods Teach Us About Paying for News?

// February 8th, 2010 // Comments Off // Financial, Games & Virtual Worlds, MediaShift IdeaLab, facebook, max levchin, ohai, slide, susan wu, techcrunch, virtual goods, zynga

Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online?

On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it’s greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers’ actions, the exact opposite is true.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People are expected to spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods this year in the U.S. alone. The emergence of this market, I think, is one of the most important business trends on the web. In Silicon Valley, it’s reshaping assumptions about online business models. As the focus on ad-driven models loses favor, the virtual goods market is generating a lot of interest.

Lessons for the News Business?

Does the rise of the virtual goods economy have any lessons for the business of news and information? I think so, but I’m not sure exactly what they are. And that’s why I’m writing this post. I want to share some of my thinking about virtual goods and news. I’m throwing it out there in hopes of sparking a discussion, or catching the eye of some entrepreneurs (or future News Challenge applicants?) who might take this a step further.

The phenomenon of virtual goods confounded and fascinated me for a long time. I couldn’t get past the absurdity of spending money on such trivial things. And part of me was in denial that so many people were doing it.

My thinking began to shift when I visited the folks at Second Life last fall. It’s a company that had been written off by many, but which is in fact still growing and is profitable. Rather than rely on advertising, the “in-world” economy revolves around the buying and selling of virtual goods. This revenue stream has continued to grow and enabled Linden Lab, which created Second Life, to do just fine during the economic downturn.

Consider, also, the success of Zynga, the social gaming company that created mega-hits Farmville and Mafia Wars for the Facebook platform and other social networks. From nowhere, Zynga has grown to 750 employees in just 2.5 years, and has 300 job openings. That means it’s almost as large as Facebook, which has 1,100 employees. One of Zynga’s prime sources of revenue is virtual goods.

Or check out this interview that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington did with the founder of Slide, Max Levchin. In this chat, Levchin explained how Slide, which makes many of the most popular widgets on Facebook, has moved from an ad-based business model to one built around virtual goods:

Levchin discusses the “shift from advertising to virtual goods” and reveals that most of Slide’s revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that it is no longer focussed on advertising says a lot about the prospects for social ads.

The True Value of Virtual Goods

The person who helped me begin to get my head around this was Susan Wu, a virtual goods pioneer and former venture capitalist who has started an online gaming company called Ohai. Here’s what she understood early on about the value of virtual goods: In the real world, we have all sorts of intangible interactions, from shaking hands to smiling to offering blessings. The value of virtual goods is not about the object, but rather its ability to express an emotion or feeling in a way that has value.

“Sending someone a virtual beer is not about the beer,” Wu told me. “It’s a way to show, ‘I have an affection for you.’ It’s the same reason people have bought bouquets or other ostentatious gifts — to demonstrate a feeling.”

She pointed me to a post, “Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model,” she wrote for TechCrunch outlining her vision of virtual goods. That was published in 2007. It’s a good starting point if you want to dig into this topic.

Applying it to News

I’ve been trying to apply this framework to news. I think it provides an interesting, and different way, of thinking about where the true value lies: Not in the thing itself, but in something adjacent to the thing, some feeling you have about it, or something you can do with it in terms of expressing yourself.

Is there a feeling or emotion or something around consuming or sharing news that possibly has some value that can be captured and expressed?

Are there virtual goods that news organizations could create that would entice people to spend some money?

And are there models in social gaming that provide structural lessons for news organizations of all shapes and sizes that would demonstrate better and more powerful ways to harness the power of social networks?

I think the answer to all of these questions is, “Yes.” But that said, I don’t really know. It’s still a considered hunch at this point.

I do think this convinces me that, in terms of business models on the web, we are still in early days. There’s been a lot written here, and elsewhere, that the search for business models is futile. I would agree that there is no single revenue stream that will ever replace the classified, ad-based model. I think most news organizations that are sustainable will have to be built on a vast array of revenue streams.

I’m wondering if virtual goods is one of them. What do you think? Do virtual goods have anything to teach us about the economic value of news and information?

What Can Virtual Goods Teach Us About Paying for News?

// February 8th, 2010 // Comments Off // Financial, Games & Virtual Worlds, MediaShift IdeaLab, facebook, max levchin, ohai, slide, susan wu, techcrunch, virtual goods, zynga

Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online?

On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it’s greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers’ actions, the exact opposite is true.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People are expected to spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods this year in the U.S. alone. The emergence of this market, I think, is one of the most important business trends on the web. In Silicon Valley, it’s reshaping assumptions about online business models. As the focus on ad-driven models loses favor, the virtual goods market is generating a lot of interest.

Lessons for the News Business?

Does the rise of the virtual goods economy have any lessons for the business of news and information? I think so, but I’m not sure exactly what they are. And that’s why I’m writing this post. I want to share some of my thinking about virtual goods and news. I’m throwing it out there in hopes of sparking a discussion, or catching the eye of some entrepreneurs (or future News Challenge applicants?) who might take this a step further.

The phenomenon of virtual goods confounded and fascinated me for a long time. I couldn’t get past the absurdity of spending money on such trivial things. And part of me was in denial that so many people were doing it.

My thinking began to shift when I visited the folks at Second Life last fall. It’s a company that had been written off by many, but which is in fact still growing and is profitable. Rather than rely on advertising, the “in-world” economy revolves around the buying and selling of virtual goods. This revenue stream has continued to grow and enabled Linden Lab, which created Second Life, to do just fine during the economic downturn.

Consider, also, the success of Zynga, the social gaming company that created mega-hits Farmville and Mafia Wars for the Facebook platform and other social networks. From nowhere, Zynga has grown to 750 employees in just 2.5 years, and has 300 job openings. That means it’s almost as large as Facebook, which has 1,100 employees. One of Zynga’s prime sources of revenue is virtual goods.

Or check out this interview that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington did with the founder of Slide, Max Levchin. In this chat, Levchin explained how Slide, which makes many of the most popular widgets on Facebook, has moved from an ad-based business model to one built around virtual goods:

Levchin discusses the “shift from advertising to virtual goods” and reveals that most of Slide’s revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that it is no longer focussed on advertising says a lot about the prospects for social ads.

The True Value of Virtual Goods

The person who helped me begin to get my head around this was Susan Wu, a virtual goods pioneer and former venture capitalist who has started an online gaming company called Ohai. Here’s what she understood early on about the value of virtual goods: In the real world, we have all sorts of intangible interactions, from shaking hands to smiling to offering blessings. The value of virtual goods is not about the object, but rather its ability to express an emotion or feeling in a way that has value.

“Sending someone a virtual beer is not about the beer,” Wu told me. “It’s a way to show, ‘I have an affection for you.’ It’s the same reason people have bought bouquets or other ostentatious gifts — to demonstrate a feeling.”

She pointed me to a post, “Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model,” she wrote for TechCrunch outlining her vision of virtual goods. That was published in 2007. It’s a good starting point if you want to dig into this topic.

Applying it to News

I’ve been trying to apply this framework to news. I think it provides an interesting, and different way, of thinking about where the true value lies: Not in the thing itself, but in something adjacent to the thing, some feeling you have about it, or something you can do with it in terms of expressing yourself.

Is there a feeling or emotion or something around consuming or sharing news that possibly has some value that can be captured and expressed?

Are there virtual goods that news organizations could create that would entice people to spend some money?

And are there models in social gaming that provide structural lessons for news organizations of all shapes and sizes that would demonstrate better and more powerful ways to harness the power of social networks?

I think the answer to all of these questions is, “Yes.” But that said, I don’t really know. It’s still a considered hunch at this point.

I do think this convinces me that, in terms of business models on the web, we are still in early days. There’s been a lot written here, and elsewhere, that the search for business models is futile. I would agree that there is no single revenue stream that will ever replace the classified, ad-based model. I think most news organizations that are sustainable will have to be built on a vast array of revenue streams.

I’m wondering if virtual goods is one of them. What do you think? Do virtual goods have anything to teach us about the economic value of news and information?

Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month

// October 9th, 2009 // Comments Off // Best Practices, Financial, MediaShift IdeaLab, berkeley, chi-town daily news, kqed, non-profit, texas tribune, warren hellman

Something that’s been lurking just below the surface of the San Francisco Bay Area news scene for several months finally bubbled up to the top last month. Financier Warren Hellman announced the creation of a new, non-profit news organization. This news organization will partner with KQED, the the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and most likely the New York Times.

The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times.

There are few details available about the project, in part because they haven’t really been worked out. But the news is emblematic of something much larger going on across the country. As various people try to figure out the future of news, the non-profit model has gained substantial momentum.

This struck me last week while I was attending the two-day UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google.

Presenters from the non-profit journalism world gave some interesting insight into how the model works and, in some cases, doesn’t. It left me with a sense of the challenges the Hellman project faces to get off the ground and have an impact. The odds are against most start-ups. And that’s no different for non-profit news organizations.

A ‘kvetch-free’ journalism conference

The Berkeley-Google conference was devoted to exploring the intersection between technology, news, and business models. It was organized by Alan Mutter, who blogs at Reflections Of A Newsosaur. You can find Alan’s opening thoughts here, and his takeaways on having what he called a “kvetch-free journalism conference” here.

Besides being hosted by Google, it was presented by the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Sponsors included The Koret Foundation, Google, and the McCormick Foundation.

There were lots of interesting tidbits about various technology trends. For notes on the conference, you can search Twitter for #mts to see all the tweets (and there were a surprising number of tweeters there). The tweets were also being captured by live bloggers on day one and day two. There were a lot of interesting thoughts on things news organizations could be doing more efficiently or effectively to increase traffic, engagement, and advertising revenue. But, frankly, there wasn’t much that sounded revolutionary or that would move the needle.

It was the discussion about non-profit models that I found most intriguing. Not because I necessarily believe that’s where the future lies, but because at this moment so many others clearly do. There are enough emerging or current non-profit experiments that over the next couple of years we should have a pretty good sense of whether or not this model is relevant and sustainable.

The NPR Model

One of the speakers at Google was Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news at National Public Radio. Weiss, who has been at NPR for almost two decades, summed it up nicely when she said that the non-profit model seemed a bit like the “flavor of the month.”

For better or for worse, non-profit news organizations represent a big departure in terms of business models from the for-profit mainstream model. In a way, it seems like some of this push is driven by a sense of resignation that a new model can’t be found to reinvent for-profit news. I don’t buy that. But, clearly, others do.

The highest profile non-profit effort to date is ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization. There’s also Investigate West, Voice of San Diego, and Minnpost.com. Already in San Francisco, there’s The Public Press and California Watch. There are many, many others out there.

In an era of financial challenges, the so-called NPR model seems appealing to many newsrooms. But Weiss delivered a little reality check. Of NPR’s $166 million budget, 40 percent of that comes from member stations and 30 percent comes from corporate sponsorship. NPR gets no money directly from the federal government, Weiss said.

She noted that folks from a traditional media background don’t always understand how hard it was to build that model. In NPR’s case, they’ve had 35 years. Of ProPublica, she pointed out that the organization was started with a large personal donation, a “lightning strike,” as she called it. But they haven’t proved they have a sustainable model.

The problem is that if the non-profit model catches on too much, then what little money that exists to support these organizations will be stretched too thin. “One girl selling girl scout cookies is cute,” Weiss said. “Two are okay. Three or more is just annoying.”

Her bottom line: “Will non-profits save us all? They’re an essential ingredient. But I doubt it.”

Texas Tribune

Another fascinating non-profit presentation came from John Thornton, a partner in Austin Ventures and chairman of the Texas Tribune. Thornton is hoping to launch the Tribune next year, and has raised $3.5 million of the $4.5 million targeted. Just last week, Thornton announced he’d bagged another $750,000.

But that money really is just a start. Thornton provided a lot of useful data and shared his spreadsheets with the conference. According to his calculations, the organization needs to raise $1.3 million in donations every year to support a newsroom of 10 full-time journalists.

Thornton said people donate $20 million each year to dance non-profits in Texas. From that perspective, he said getting $1.3 million each year doesn’t seem like big hill to climb.

We’ll see.

Perhaps the most cautionary tale came from Geoff Dougherty, a fellow blogger here at Idea Lab and founder and CEO of the Chi-Town Daily News. Dougherty’s grant was to “recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists — one in each Chicago neighborhood.” But despite his efforts, Dougherty said at Google that the support from the local philanthropic community didn’t materialize to sustain it.

Last month, Dougherty announced Chi-Town was going to re-launch using a for-profit model.

Bay Area News Project

All this brings us back to Hellman and the Bay Area News Project. UC Berkeley Dean Neil Henry gave a short presentation at Google, but he didn’t reveal much more than had already been announced. Here’s what we do know.

The goal is create a news organization that employs full-time journalists, perhaps anywhere from 10 to 15 to start. They hope to leverage KQED’s fundraising experience. And they’re exploring a partnership with the New York Times to provide content for that paper’s new Bay Area edition.

Beyond that, there are lots of blanks to be filled in. The first step is to hire a CEO and/or executive editor to actually map out what this organization can and should be, what it will do, and how it will operate. This is a tall order. And an expensive one. I had been telling folks that to find someone with the right set of skills and experience, they’d have to be paid well over six figures in salary.

Then I saw Mutter’s post that included information about the top salaries paid to ProPublica editors. Editor Paul E. Steiger got a whopping salary of $570,000 while the number two editor pulled in $296,370. Whoa. That will eat up Hellman’s money right quick.

This leads to my own reality check: $5 million sounds like a lot. But it’s not. Not when you’re talking about starting an actual news organization with paid reporters. The same day the project was announced, I happened to be visiting a start-up in San Mateo called Caring.com, which produces content related to elder care. The CEO said he needed to raise “a little money” to get through the next year, about “$5 million or $6 million dollars.” That would sustain an online-only content start-up with a staff of 14 that already has a growing revenue stream.

All of this is to say that $5 million is purely seed money. KQED and the other parties are going to need to put serious fundraising muscle behind this. They still need to hire a CEO, executive editor, and staff. It’s going to be some time before it’s having any impact on the ground.

The reaction to Hellman’s project has ranged widely, and I must say I’m quite surprised. On the positive side, David Cohn weighed in with advice for Hellman, including to hire folks who think “web first.”

But not everyone was giddy. Popular local blogger Greg Dewar, who writes the N-Judah Chronicles on the Njudah blog, tweeted: “this Hellman/KQED/UCB J School thing sounds like a disaster in the making, at least for us who don’t have wealthy financiers…”

And Suzanne Yada tweeted: “@mediatwit I am only officially speaking for myself re: Public-Press. But yes, I feel like Hellman ganked our model & left us to dry TBH.” The Public Press, for which Yada does some work, had been operating through bootstrapping and small grants.

The East Bay Express worried that this project “threatens traditional news media in the Bay Area, because it will rely on 120 journalism students at Cal who will work for free.”

I think the fears of the other local and hyper-local news start-ups are valid. Hopefully, the organization will take a collaborative approach that builds the news ecosystem.

Finally, if you want to hear from some of the folks involved in Hellman’s project, check out this interview from KQED’s Forum:

Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month

// October 9th, 2009 // Comments Off // Best Practices, Financial, MediaShift IdeaLab, berkeley, chi-town daily news, kqed, non-profit, texas tribune, warren hellman

Something that’s been lurking just below the surface of the San Francisco Bay Area news scene for several months finally bubbled up to the top last month. Financier Warren Hellman announced the creation of a new, non-profit news organization. This news organization will partner with KQED, the the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and most likely the New York Times.

The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times.

There are few details available about the project, in part because they haven’t really been worked out. But the news is emblematic of something much larger going on across the country. As various people try to figure out the future of news, the non-profit model has gained substantial momentum.

This struck me last week while I was attending the two-day UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google.

Presenters from the non-profit journalism world gave some interesting insight into how the model works and, in some cases, doesn’t. It left me with a sense of the challenges the Hellman project faces to get off the ground and have an impact. The odds are against most start-ups. And that’s no different for non-profit news organizations.

A ‘kvetch-free’ journalism conference

The Berkeley-Google conference was devoted to exploring the intersection between technology, news, and business models. It was organized by Alan Mutter, who blogs at Reflections Of A Newsosaur. You can find Alan’s opening thoughts here, and his takeaways on having what he called a “kvetch-free journalism conference” here.

Besides being hosted by Google, it was presented by the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Sponsors included The Koret Foundation, Google, and the McCormick Foundation.

There were lots of interesting tidbits about various technology trends. For notes on the conference, you can search Twitter for #mts to see all the tweets (and there were a surprising number of tweeters there). The tweets were also being captured by live bloggers on day one and day two. There were a lot of interesting thoughts on things news organizations could be doing more efficiently or effectively to increase traffic, engagement, and advertising revenue. But, frankly, there wasn’t much that sounded revolutionary or that would move the needle.

It was the discussion about non-profit models that I found most intriguing. Not because I necessarily believe that’s where the future lies, but because at this moment so many others clearly do. There are enough emerging or current non-profit experiments that over the next couple of years we should have a pretty good sense of whether or not this model is relevant and sustainable.

The NPR Model

One of the speakers at Google was Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news at National Public Radio. Weiss, who has been at NPR for almost two decades, summed it up nicely when she said that the non-profit model seemed a bit like the “flavor of the month.”

For better or for worse, non-profit news organizations represent a big departure in terms of business models from the for-profit mainstream model. In a way, it seems like some of this push is driven by a sense of resignation that a new model can’t be found to reinvent for-profit news. I don’t buy that. But, clearly, others do.

The highest profile non-profit effort to date is ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization. There’s also Investigate West, Voice of San Diego, and Minnpost.com. Already in San Francisco, there’s The Public Press and California Watch. There are many, many others out there.

In an era of financial challenges, the so-called NPR model seems appealing to many newsrooms. But Weiss delivered a little reality check. Of NPR’s $166 million budget, 40 percent of that comes from member stations and 30 percent comes from corporate sponsorship. NPR gets no money directly from the federal government, Weiss said.

She noted that folks from a traditional media background don’t always understand how hard it was to build that model. In NPR’s case, they’ve had 35 years. Of ProPublica, she pointed out that the organization was started with a large personal donation, a “lightning strike,” as she called it. But they haven’t proved they have a sustainable model.

The problem is that if the non-profit model catches on too much, then what little money that exists to support these organizations will be stretched too thin. “One girl selling girl scout cookies is cute,” Weiss said. “Two are okay. Three or more is just annoying.”

Her bottom line: “Will non-profits save us all? They’re an essential ingredient. But I doubt it.”

Texas Tribune

Another fascinating non-profit presentation came from John Thornton, a partner in Austin Ventures and chairman of the Texas Tribune. Thornton is hoping to launch the Tribune next year, and has raised $3.5 million of the $4.5 million targeted. Just last week, Thornton announced he’d bagged another $750,000.

But that money really is just a start. Thornton provided a lot of useful data and shared his spreadsheets with the conference. According to his calculations, the organization needs to raise $1.3 million in donations every year to support a newsroom of 10 full-time journalists.

Thornton said people donate $20 million each year to dance non-profits in Texas. From that perspective, he said getting $1.3 million each year doesn’t seem like big hill to climb.

We’ll see.

Perhaps the most cautionary tale came from Geoff Dougherty, a fellow blogger here at Idea Lab and founder and CEO of the Chi-Town Daily News. Dougherty’s grant was to “recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists — one in each Chicago neighborhood.” But despite his efforts, Dougherty said at Google that the support from the local philanthropic community didn’t materialize to sustain it.

Last month, Dougherty announced Chi-Town was going to re-launch using a for-profit model.

Bay Area News Project

All this brings us back to Hellman and the Bay Area News Project. UC Berkeley Dean Neil Henry gave a short presentation at Google, but he didn’t reveal much more than had already been announced. Here’s what we do know.

The goal is create a news organization that employs full-time journalists, perhaps anywhere from 10 to 15 to start. They hope to leverage KQED’s fundraising experience. And they’re exploring a partnership with the New York Times to provide content for that paper’s new Bay Area edition.

Beyond that, there are lots of blanks to be filled in. The first step is to hire a CEO and/or executive editor to actually map out what this organization can and should be, what it will do, and how it will operate. This is a tall order. And an expensive one. I had been telling folks that to find someone with the right set of skills and experience, they’d have to be paid well over six figures in salary.

Then I saw Mutter’s post that included information about the top salaries paid to ProPublica editors. Editor Paul E. Steiger got a whopping salary of $570,000 while the number two editor pulled in $296,370. Whoa. That will eat up Hellman’s money right quick.

This leads to my own reality check: $5 million sounds like a lot. But it’s not. Not when you’re talking about starting an actual news organization with paid reporters. The same day the project was announced, I happened to be visiting a start-up in San Mateo called Caring.com, which produces content related to elder care. The CEO said he needed to raise “a little money” to get through the next year, about “$5 million or $6 million dollars.” That would sustain an online-only content start-up with a staff of 14 that already has a growing revenue stream.

All of this is to say that $5 million is purely seed money. KQED and the other parties are going to need to put serious fundraising muscle behind this. They still need to hire a CEO, executive editor, and staff. It’s going to be some time before it’s having any impact on the ground.

The reaction to Hellman’s project has ranged widely, and I must say I’m quite surprised. On the positive side, David Cohn weighed in with advice for Hellman, including to hire folks who think “web first.”

But not everyone was giddy. Popular local blogger Greg Dewar, who writes the N-Judah Chronicles on the Njudah blog, tweeted: “this Hellman/KQED/UCB J School thing sounds like a disaster in the making, at least for us who don’t have wealthy financiers…”

And Suzanne Yada tweeted: “@mediatwit I am only officially speaking for myself re: Public-Press. But yes, I feel like Hellman ganked our model & left us to dry TBH.” The Public Press, for which Yada does some work, had been operating through bootstrapping and small grants.

The East Bay Express worried that this project “threatens traditional news media in the Bay Area, because it will rely on 120 journalism students at Cal who will work for free.”

I think the fears of the other local and hyper-local news start-ups are valid. Hopefully, the organization will take a collaborative approach that builds the news ecosystem.

Finally, if you want to hear from some of the folks involved in Hellman’s project, check out this interview from KQED’s Forum:

Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month

// October 9th, 2009 // Comments Off // Best Practices, Financial, MediaShift IdeaLab, berkeley, chi-town daily news, kqed, non-profit, texas tribune, warren hellman

Something that’s been lurking just below the surface of the San Francisco Bay Area news scene for several months finally bubbled up to the top last month. Financier Warren Hellman announced the creation of a new, non-profit news organization. This news organization will partner with KQED, the the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and most likely the New York Times.

The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times.

There are few details available about the project, in part because they haven’t really been worked out. But the news is emblematic of something much larger going on across the country. As various people try to figure out the future of news, the non-profit model has gained substantial momentum.

This struck me last week while I was attending the two-day UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google.

Presenters from the non-profit journalism world gave some interesting insight into how the model works and, in some cases, doesn’t. It left me with a sense of the challenges the Hellman project faces to get off the ground and have an impact. The odds are against most start-ups. And that’s no different for non-profit news organizations.

A ‘kvetch-free’ journalism conference

The Berkeley-Google conference was devoted to exploring the intersection between technology, news, and business models. It was organized by Alan Mutter, who blogs at Reflections Of A Newsosaur. You can find Alan’s opening thoughts here, and his takeaways on having what he called a “kvetch-free journalism conference” here.

Besides being hosted by Google, it was presented by the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Sponsors included The Koret Foundation, Google, and the McCormick Foundation.

There were lots of interesting tidbits about various technology trends. For notes on the conference, you can search Twitter for #mts to see all the tweets (and there were a surprising number of tweeters there). The tweets were also being captured by live bloggers on day one and day two. There were a lot of interesting thoughts on things news organizations could be doing more efficiently or effectively to increase traffic, engagement, and advertising revenue. But, frankly, there wasn’t much that sounded revolutionary or that would move the needle.

It was the discussion about non-profit models that I found most intriguing. Not because I necessarily believe that’s where the future lies, but because at this moment so many others clearly do. There are enough emerging or current non-profit experiments that over the next couple of years we should have a pretty good sense of whether or not this model is relevant and sustainable.

The NPR Model

One of the speakers at Google was Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news at National Public Radio. Weiss, who has been at NPR for almost two decades, summed it up nicely when she said that the non-profit model seemed a bit like the “flavor of the month.”

For better or for worse, non-profit news organizations represent a big departure in terms of business models from the for-profit mainstream model. In a way, it seems like some of this push is driven by a sense of resignation that a new model can’t be found to reinvent for-profit news. I don’t buy that. But, clearly, others do.

The highest profile non-profit effort to date is ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization. There’s also Investigate West, Voice of San Diego, and Minnpost.com. Already in San Francisco, there’s The Public Press and California Watch. There are many, many others out there.

In an era of financial challenges, the so-called NPR model seems appealing to many newsrooms. But Weiss delivered a little reality check. Of NPR’s $166 million budget, 40 percent of that comes from member stations and 30 percent comes from corporate sponsorship. NPR gets no money directly from the federal government, Weiss said.

She noted that folks from a traditional media background don’t always understand how hard it was to build that model. In NPR’s case, they’ve had 35 years. Of ProPublica, she pointed out that the organization was started with a large personal donation, a “lightning strike,” as she called it. But they haven’t proved they have a sustainable model.

The problem is that if the non-profit model catches on too much, then what little money that exists to support these organizations will be stretched too thin. “One girl selling girl scout cookies is cute,” Weiss said. “Two are okay. Three or more is just annoying.”

Her bottom line: “Will non-profits save us all? They’re an essential ingredient. But I doubt it.”

Texas Tribune

Another fascinating non-profit presentation came from John Thornton, a partner in Austin Ventures and chairman of the Texas Tribune. Thornton is hoping to launch the Tribune next year, and has raised $3.5 million of the $4.5 million targeted. Just last week, Thornton announced he’d bagged another $750,000.

But that money really is just a start. Thornton provided a lot of useful data and shared his spreadsheets with the conference. According to his calculations, the organization needs to raise $1.3 million in donations every year to support a newsroom of 10 full-time journalists.

Thornton said people donate $20 million each year to dance non-profits in Texas. From that perspective, he said getting $1.3 million each year doesn’t seem like big hill to climb.

We’ll see.

Perhaps the most cautionary tale came from Geoff Dougherty, a fellow blogger here at Idea Lab and founder and CEO of the Chi-Town Daily News. Dougherty’s grant was to “recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists — one in each Chicago neighborhood.” But despite his efforts, Dougherty said at Google that the support from the local philanthropic community didn’t materialize to sustain it.

Last month, Dougherty announced Chi-Town was going to re-launch using a for-profit model.

Bay Area News Project

All this brings us back to Hellman and the Bay Area News Project. UC Berkeley Dean Neil Henry gave a short presentation at Google, but he didn’t reveal much more than had already been announced. Here’s what we do know.

The goal is create a news organization that employs full-time journalists, perhaps anywhere from 10 to 15 to start. They hope to leverage KQED’s fundraising experience. And they’re exploring a partnership with the New York Times to provide content for that paper’s new Bay Area edition.

Beyond that, there are lots of blanks to be filled in. The first step is to hire a CEO and/or executive editor to actually map out what this organization can and should be, what it will do, and how it will operate. This is a tall order. And an expensive one. I had been telling folks that to find someone with the right set of skills and experience, they’d have to be paid well over six figures in salary.

Then I saw Mutter’s post that included information about the top salaries paid to ProPublica editors. Editor Paul E. Steiger got a whopping salary of $570,000 while the number two editor pulled in $296,370. Whoa. That will eat up Hellman’s money right quick.

This leads to my own reality check: $5 million sounds like a lot. But it’s not. Not when you’re talking about starting an actual news organization with paid reporters. The same day the project was announced, I happened to be visiting a start-up in San Mateo called Caring.com, which produces content related to elder care. The CEO said he needed to raise “a little money” to get through the next year, about “$5 million or $6 million dollars.” That would sustain an online-only content start-up with a staff of 14 that already has a growing revenue stream.

All of this is to say that $5 million is purely seed money. KQED and the other parties are going to need to put serious fundraising muscle behind this. They still need to hire a CEO, executive editor, and staff. It’s going to be some time before it’s having any impact on the ground.

The reaction to Hellman’s project has ranged widely, and I must say I’m quite surprised. On the positive side, David Cohn weighed in with advice for Hellman, including to hire folks who think “web first.”

But not everyone was giddy. Popular local blogger Greg Dewar, who writes the N-Judah Chronicles on the Njudah blog, tweeted: “this Hellman/KQED/UCB J School thing sounds like a disaster in the making, at least for us who don’t have wealthy financiers…”

And Suzanne Yada tweeted: “@mediatwit I am only officially speaking for myself re: Public-Press. But yes, I feel like Hellman ganked our model & left us to dry TBH.” The Public Press, for which Yada does some work, had been operating through bootstrapping and small grants.

The East Bay Express worried that this project “threatens traditional news media in the Bay Area, because it will rely on 120 journalism students at Cal who will work for free.”

I think the fears of the other local and hyper-local news start-ups are valid. Hopefully, the organization will take a collaborative approach that builds the news ecosystem.

Finally, if you want to hear from some of the folks involved in Hellman’s project, check out this interview from KQED’s Forum:

New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50

// September 17th, 2009 // Comments Off // MediaShift IdeaLab, Technology, citysourced, docwrite, insttant, tc50, techcrunch50

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here’s a selection:

• Citysourced: The company has a platform for “citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution.” They are launching soon with a project with the city of San Jose. For now, you can sign up to be alerted when the full site is launched.

• Insttant: The site provides “real time people-generated news.” According to the founders, Insttant will use “Twitter’s public stream to generate a comprehensive overview of what’s happening in real time through headlines and visuals.” You can sign up to get an invite to the beta.

• DocWrite: An iPhone application that allows you to easily perform dictation and transcription. The sound file is automatically uploaded to a site where you can listen to it while using a window to type up the transcription. (Yes, you still do the transcription yourself.) Still, it could be handy for journalists.

New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50

// September 17th, 2009 // Comments Off // MediaShift IdeaLab, Technology, citysourced, docwrite, insttant, tc50, techcrunch50

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here’s a selection:

• Citysourced: The company has a platform for “citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution.” They are launching soon with a project with the city of San Jose. For now, you can sign up to be alerted when the full site is launched.

• Insttant: The site provides “real time people-generated news.” According to the founders, Insttant will use “Twitter’s public stream to generate a comprehensive overview of what’s happening in real time through headlines and visuals.” You can sign up to get an invite to the beta.

• DocWrite: An iPhone application that allows you to easily perform dictation and transcription. The sound file is automatically uploaded to a site where you can listen to it while using a window to type up the transcription. (Yes, you still do the transcription yourself.) Still, it could be handy for journalists.

New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50

// September 17th, 2009 // Comments Off // MediaShift IdeaLab, Technology, citysourced, docwrite, insttant, tc50, techcrunch50

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here’s a selection:

• Citysourced: The company has a platform for “citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution.” They are launching soon with a project with the city of San Jose. For now, you can sign up to be alerted when the full site is launched.

• Insttant: The site provides “real time people-generated news.” According to the founders, Insttant will use “Twitter’s public stream to generate a comprehensive overview of what’s happening in real time through headlines and visuals.” You can sign up to get an invite to the beta.

• DocWrite: An iPhone application that allows you to easily perform dictation and transcription. The sound file is automatically uploaded to a site where you can listen to it while using a window to type up the transcription. (Yes, you still do the transcription yourself.) Still, it could be handy for journalists.

Look Beyond Data When Considering New Models for News

// September 10th, 2009 // Comments Off // Best Practices, Innovation, MediaShift IdeaLab, Philosophy, design thinking, nextnewsroom, san jose mercury news, steve buttry, tim o'brien

My post last month — Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content — generated some thoughtful discussion and comments. But there was one thread that I want to highlight in order to elaborate on an important concept for news innovators.

Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point. When it comes to understanding behavior, there are two general strategies. The first is to gather as much data as possible. And in this Google-driven, engineering-led era of product thinking, this tends to be the dominant approach.

The Anecdotal And Observational Approach

But numbers and data can often obscure the important lessons of the way people behave. And that’s why I advocate for the second approach, which is anecdotal and observational. It tends to be overlooked or even dismissed. In the work I’ve done over the past two years, I’ve found this approach to be far more helpful in thinking about the opportunities for reinventing news and information.

My thinking on this topic has grown in part out of a conversation that started on Twitter between myself, Steve Buttry, the C3 Coach at Gazette Communications, and Tim O’Brien, the editor of the New York Times Sunday business section. Steve cited my post to support an argument and Tim replied that my post didn’t prove anything because my analysis was too subjective. He wanted data to support it.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. The series of tweets led to Steve blogging a response here. In the comments, Tim felt his point was misrepresented and explained himself further:

But to extrapolate from Fine’s data to say, as Chris does, and as InfoWeek does, that it shows that newspapers didn’t understand what their readers were paying for is ridiculous. I asked for any empirical data, reader surveys, etc., that outline why readers buy certain papers so we could look at that issue in a less subjective way, not one driven by Chris or InfoWeek’s assumptions. And once we have more of that, then maybe I’ll be proven wrong.

My response is in the comments here. But, again, my message to people designing new services is that there’s another way to think about the problems that need solved.

So, with that in mind, below are some key excerpts from what I wrote. I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Why Data Alone Can’t Solve Our Problems

In trying to think differently about how to deal with the ongoing news business crisis, over the past two years I’ve taken an approach that is intentionally anecdotal and subjective. I simply don’t believe that any amount of data is going to solve this industry’s problems. As I’ve worked on various newsroom reinvention and research projects over the past two years, I’ve come around to believe that the quantitative approach — putting our trust in massive reader surveys, polling data, whatever — has failed us.

Instead, I’m convinced that we need to take a qualitative approach to understanding the behavior, patterns and needs of our communities when it comes to news and information…

Why? Without listing every single study undertaken and tallying all the money spent, I think I can safely assert that over the past two decades, the news industry has spent millions of dollars accumulating data about readers and what they supposedly want. And our industry has responded by altering its products and newsrooms to produce the things that they thought the data told them that readers really wanted. Today, metro newspapers write shorter stories, with faster ledes, and publish more pictures about fluffier stuff. Our leaders have steadily used this data to make decisions that have made newspapers worse every year. Somehow, no one has stopped to consider that no industry has ever solved its problems by making its main product worse. Instead, management points to the data from readers’ survey to insist they’re doing what people say they want. The result is that we’re worse off than ever.

If a data-driven approach was going to solve our problems, wouldn’t it have done so by now? What exactly is the piece of data we’re lacking to begin to address the business crisis the news industry is facing?

I don’t believe there’s a magic data set waiting to be assembled that will lead us to the big “Ah-ha!” I don’t think we’re one reader survey away from figuring it all out. We live in an era where people turn to data as a crutch, leaning on it to give themselves a false sense of certainty. The facts don’t lie, right? Except we know that they do. A lot of such data is formed by the biases and frames through which the questions are formulated, asked, and then interpreted. The newspaper business has failed to recognize its own flawed frames. To this day, no matter what you hear from a newspaper executive, they still believe their primary purpose is to get people to read them in print. It’s why newspapers still spend so much money propping up circulation by subsidizing a large number of people through persistent telemarketing.

My intention, in the original post, was to point out that within the newsroom, these questions have been asked, and continue to be interpreted, through an incorrect frame: The belief that the primary product customers paid for was journalism. It’s not. I do think that in the newsroom, and in the management suites, many in our industry have failed to grasp the need to reinvent the business side. And even among the most experienced new executives, I think there is truly a failure to understand the dynamics of our business and our relationship to the community. While the functions in the newsroom have evolved (not as much as critics say they should, but still….), on the business side, there’s been little attempt to do anything wildly different than what’s been done before.

My perspective on the quantitative versus the qualitative approach to product design began to shift two years ago when I became a member of a task force for a project called “Rethinking The Mercury News.” In the summer of 2007, our executive editor at the San Jose Mercury News charged us with zero-basing the newsroom and re-imagining all of our products and newsroom staffing as if we were just creating the company today. Rather than hunting down piles of research data, or commissioning yet another survey of readers, we decided to conduct the research phase using the “design thinking” process. Design thinking seeks to create empathy with the user of a product by using observation and interviewing to allow you to see the world through their eyes, not your own. The goal is to “re-frame” the issues or problems in the hope of pointing toward different opportunities or solutions.

For me, it’s the anecdotes that provide better insight than the numbers…

The problem with a lot of data we’ve gathered is that you can’t always be sure the people themselves know why they do what they do, or what they really want. Or whether you’re even asking the right questions. During one of my Rethinking interview sessions, my team talked to a woman in her early 40s who spoke at length about how un-interested she was in technology and how she didn’t feel like technology played a role in her life. As she was speaking, she kept taking out her BlackBerry and checking her email. Now, if I’d called her on the phone, and asked her about her interests, I would have checked her off as a woman not interested in technology. But in observing her, I could see that she was. Was she lying to me or was she ignorant? No and no. But she clearly thinks about that topic differently.

To take another example, let’s look at young people and printed newspapers. If there is one piece of data that everyone seems to agree upon, it’s that young people don’t read printed newspapers, right? Its turns out that’s totally false. Over the past two years, as part of the work I’ve been doing for the Knight Foundation (The Next Newsroom Project), I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting college newsrooms, which are far more conservative in their journalism culture and behind the new media curve than professional newsrooms. That was confounding to me for a long time. So what’s going on? The response I heard from college media advisers and college newspapers editors has been fairly consistent: The staffs at college newspapers look around and see all their classmates reading the printed version of the college paper every day. When they get up in the morning, the newspaper bins are empty. If everyone is still reading the print version, why should they worry much about the Internet and all this new media stuff?

As I’ve considered what that means, I’ve tried this experiment a few times myself: Go into the student union and leave a few copies of the newspaper like the New York Times or the Mercury News on a table. They get scooped up pretty quick.

In fact, the generation that doesn’t read print does read a lot of print. What the surveys have really been telling us is that this demographic won’t pay to have the morning paper delivered every day. But when they encounter a printed product that’s free, is compact, and fits the way they consume news and information, and yes, usually has the crossword and comics, then they’ll consume it in large numbers. Do I think print is the future? It’s a part of it, much bigger than most folks believe, I think. How does this square with all those surveys about the news habits of young adults? Those surveys are being commissioned by news executives who are really just trying to figure out how to get young people to pay for the newspaper. They thought they could do this by altering the content. But what they really needed to do was reinvent the product form (compact, free) to fit into these people’s lives (lots of downtime on a pedestrian campus), and that’s a step that’s too radical to be considered by most newsrooms.

These are insights that I’ve gained not through studying the data, but through the subjective, anecdotal approach…In my view, the subjective approach is the strength, not the weakness of my analysis.

Look Beyond Data When Considering New Models for News

// September 10th, 2009 // Comments Off // Best Practices, Innovation, MediaShift IdeaLab, Philosophy, design thinking, nextnewsroom, san jose mercury news, steve buttry, tim o'brien

My post last month — Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content — generated some thoughtful discussion and comments. But there was one thread that I want to highlight in order to elaborate on an important concept for news innovators.

Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point. When it comes to understanding behavior, there are two general strategies. The first is to gather as much data as possible. And in this Google-driven, engineering-led era of product thinking, this tends to be the dominant approach.

The Anecdotal And Observational Approach

But numbers and data can often obscure the important lessons of the way people behave. And that’s why I advocate for the second approach, which is anecdotal and observational. It tends to be overlooked or even dismissed. In the work I’ve done over the past two years, I’ve found this approach to be far more helpful in thinking about the opportunities for reinventing news and information.

My thinking on this topic has grown in part out of a conversation that started on Twitter between myself, Steve Buttry, the C3 Coach at Gazette Communications, and Tim O’Brien, the editor of the New York Times Sunday business section. Steve cited my post to support an argument and Tim replied that my post didn’t prove anything because my analysis was too subjective. He wanted data to support it.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. The series of tweets led to Steve blogging a response here. In the comments, Tim felt his point was misrepresented and explained himself further:

But to extrapolate from Fine’s data to say, as Chris does, and as InfoWeek does, that it shows that newspapers didn’t understand what their readers were paying for is ridiculous. I asked for any empirical data, reader surveys, etc., that outline why readers buy certain papers so we could look at that issue in a less subjective way, not one driven by Chris or InfoWeek’s assumptions. And once we have more of that, then maybe I’ll be proven wrong.

My response is in the comments here. But, again, my message to people designing new services is that there’s another way to think about the problems that need solved.

So, with that in mind, below are some key excerpts from what I wrote. I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Why Data Alone Can’t Solve Our Problems

In trying to think differently about how to deal with the ongoing news business crisis, over the past two years I’ve taken an approach that is intentionally anecdotal and subjective. I simply don’t believe that any amount of data is going to solve this industry’s problems. As I’ve worked on various newsroom reinvention and research projects over the past two years, I’ve come around to believe that the quantitative approach — putting our trust in massive reader surveys, polling data, whatever — has failed us.

Instead, I’m convinced that we need to take a qualitative approach to understanding the behavior, patterns and needs of our communities when it comes to news and information…

Why? Without listing every single study undertaken and tallying all the money spent, I think I can safely assert that over the past two decades, the news industry has spent millions of dollars accumulating data about readers and what they supposedly want. And our industry has responded by altering its products and newsrooms to produce the things that they thought the data told them that readers really wanted. Today, metro newspapers write shorter stories, with faster ledes, and publish more pictures about fluffier stuff. Our leaders have steadily used this data to make decisions that have made newspapers worse every year. Somehow, no one has stopped to consider that no industry has ever solved its problems by making its main product worse. Instead, management points to the data from readers’ survey to insist they’re doing what people say they want. The result is that we’re worse off than ever.

If a data-driven approach was going to solve our problems, wouldn’t it have done so by now? What exactly is the piece of data we’re lacking to begin to address the business crisis the news industry is facing?

I don’t believe there’s a magic data set waiting to be assembled that will lead us to the big “Ah-ha!” I don’t think we’re one reader survey away from figuring it all out. We live in an era where people turn to data as a crutch, leaning on it to give themselves a false sense of certainty. The facts don’t lie, right? Except we know that they do. A lot of such data is formed by the biases and frames through which the questions are formulated, asked, and then interpreted. The newspaper business has failed to recognize its own flawed frames. To this day, no matter what you hear from a newspaper executive, they still believe their primary purpose is to get people to read them in print. It’s why newspapers still spend so much money propping up circulation by subsidizing a large number of people through persistent telemarketing.

My intention, in the original post, was to point out that within the newsroom, these questions have been asked, and continue to be interpreted, through an incorrect frame: The belief that the primary product customers paid for was journalism. It’s not. I do think that in the newsroom, and in the management suites, many in our industry have failed to grasp the need to reinvent the business side. And even among the most experienced new executives, I think there is truly a failure to understand the dynamics of our business and our relationship to the community. While the functions in the newsroom have evolved (not as much as critics say they should, but still….), on the business side, there’s been little attempt to do anything wildly different than what’s been done before.

My perspective on the quantitative versus the qualitative approach to product design began to shift two years ago when I became a member of a task force for a project called “Rethinking The Mercury News.” In the summer of 2007, our executive editor at the San Jose Mercury News charged us with zero-basing the newsroom and re-imagining all of our products and newsroom staffing as if we were just creating the company today. Rather than hunting down piles of research data, or commissioning yet another survey of readers, we decided to conduct the research phase using the “design thinking” process. Design thinking seeks to create empathy with the user of a product by using observation and interviewing to allow you to see the world through their eyes, not your own. The goal is to “re-frame” the issues or problems in the hope of pointing toward different opportunities or solutions.

For me, it’s the anecdotes that provide better insight than the numbers…

The problem with a lot of data we’ve gathered is that you can’t always be sure the people themselves know why they do what they do, or what they really want. Or whether you’re even asking the right questions. During one of my Rethinking interview sessions, my team talked to a woman in her early 40s who spoke at length about how un-interested she was in technology and how she didn’t feel like technology played a role in her life. As she was speaking, she kept taking out her BlackBerry and checking her email. Now, if I’d called her on the phone, and asked her about her interests, I would have checked her off as a woman not interested in technology. But in observing her, I could see that she was. Was she lying to me or was she ignorant? No and no. But she clearly thinks about that topic differently.

To take another example, let’s look at young people and printed newspapers. If there is one piece of data that everyone seems to agree upon, it’s that young people don’t read printed newspapers, right? Its turns out that’s totally false. Over the past two years, as part of the work I’ve been doing for the Knight Foundation (The Next Newsroom Project), I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting college newsrooms, which are far more conservative in their journalism culture and behind the new media curve than professional newsrooms. That was confounding to me for a long time. So what’s going on? The response I heard from college media advisers and college newspapers editors has been fairly consistent: The staffs at college newspapers look around and see all their classmates reading the printed version of the college paper every day. When they get up in the morning, the newspaper bins are empty. If everyone is still reading the print version, why should they worry much about the Internet and all this new media stuff?

As I’ve considered what that means, I’ve tried this experiment a few times myself: Go into the student union and leave a few copies of the newspaper like the New York Times or the Mercury News on a table. They get scooped up pretty quick.

In fact, the generation that doesn’t read print does read a lot of print. What the surveys have really been telling us is that this demographic won’t pay to have the morning paper delivered every day. But when they encounter a printed product that’s free, is compact, and fits the way they consume news and information, and yes, usually has the crossword and comics, then they’ll consume it in large numbers. Do I think print is the future? It’s a part of it, much bigger than most folks believe, I think. How does this square with all those surveys about the news habits of young adults? Those surveys are being commissioned by news executives who are really just trying to figure out how to get young people to pay for the newspaper. They thought they could do this by altering the content. But what they really needed to do was reinvent the product form (compact, free) to fit into these people’s lives (lots of downtime on a pedestrian campus), and that’s a step that’s too radical to be considered by most newsrooms.

These are insights that I’ve gained not through studying the data, but through the subjective, anecdotal approach…In my view, the subjective approach is the strength, not the weakness of my analysis.