Journalists are leaving legacy media organisations to gain the freedom to maximise their potential
If you are a high profile journalist with a well-paid job in a large American news organisation, the first thing you are likely to be thinking every morning is "when do I leave?". The second thing is probably "I wonder how much … ?". Journalism does not yet have a transfer window, but if the stream of earnest young men with square spectacles moving their followers from one media brand to the next increases, it might well need one.
The celebrated statistics-based political journalist, Nate Silver, removed his FiveThirtyEight blog from the New York Times and took it to sports channel ESPN at the end of last year. The new "data journalism driven site", as Silver calls it, relaunches in its new home today. Inspired perhaps by his example, Ezra Klein, the Washington Post's political hotshot, presented his employers with an ambitious expansion plan for his Wonkblog.
The Post's new owner Jeff Bezos and editors rejected the plan, which resulted in Klein's departure last week. His plan was given a warmer reception by digital media company Vox Media, and so Klein and his team arrived en masse from the Post to work on "Project X".
It is not a novel phenomenon; the publishing horizon is littered with dozens of digital publishers, small and slightly larger, staffed by journalists from legacy media. Gawker, founded by former Financial Times journalist Nick Denton, is remarkably durable and over a decade old. Politico, which famously came out of the Washington Post's political team, a forerunner of generation Project X, is still one of the most commercially vigorous companies in any area of niche publishing seven years after it started.
However, the striking out on your own to start a media company of the recent past is in contrast now to a kind of franchise hopping reminiscent of the eminently tradeable sports stars.
David Carr, the New York Times media writer, puts it down to there finally being a "lasting commercial market" for digital publishing. Perhaps, but actually that has been the case for a long time. What is interesting is that these brand journalists are taking risks and placing a bet on prospering, away from even the largest and often well resourced legacy media organisations. The top of the profession is now just a stepping stone.
This is a change motivated primarily by two things, first the availability of cash, tied as much to the liquidity of the markets as to the business. "If you want venture capital money you can raise it in about five seconds," as one entrepreneur put it, an exaggeration perhaps but not an unfair characterisation.
Secondly, in a world where individual voice is amplified through social media, journalists are beginning to question just how much value they get from their institutional homes in relation to what value they could extract by themselves. Legacy media always found it hard to innovate within existing business protocols. Management and technical structures cannot cede the necessary control or create the new systems fast enough to meet the curiosity and ambition of their staff. Then there is always the tantalising but extreme possibility that one might become extraordinarily rich. Again something that is becoming more remote within large companies with shareholders and legacy overheads.
Three weeks ago the wrappers came off Re/code, the new entity led by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Silicon Valley's most reliable and respected journalists who previously built AllThingsD, the Wall Street Journal's semi-autonomous tech site and highly lucrative conference business. Mossberg and Swisher have set up a new business, Revere Media, to contain Re/code, with investment from NBC Universal and former Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel.
"If you have written about the internet for a long time, it really isn't that hard to figure out," Swisher told me about why she and Mossberg wanted their own business. Mossberg added: "This disruption makes things difficult for the industry but wonderful for journalists – the interests of individual journalists and publishers are diverging." Mossberg and Swisher took all of their 23 staff with them.
Swisher made the point that the pair had unusual autonomy and a slice of the profit share at the News Corp-owned WSJ but something else was missing: "We came to the realisation that dealing with the competing claims of a large legacy media organisation was not consistent with what a start-up could be." This, she said, is not confined to News Corp but can be applied across the board.
The irony of this situation is that legacy media in turn is learning a trick from the tech industry of buying innovation. News Corp, for instance, recently bought the Irish news start-up Storyful, which has built a solid reputation for being able to rapidly source and verify user generated footage before selling it on to commercial media outlets. Its founder, Mark Little, and executive editor David Clinch, both came out of traditional television newsroom backgrounds. This is likely to result in transferable journalist brands and audiences leading to a much more fluid market.
Digital sustainability, as Carr said, might well be the key, but it is also the lure of autonomy and the promise of something high risk but potentially financially rewarding. Ten years ago, media companies urged their staff to think more entrepreneurially. Now they might prefer it if they narrowed their horizons.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário