A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

generate more revenue from corporate underwriting of a free app than could be earned
from a paid download. Typically, Wilson said, only about 10 percent of the people who
download free apps are willing to pay. 110
PARTNERSHIPS
Sustaining local news is not just about revenue.
To survive, news organizations will need to partner with all of journalism’s
stakeholders. Some will be business partnerships, involving technology or expertise in
emerging areas of digital commerce. Some will be journalism partnerships, linking news
organizations with the right combinations of talents and gaps. Some partnerships
already in place are filling holes in staffing and coverage by getting the work done by
other people, in other ways. In Boston, both Northeastern University and Boston
University have formed investigative units that provide coverage to The Globe and area
TV and radio outlets. Other arrangements involve working with competitors and
putting users to work in networked newsgathering initiatives. Some unusual alliances
are showing up as news organizations forge new partnerships, but at least one trait
characterizes most of the successful ones: a shared commitment to putting users first.
Among the many explanations for the current crisis in journalism funding is the
story of a failed partnership. In 1995, the nation’s nine biggest newspaper companies
chipped in $1 million each and created New Century Network, an alliance of big and
small papers designed to hang onto and grow what then amounted to the early stages of
advertising’s migration from print to online.
But two years later, New Century Network had managed to capture just $1 million
of the $500 million that advertisers were spending online. And the year after that, NCN
was dead, its member companies walking away after failing to agree on the most basic
approaches to online threats and opportunities. 111
Fast forward to February 2009. Geneva Overholser, director of the Annenberg School
of Journalism at the University of Southern California and former editor of The Des
Moines Register, urged news organizations to adopt wholesale partnering. “Look around
the community to see who is doing good information‐gathering and sharing,” she wrote
in a special “Battle Plans for Newspapers” discussion on the New York Times Web site.
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