Young in the Digital Age

I recently moved to Northern California, among other reasons, to focus on journalism. Most people think I’m crazy for quitting a perfectly good (although temporary) job while millions are getting laid off to try my hand at arguably the most unstable profession in recent history– journalism. Thinking logically about these facts, most people are probably right. I am crazy. But, out of some strange compulsion perhaps, I feel like I’m right where I need to be: twenty-two years old, ambitious, living in the Bay Area amid a digital revolution.

That feeling was enhanced by a “Journalism Innovations” conference I attended last Friday. I heard about it through  Kara Andrade, a friend of my cousin, who is an organizer for Spot Us–a Bay Area startup that’s experimenting with community-funded journalism. The conference was a meeting of the minds between news veterans and innovation leaders, centered on one main question: what is the fate and future of journalism? Being new in the area, I went to the conference with the goal of networking; however, I left with much more than a few business cards in my pocket. Yes I did my share of shmoozing; I think I even said the words, “let’s be friends” after discovering that a man with Nuestra Voz lived in Santa Cruz, but moreover, I was inspired and thoughts have been swarming in my head ever since about the media revolution we are currently facing. As a newbie in the field, I won’t relay all of my personal thoughts, but I do want to pass along some of the avant-garde ideas that were shared:

First and foremost, we should be comforted by the overwhelming sentiment among media veterans that journalism is not dying; it’s just the business model of the newspaper industry that has collapsed and needs to be recreated, mainly due to the rise of the Internet. That’s not to underscore the current crisis we’re in, where people have less access to the fact-based journalism that may help them recover from economic crises, swine flu, you name it. But, on the other hand, there is tremendous opportunity to break out of the corporate owned model, tell stories in more creative ways and connect people more than ever before through the Internet, blogs and social media. Of course, it’s funding quality journalism–which takes time, editing and fact checking–that is the challenge, so whatever emerges from this “crisis” needs to meld journalism that serves the public with a sustainable business model (the hardest part for us creative folk).  Below is a list of startups that may hint at our future:

• Reelchanges.org is owned and operated by the nonprofit Center for Media Change. Like sites such as IndieGoGo, Reel Changes uses the concept of “Crowdfunding” to facilitate public funding for documentary film projects. Filmmakers upload works in progress and fans donate in return for perks like screen credits.
• Spot Us is another nonprofit crowdfunding project of the Center for Media Change, pioneering community funded journalism in the Bay Area. Freelance writers pitch story ideas (mostly investigative) to the public and individuals can fund the stories they wish to see written. A New York Times article wrote about this concept and questioned the possibility of content creation by donors.  Founder Dave Cohn said that each article must be funded by a group of individuals and any one person cannot donate more than 20 percent of the article’s cost.
• Kachingle is a very interesting for-profit business model, also based on crowdfunding, that targets money for existing news sites and blogs through a very simple, user centric program. Users pay $5 per month to fund the sites they love, chosing which sites to donate to and the money is then distributed fairly based on how often the user visits each site. Learn more about Kachingle on this Poynter Institue blog.
• L3Cs or “Low Profit Limited Liability Corporations” are what many news organizations hope to be their saving grace. Like LLCs, they can attract wealthy investors but there is one amendment–an L3C must provide some social benefit, besides just maximizing profit. L3Cs solicit a new breed of investors that share the values of the social enterprise–in this case, public service journalism. L3C investors can put in large sums of money up front without expecting the immediate, high returns associated with venture capitalism. Learn more about L3Cs here.

And, of course, there are many other quality sources of online journalism that predicted the media transformation early on such as Slate.com, the Huffington Post, ProPublica and VoiceofSanDiego that utilize various funding models, just to name a few. Whatever becomes of journalism, it is our generation that is creating it through blogs and multimedia, on facebook and twitter, and it is us young journalists who will carry it out. We can either sit back and wait for this new industry to emerge or we can join the revolution and help create it. Please share your ideas and comments below so we can start a dialogue about the digital renaissance and our role in it.

For further reading on the media shift, see this Slate.com article, the PBS ‘Media Shift’ Blog, the Poynter Institute’s ‘NewsPay’ blog and Charlotte-Anne Lucas’ blog.