WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

In this narrated infographic, Alexander Osterwalder uses the business model canvas to analyze Nespresso, an operating unit of the Nestlé Group, that manufactures and sells espresso brewing machines and the coffee capsules used in them.

When I ran for Mayor as a performance project back in 2005, part of my platform (as founder and sole member of The Blog Party) was free, citywide, public wifi and in-home broadband Internet as a public utility like water, gas, etc. Neither of those things has happened yet. But I also promised more transparency, accountability and access by increasing mayoral use of the Internet as a communications platform, open data sharing including budget numbers and insight into the workings of government. To give credit where credit is due, between 311, the highly functional and easy-to-use NYC.gov, the NYC Open Data site, My Money NYC and Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne Haot‘s twitter feed, Michael Bloomberg has done a hell of a job as the city’s first 21st Century Mayor.

In my previous essay I floated a few “blue sky” scenarios that, in this light, may not be as crazy as they sound, to wit:

Rebooting Representation: Imagine a representative democracy that uses big data to create alternate voter sets independent of place? A system that moves beyond the two party binary into either radical individual representation or alternate aggregation structures? Could this include a more complex but transparent system that balances place-based resource allocation and distribution systems with other criteria? What would digital demography and representative democracy actually look like? http://senseable.mit.edu/csa/

Rebooting Education: Imagine a federally funded and strategically developed K-12 MOOC that centralizes core curriculum but decentralizes place-based education. The MOOC offers a curriculum developed through strategic analysis of knowledge and skills required for maximum jobs and growth nationally. The curriculum is predicated on national standards and taught locally by nationally accredited teachers. Additional coursework, tailored to regional variance and cultural settings, can be implemented on the local level. This curriculum can be provided to home schoolers, self-aggregated small schools that would either hire an accredited teacher or become accredited themselves. Subsidy then becomes available for these smaller, independent classrooms and bricks and mortar schoolhouses become an option, not a necessity. Government scales back its involvement in the expensive business of maintaining bricks and mortar facilities and top-heavy, bloated administrative structures while guaranteeing access to education to all and insuring at least a minimum level of preparedness for students in the 21st Century.

Robin Good: How can journalists and small news companies become/remain profitable in the years to come? What are the business moels that news-based outlets and professionals can consider adopting in their effort to become/remain sustainable?

A joint project of the University of Tampere, USC Annenberg and Waseda University in Tokyo, has decided to tackle these very set of questions by researching existing journalistic startups and analyzing their approach and results.

"...there has been much lively discussion about the future of journalism and its business model. However, there has been little research or academic focus to date on the business models for for-profit journalism startups..."

From the report Introduction: "Overall, advertising models that supported media offline seem – for the most part – unable to do so online.

Most attempts to shift business models online fail as they trade “old media dollars for new media pennies” (Nichols and McChesney 2009).

The fundamental trade on scarcity of space cannot hold value in abundant space. Yet advertising remains one of the bedrocks of revenue for most media organisations."

"This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology.

The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of nine countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan.

The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups.

a) The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences.

b) But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focuson carving out new functionality.

The project was able to identify several revenue sources that include:  1. advertising,

2. paying for content,

3. affiliate marketing,

4. donations,

5. selling data or services,

6. organizing events,

7. freelancing and

8. training or

9. selling merchandise.

Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured.

The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site."

Useful. Informative. Pragmatical. 9/10

Report: Table of Contents - http://www.submojour.net/archives/989/table-of-contents/

Full report (PDF): http://tampub.uta.fi/handle/10024/66378