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PRESENTATIONS: "Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos"

Running notes from Bill Densmore from the second day of the two-day symposium, "Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos," at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Missouri School of Journalism. There may be some typos in the moment, which we'll go back and correct later so consider this a work in progress! Also, there's a CoverItLive blog stream underway: WATCH LIVE VIDEO STREAM AND LIVE BLOG

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CHECK OUT DAY ONE
CHECK OUT DAY TWO PREPARATIONS

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This week's event is an initiative of the interdisciplinary Center for the Digital Globe (CDiG), the Alfred Friendly Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI). It involves about 50 international industry leaders in media, technology and business. The idea is to create new business models and it's organized by Randy Smith, Donald W. Reynolds Chair of Business Journalism. Among participants: Mark VandenBrink, vice president of technology solutions for Samsung America; Beth Polish, senior vice president of Hearst Corporate Innovation; Ochieng Rapuro, managing editor of Kenya^Ys Business Daily newspaper; Jim Kennedy, vice president of strategy for The Associated Press; Vin Capone, development executive for Apple; Beth Keck, senior director for WalMart; Jin-Yong Park, assistant editor for Hankook-Ilbo (The Korea Times)and Phil Aucutt, managing partner for WR Holdings and president of Junit, LLC. (For a full list visit http://www.rjionline.org/cdig )

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Day Two: Developing new business models and and viable focus areas

Venture capitalist Alan Veeck is leading today's session set up this way: Six round tables assembled in Room 100-A of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

THE PRESENTATIONS

After a morning culling ideas, and two hours honing a presentation, six groups now present their proposals.

TEAM ONE: The Perfect Calendar

Presented by Marty Steffens, Jim Price and Jeff Vander Clute

"Harnessing the power of local media." Extending the calendar application. It uses your already familiar application, like iCalendar, your Exchange or Entourage or Google calendar, and will populate it with things that will help you spend your day smarter, partner with your local news organization to give you the news that matters, be aware of local civic events, receive local and national ads.

• Consumer in control -- adjust privacy settings to your level of comfort.

• Key milestones .... many components already exist

• Register PerfectCalendar.com domain
• Partners include Columbia Missourian
• Work with partners
• Build technology in agile fashion
• Integrate with social tools like Facebook
• Integration with other technologies, like Outlook and Google, iCal
• Self-serve advertising modules
• Deployment, with milestones for sales, sales training, consumer testing, feedback, marketing

Self-service module that local newspapers can interactive with. Need knowledgeable publishers who can sell the product. Not just broadcasting but community members can upload events.

One idea in version 2.0 would be a "Pandora-like" service that would tailor and make recommendations.

Revenue streams:

Place ... time ... and retailer specific

Examples: Local coupons (merchant initiated), local coupons (crowd triggered), preferred location (need a place), classified listings. Ad day-parting. Sales reminders. Impulse-buy specials, local and national.

Competitors might be Yelp and Zvents. Differentiators: Facilitation with current calendar, participation, and being able to deliver news within the calendar function.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

COMMENT: Hates the idea of advertising sending stuff into my personal calendar. ANSWER: This will be opt-in as part of your privacy settings.

TEAM SIX: NoSpam News

Group consists of Ochieng Rapuro, Jonathan Friendly, Yihu (Elina) Tang, Amiri Jameel Yehia, Phil Aucutt, Peter Meng and Margaret Duffy.

Like Getty Images, a large content library that people can license.

• Peter Meg leads the description of NoSpam News. It uses a selected group of editors and marketing professionals using crowd sourcing techniques, to test and evaluate news stoires for quality and marketability. Customers are ad agency and corporate partners.
• A global marketplace for advertisres, news organizations and corporations to purchase content and obtain real-time market data.
• Uses a select qualified group of editors and marketing professionals using crowd-sourcing techniques, to test and evaluate news stores for quality and marketability.

• Revenue comes from testing fees, royalties and premium-content sales. Assumption of 8000 transactions in the first year.

• Competitors are traditional market research, Digg and Seed.com/Helium.com, Demand Media. They offer classic research, but that is time-consuming and costly. They work with crowd-source ranking and are an outlet for paid and edited freelanders. NoSpam News costs less, is easier t use and takes a different approach. It doesn't pay freelancers. It ensures the content is of the highest level.

• Challenges and risks -- Big challenge is signing the one content partner with a large content library and then building a user base fast so as not to be out-innovated or overtaken by innovators. Also a challenge to match revenues to market-research spending through 2014.

• Strategic partners sought: RJI, The McClatchy Co., Clear Channel Communications Group.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Question about monetization: Big play is to have it an easy marketplace to get all kinds of content. A place to easily and cheaply license content rather than just ripping it off.

TEAM FOUR: Global Citizen: "Butterfly"

Team members included Jean-Raymond Naveau, Coleman Hutchins, Jim Sterling, Keith Politte, Alisa Cromer, Steven Sparkman and Washington Gikunju.

A site that provides actionable news about global issues. Content comes from people, institutions, communities, corporations. "You are a global citizen and there is nothing you can do about that," says Jean-Raymond Naveau. "Butterfly provides actionable information, deeper planet possibility."

Information about sustainability providers, GRI taxonomy, news, issues, innovation exchange, products, applications for monitoring local, national and international issues, transactions that allow you to engage in a feedback loop, license content receive local discounts. Benchmarking.

"We realized there are really no global sources -- everyone is watching international news, but no one is looking at things on a global level, the superissues." Butterfly will have to cover 10 languages.

• Market: Who are potential global citizens? Guessing that it is 36% of global internet usres is the pontential market size, people who think of themselves as "Global Citizens."

• Audience is internet-connected global citizens, companies, staff, invesetors, fund managers, global-citizen related NGOs.

• Management team: They seek Arianna Huffington as a sustainability expert. Angels would be alMark, World Bank, WHO and Samsung.

No one out there doing this now. People are having to go to the Internet to piece together their news. (Viewing chart taken from the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

What would the three launch issues? Answer: Environment, government and climate.

Will you adapt content regionally to deal with cultural differences? Try not to appear too Western.

Hutchins: "We really want to stay above the national level."

TEAM THREE:

TEAM THREE: Newsroom Cafe

Team members: Michael Skoler, Clyde Bentley, Stephanie Durand, David Cohn, Taylor Wiegert, Maria Garcia, Jung-Ha-Berkshire, Rob Weir.

Turning coffee into community -- taking coffee shops and bring back a little bit of the community. Bring a young community of people who care about their communty and the world. Values are that it feeds passsion, intellectual stimulation, provides social capitall, personal image/brand. ONe step beyond Starbucks.

• Target consumer: Is ages 18-34, interested in social issues and not afraid to speak out. It will be a public sphere like the old European tea salons. Young professionals, university students, socdiall-aware/curious, consumers of information, yupplies, creatives.

• Vale proposition: Feeds consumer pasion, relates to personal image/self-brand, offers intellectual stimulation, provides social capital, allows for extended understanding of local and global issues.

• Values statement: We value creativity and publci opinion, and support those who take the lead rather than follow from behind.

• Tagline: "An open space for open minds."

• Total market: $13.2 billion, 70 percent of adults drink coffee. It is 72 million people in the United States.

• Key milestones:

"There is a hunger to turn it into bricks and mortar." Coffee shops already make a 19% profit margin.

• Revenue proejct: Francising fee of 5%; food and drink there's a 19% pargine for food and drink, also putting on events, doing media products and co-working rent. Send reporters from news organizations to hang out at coffee shops.

• Business management team: Need a franchise business manager, coffee-shop business manager (relationships with coffee cources, buys and oversees distribtion of supplies, oversees development), community-engagement officer, journalistic advisor and marketing manager. Show grow from a grass roots, word-of-mouth perspective.

• Competition: Biggest competition -- large franchise owners, however, Newsroom Cafe offers open, participatory. Starbucks has 11,600 stores, other competitors Dunkin Donuts, Intelligentsia, Bridgeport Coffee (Chicago).

• Challenges risks: Crowded market where incumbents are making a lot of money. But can offer distinct value proposition. You come into these coffee shops expect to engage. If you want to sit alone, go to Starbucks, if you want an environment where people are like you. There has to be a culture created around special employees -- baristas are going to be journalists who blog. Need to attract young people around discussing issues that matter to them, their lives and their community.

Skoler: "We don't believe that for a second, we just want to get them charged up in a great environment."

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:

There are "Newscafes" around United States, including one in Miami's South Beach.

Answer: That will be sorted out somehow.

Bill Densmore: Says we've had discussions with the owner of Miami NewsCafes.

Q: Can you pay a blogging barista the wages Starbucks pays its baristas?

Q: Did you think about partying with Starbucks?

A: Skoler: The real model is in franchising and going up against the Starbucks brand. Can be monetized in a variety of ways.

Q: Could this work in anything other than a coffee shop?

A: They discussed this. Coffee shop kind of came to mind as the right density and atmosphere.

Q: Why age 18-34?

A: Needed a target market. Not about exclusion but picking a target market that already has the habit of going to coffee-shops.

"It's not about drinking coffee, it's about community but what we're selling is people who have the coffee habit.

Q: How will you control quality of discussion. So experience my differ from today to tomorrow.

A: Unique because it tackles this particular cultural environment. We will continue to adapt to needs. WE don't want to exclude anybody because of their opinions.

TEAM TWO: Discovery -- Youth News Digest

This team included:

There's a market need for youth-oriented educational news, delivered to their smartphones. The idea is to put position news and information in front of them. Put it on a mobile application in front of the child. High curated, packaged editorial content.

• Definition: Application streaming news articles appropriate for 10-14-year-olds to their smartphones.

• Distribution: Partner with cell providers (e.g. Verizon) or phone manufactuer (e.g. Samsung) to preload and/or parents can load from App Store.

• Content: Contenet amnually selected/curated with aid of automatic tagging/entity extration extended with age-appropriate filters (e.g. reading level analysis). Initially, limited ot science. Editorial section rewrites sleected article in age-appropriate fashion (e.g. digest such as The Week ... for kids).

• Purchase: Sell app/subscription to parents on basis of educational value by monthly subscription.

• Configuration: Parents specify areas of interest such as science, technology, etc. (though they can be modified by end users).

• Usage:

"We think this is a huge market and an easy sell," says team member Miriam Pepper, editorial-page editor of the Kansas City Star. The selling proposition here is easy: Resolve parental guilt about buying a cell phone for their kids by providing this educational resource along with hit. She says it is a triple-hit product. Sell as an ap, sell as an embedded addition to other apps.

• Market: Potential market is 20 million U.S. youth. If a teen-ager sends 6,000 texts a month, how about if she could look at the Science News app while she is on the phone? $240 million U.S. market potential if you assume $2.99 a month, $35.88 a year per month times 20 million teens. Studies find tha 25% of parents are willing to pay for increasing their children's education -- that yields a target market worth $60 million.

One possibility: Cell providers/carriers could pre-load this onto their cell phones. Ad artners: Youth-oriented retail outlets offer bonus points for game/quiz victories. Baskin-Robbins, movie chains, Blockbuster, Netflix.

Q: Dubious about stickiness to get conversion to buy the product from schools or parents. They tried this in Tampa market and got 1.6 percent conversion.

Q: Beth Polish: She wonders about getting parents to part with $3/month.

A: I think your question shows how this is an open field.

Q: Dean Mills: Skepticism about whether a 10- or 11-year-old will uptake. They may just no take to it.

A: Miriam Pepper says you could push the news aspect, not the educational aspect.