The Modern Journalist

Working Out A New Business Model

I drove to Pittsburgh this weekend to meet with a friend, Cynthia, who is working out a business plan for a new type of media organization, who that isn’t quite a local news organization, isn’t quite a portal, isn’t quite a social network and isn’t quite an aggregator.

It’s somewhere in-between all of that. It’s also being created in a small town, Butler, which is about an hour north of Pittburgh, with a local newspaper that makes people subscribe to get information. In other words, it’s a closed community with few outlets for information.

Ripe for some kind of success, I think. I spent the day at her house, brainstorming ideas for the site — many of which she’d already had fleshout out, I think — and brainstorming a business model for the site.

The first part was a bit more difficult than I’d thought because we’re trying to conceptualize how you can get information, cheap with little oversight on the part of the staff, which will be small to begin. Plus, you have to make sure the content is compelling enough that people want to continue returning to the site, but different than anything else they can get elsewhere.

E gads. But the real fun — for me — came with the business models.

The challenge I’ve posed to print folks is simple: recognize that you don’t sell banner ads, you need to sell actual “things”, tangible and real world goods. If you don’t, you are totally screwed.The brilliance of the Internet is that you can now reach an unlimited number of people, which means your audience isn’t limited to any one geographic location. However, you need to find a way to sell “wares” if you’re going to make it as a business.

Here’s what we came up with today when we asked the question, what could you sell as a site:

1. Lead-generation for specific advertisers, which means creating a series of informational sites that encourage people to sign up for more information;
2. Possibly by creating a marketplace section (which we did at TR, I think) that allows individual businesses to buy a section on a page with deals, like a shopper;
3. Which means building microsites for local businesses that need an online presence;
4. And to create a site, you need to hire writers who can create content for that site.

This doesn’t get into the community-writing pages that you could develop out and turn into special market place sections or the on-demand books and other publishing outlets you could use to promote specific areas of your local coverage.

In other words, we never once talked about banners or walled garden content. That’s not the point because you can’t build your business around that.

Not for long, anyway.