Coverage of innovation is important for local media, not just big pubs. Local media:
- disseminates information about innovation
- create an understanding of innovation
- put innovation on the agenda of the community
- support the evolution of innovation system
Media as a feedback loop: they provide coverage and feedback on what’s been done so far.
- Media enables innovation to evolve and improve
- it is part of innovation system whether it provides coverage or chooses not to
Challenges:
- Making complicated matters understandable — how do you make stories interesting?
- Finding and keeping skilled journalists — how do you attract journalists to smaller markets?
- Allocating adequate resources — no start or finish to this story…
- The editor as obstacle — editors make the final call; doesn’t matter how dedicated you are as a reporter if you don’t have support
- Introducing a new beat in times of downsizing — can local journalism be profitable
Mercury News strategy in attracting, keeping skilled workers: Stephen Trousdale, business editor of San Jose Mercury News
The primary mission of SJMN is to cover innovation as a topic. Our primary mission, esp in business section, is to cover innovation in the SV. (Chris O’Brien is new columnist.) Challenging biz climate for newspapers. Never would have thought NYT would lay off newspapers, shows how biz model has shifted from under them. Problem of trying to convey story in simple language: broad audience. Have to do this explanation in engaging way. It is a gradual story — how can you keep tabs on that gradual process and pick the right moment where you can explain to people that they should pay attention to it. High ratio of noise — 1,000 press releases/day. How do you filter it? The key thing is to learn from mistakes and create dynamic feedback loop with readers and internally, we’re learning same lesson. Give folks sense of dramatic changes in SV across broad range of spectrums.
Matt Wenger: President of Packet Front Inc. Eight years in rural Canada as entrepreneur and social economic development organization to create innovation systems within this rural area. Stymied by local media. You’re in a town of 5K in the Rockies and they wanted to bring advanced fiber optic communications to homes & bizs in rural area. Headline in paper: 18-year-old reporter who was there on this complex issue: city to pledge $18 million to hang wires on polls. People got upset, most funding coming from private sector, but it made it difficult. It really helped to slow the progress of the innovation. It’s not just covering it, but covering it well and providing the appropriate context. Tried to work with local media directly to provide editorials in paper so that people working with innovations could write directly about it.
Thomas Frostberg: Making local journalism profitable: Rapidus. Pick up interesting stories about startups rather than listed companies. Newsletters, email format, subscription only, no ads, worked well. We focus on bringing up new stories all the time. Regional rather than national, we could go across the subjects.
Does it take separate actors like Rapidus, or can local newspapers do this?
TF: often easier to do this when you start from zero so you don’t have to think about how you did things yesterday. there are ideas you can also merge into newspaper organizations. Launched new news service they’re distributing copy to local newspaper.
Now opening floor to questions:
Appetite for news about Apple, Google. This is wonkier than we normally do… Tough decisions that we face every day: we want to be savvy when a small company claims it has a dramatic announcement. We exercise huge level of skepticism. Most of those small companies aren’t doing anything that’s that interesting to a broad audience. Finding that diamond in the rough is one of our biggest challenges. We don’t want to look foolish and pick the wrong companies…
David: Innovation clusters in places that aren’t that big… When you look at smaller newspapers, the financial, buz stuff is not appreciated — need editors with insight. Not just a story when company in region is laying off people.
Audience: do you go looking for innovation or do you expect it to come looking for you? Those who can innovate and those who can self-promote are not necessarily related.
TF: Failure: I have different idea about that — VCs, entrepreneurs don’t know if their companies will succeed. I can do fact checking, due diligence, but we can’t see into the future, so must come back and report on the company again and again and then report on success or failure.
ST: Those who are best promoters don’t have, nec, best technology. We discuss things internally, run story ideas through a “smell test” in the newsrooms. When we’re addressing something new, we do have some discussions internally if we’re overhyping and need to be more skeptical, critical, run thru financials, like TF said. There’s so much going on we don’t even come close to tapping the surface, so we do tend to get higher profile. One of the things I ask them is, why do you want to reach SJMN audience? Many pitches about innovative concepts are better suited for other pubs, not the SJMN. We’re going to cover higher-profile ones that are going to effect more people.
How would local media attract and keep journalists that are skilled enough to take on this challenge?
ST: Pay them more.
MW: That’s where we found the weakness in the system. Forty-five newspapers got collapsed and bought by Conrad Black, everyone got laid off, the only thing we could do was partner with these companies to take our coverage of the local things. They were not going to be hiring people to cover these things, but create partnerships to do that.
