Chasing Sustainability on the Net Esa Sirkkunen Research Centre COMET, University Of Tampere, Finland ECREA Istanbul

SuBMoJour-project International project: USA, Japan, European countries: UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland. Goals – To study empirically how it is possible to do journalism profitably on the net – To help students or journalists to start their own ventures based on the experience of others – To start to imagine what happens to professional journalism in the age of fragmenting audiences and disappearing business models

Research questions: how these startups have started, how they have survived over the first few years, how they fund their operations, what are their products, main revenue sources, how they see their future Material: semi-structured interviews with ”pure players”, non-profits not included sustainability = profitability in this case Research Consortium: USC Annenberg, USA, Waseda University, Japan and University of Tampere, Finland

Submojour.net 69 semi-structured interviews from 9 countries published on a database

The report will be published online Writers: Pekka Pekkala (USA), Mikihito Tanaka (Japan), Johanna Vehkoo and Clare Cook (UK), Clare Cook (France), Nicola Bruno (Italy), Luchino Sivori (Spain), Esa Sirkkunen (Finland)

Findings Two main categories in the cases: – Storytelling oriented business models: producing original content, news and stories for audiences, making revenues mainly from advertisements – Service oriented business models: don’t monetize the journalistic content as such, eg. curate and moderate citizen oriented content, aggregate news from other outlets etc.

Findings Revenue sources: – Advertising; display ads, cost per view, cost per click, cost per action, weekly rates – Charging for content: paywalls, memberships, subscriptions and freemium models – Affiliate marketing – Donations – Selling data and services – Arranging events, training, consulting – Merchandise

it appeared that business models are in many cases related to the audience type, content type and revenue sources how to connect the business models, audience concepts, type of content (or service), and revenue sources

Conclusions Different media environments create different sets of circumstances for journalistic startups The national media system by Hallin & Manchini still has some relevance also on the grassroots level However the national features may be evaporating – global web-based players FB, Google, Amazon are rivals in the advertising market

Conclusions Journalists as business persons: most startups were either one-man-band operations or small teams Selling your work to the niche audience and to the advertisers has become more and more important part of journalistic work Flexible or atypical work is becoming common – often badly paid, relying on short term contracts

Conclusions the service oriented business models seem to be rising although the selling of journalistic content is still the core in the majority of the cases

Future If journalism should make a living solely out of the net: small newsrooms, outsourced work, flexible or liquid professional identities, going back to 1800s? This has many implications to journalism as an institution for the self understanding of journalists next step is to continue with collecting more cases – open invitation for collaboration to all intrested start to contextualise the results with more theoretical thinking: theories of media convergence, political economy of the net, journalism studies etc.

Thank you!