The Conversation is a popular Australian online news site that uses academics to cover breaking news and analyze current debates. The idea behind the model is to team up university researchers, who know a lot about many things but can’t necessarily write for a mainstream audience, with editors, who can. The combination of “academic rigour with journalistic flair” (the site’s slogan) has proved a roaring success and The Conversation now attracts nearly 20 million reads a month.

Largely funded by partner universities, the articles are free to read, there are no limits to the number of articles people can read and there is no advertising. In an interesting twist, articles are also free to republish under a Creative Commons license. And in an era where news organizations are continually slashing budgets and laying off staff, the not-for-profit has managed to export its model beyond Australia’s shores to the United Kingdom and the United States.

OnMedia spoke with The Conversation’s founder, Andrew Jaspan.

OnMedia: Why did you think there was a need for The Conversation?

Andrew Jaspan: I’d been working as an editor at The Age newspaper in Australia and The Observer in the UK, and every year I had to lead a redundancy round, which I didn’t like because the good people tend to walk out and into new jobs. There’s a move away from expensive specialist or expert journalists towards general reporters, who tend to be younger and cheaper. So when I left The Age in 2009, there was one nagging problem: if one continued hollowing out the newsroom – leading to poorer service – where were citizens going to get credible information to help them understand what’s going on in the world, particularly around complex issues?

I wanted to answer that question for myself. The vice-chancellor at Melbourne University, Glyn Davis, said “Why don’t you talk to ten of my smartest people?” So I did. While talking to them, I had a Eureka moment: how can I connect these truly smart people who really know their stuff – the very specialists in a sense who’d been lost in the newsroom – and help them translate their knowledge into readable copy freely available to a wider public?

So the combination of expertise within the university research sector with journalists gave us this different and revolutionary model. Our content is now getting nearly 20 million reads a month – and we’re only three years old – so we expect to grow at a fast rate.

How did you dream up the funding model?

Well, the unique funding model followed from the idea. We didn’t want to have a paywall around the information. We wanted to make the content freely available to as many people as possible, including the media. And we don’t take advertising, so we had to come up with a new business model.

We asked each university to make a contribution, as members, and we now have 33 universities who fund us. Ninety percent of our running costs are our editors – we have a team of 32 in Australia. Much the same model operates in the United Kingdom where we have a team of 18 in London funded by nearly 40 universities. In the US (which launched in October 2014), we have a start-up team of 10 based in Boston funded initially by foundations. The universities then get this free service back to them – the commissioning, editing and curating that we do on their behalf. The site has real integrity because there aren’t any advertisements for McDonald’s next to a story about a crisis.

The media can use our content for free under the specific Creative Commons license as long as they don’t re-edit it, which would run the risk they’ll introduce the error we’ve worked hard to avoid. Now we have 13,000 websites around the globe using our content, which is brilliant because we wanted to put high-quality content back into the public arena.

Do you think journalistic commentary takes on a different meaning because of The Conversation’s model?

Authors have to sign a disclosure statement which is published alongside their articles

Our 16,000 writers have to be registered, vetted and authenticated. This has brought a level of expertise and trust that what our audience reads in our pages is not being spun by ideological, commercial, public relations or marketing reasons. What we do has more depth than what you’ll see on most sites.

You also exported your model to the UK in 2013 and the US in October 2014. Would you have done anything differently in retrospect?

Not much, it’s gone well with each of our launches. One of our team went over and trained up the UK team about how the platform works and how we work as an editorial team. We sent four people to the US in two batches for a four-month period so they were really able to train and help support the launch. Wherever we launch, we’ll do a similar thing. The quality of the content has to be consistent so that we can move copy around and share it with other countries. We can’t have some countries being weak because they don’t operate to the standards we expect.

Which countries do you hope to spread to soon?

We have a few more to launch so we’ll have about six or seven sites. Our aim is to set up in different languages including across Europe – in Germany, France and Spain – but that involves our being approached by local journalists. We wait until they contact us and ask us to partner with them.

But before we work with journalists in another country, we need to see if we agree on a set of values around serious journalism, such as getting things right, checking facts and adhering to our code of conduct and our charter.

We’re not seeking to launch lots of sites just for the sake of it. We’re not McDonalds or KFC, trying to sell many franchises. We want locally employed editors who can collaborate with academics and researchers in that country. This means we can work across different territories as one global virtual newsroom, which allows us to tackle global issues, such as food, water, health, energy, human rights, migration issues and so on.

Can you talk more about your goal of creating a global newsroom?

If you take something like Ebola, for example, most of the reporting is done globally by news organizations from first-world countries. To a certain extent, they define the scale of the problem and report back to their domestic audiences about whether they should be concerned or not. We want to make sure that researchers explain why there has to be more of an African approach to the way we work with tackling [Ebola or other big problems] and how we might work towards solutions by engaging local people, rather than having people rush in and see if they can quickly fix the problem and then move out. So it’s a kind of re-balancing of the way in which we understand problems and their range and complexity. That is often not characterized in the reporting from the western media.

What advice would you give to people who want to also start up an innovative media project?

You need to have clear differentiation between what you do and what others do. You have to have a clear message and what you do must resonate. The second thing, it’s all in the quality of the execution, so quality, reliability and adherence to standards are important. The third thing that’s really worked for us is social media – a lot of people help get our message out. And the last reason it’s taken off for us is that we are free, and – through Creative Commons – that has allowed us to move content in a very fast way around the world.

So, you have to: get a good idea, execute it well, tell people about it, and be very focused on what you do.

For more about innovative digital sites or news services, take at look at onMedia’s interviews with Syria Deeply’s founder Lara Setrakian and with with Mark Little from Storyful, a social media news service. 

Interview by Lesley Branagan, edited by Kate Hairsine

(The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity).

African SkyCAM drone

The South2South Media Dialogue recently brought together 14 amazing journalists and activists from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa who are all working in the trenches – creating new tools and new ways of using technology to increase people’s freedom of information and expression. Their experiences range from mapping Rhino poaching deaths in southern Africa and using the crowd to open up data in Argentina to providing audio news on mobiles in India, conducting investigative journalism in Peru and starting up Palestine’s first hyperlocal news site.

At the four-day event in Cape Town, they talked about their own initiatives and shared many of the pitfalls and possibilities of implementing and running projects which use digital technology. So here’s your chance to learn from them.

12 lessons learned (in no particular order of importance)

1. A website does not attract people; rather social media brings people to your site
2. Use social media well to build a community
3. Thoroughly know your users through analytics and other measurements
4. Connect online communities and offline communities to make a greater impact
5. Don’t forget Aunty! Most projects tend to attract men and if there are any women involved, they’re young. Think about how to make your project more integrative
6. Don’t forget to integrate traditional media, especially radio, in your project
7. Collaboration is key – whether it’s with other media organizations, NGOs, or with other journalists in other countries
8. Use data to show what you can’t tell with words
9. The best platforms are the ones that look the simplest and are easiest to use
10. Hire good programmers and developers
11. Make an effort to regain trust in the media that many listeners/readers/users have lost
12. Done is better than perfect (yes, we know it was a Facebook motto but it’s also relevant here)

The four-day DW Akademie South2South Media Dialogue took place in Cape Town from November 26-29, 2014 and brought together 14 people from 14 different countries in the Global South. All of the participants are involved in innovative projects which use digital technology in some way to foster freedom of expression and information.

The participants included Ahmad Al-Bazz from DOOZ, Palestine; Penhleak Chan from Open Development Cambodia; Shubhransu Choudhary from CGNet Swara, India, Wouter Dijkstra from TRAC FM, Uganda; Noora Flinkman from HarassMap, Egypt; Alejandra Gutiérrez Valdizán from Plaza Pública, Guatemala; Bektour Iskender from Kloop, Kyrgyzstan; Toufique Khalidi from bdnews24.com, Bangladesh; Fiona Macleod from Oxpeckers Centre for Investigative Environmental Journalism, South Africa; Nigel Mugamu from 263Chat, Zimbabwe; Dickens Olewe from African SkyCAM, Kenya; Oscar Parra Castellanos from Rutas del Conflicto, Colombia; Angelica Peralta Ramos from La Nación Data, Argentina; Fabiola Torres Lopéz from Ojo Público, Peru.

Written by Kate Hairsine, edited by Guy Degen

The show was inspired by a reporting trip novelist Daniel Alarcón made to his native Peru on assignment for the BBC. While investigating migration there, Alarcón travelled across the country recording personal stories from a wide range of people. But when he later heard the final mix, he was disappointed that the producers had largely highlighted the English speakers he talked to, leaving out much of the compelling material in Spanish. He wondered what the result would be if there was a place where Spanish-language voices could be heard.

In 2012, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Radio Ambulante was born. Programs have featured a transgender Nicaraguan woman living with her wife in San Francisco, a Peruvian stowaway describing his frightening journey to New York, and an Argentine who was jailed during that country’s dictatorship and given the choice to either work or to die. “Ambulante” can mean traveling or itinerant but also refers to “ambulantes”: street vendors who sell all kinds of wares in many Latin American cities.

While Radio Ambulante has a growing list of terrestrial stations that carry it, the show is largely distributed digitally. In early October, Radio Ambulante was awarded the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award in the innovation category. onMedia put a few questions to Radio Ambulante’s co-founder and executive director, Carolina Guerrero, about how the show’s format has been received in Latin America and where the show wants to go to from here.  

Carolina Guerrero (photo: Radio Ambulante)

onMedia: It’s been said that Radio Ambulante’s goal was to produce long-form audio stories, a format that largely didn’t exist on Spanish-language radio. Is it too simplistic to say you wanted stories along the lines of the popular and critically acclaimed US radio program “This American Life”, but in Spanish?

Carolina Guerrero: We are huge fans of This American Life, and that program was certainly one of the inspirations for Radio Ambulante, but we’ve created our own style, and our content is different too. Some people have called us, “This Latin American Life”, which is very flattering, but we hope our listeners now see the complexity of having created a transnational podcast in a different language, and how Radio Ambulante is still a unique podcast.

How has this new form been received in Spanish-speaking countries and communities across the Americas?

We are thrilled with the positive response we have received from our listeners. Our audience keeps growing, as more Spanish-speakers learn about podcasting and audio storytelling. Obviously, it has taken time for us to build an audience, since radio in Latin America has been mostly used to listen to music or news, and Radio Ambulante’s stories are long-narrative pieces that require time and concentration. We have around 100,000 monthly listeners, and 84 percent of those listeners are between 18 and 45 years old – 45 percent of them are in Latin America. Young Spanish-speakers are digitally savvy and interested in podcasting and in these new forms of audio storytelling.

Your audience target area is enormous. How can you be sure that all your listeners can relate to the stories you produce? Are you worried the cultural differences are too large?

Our target area is enormous since the number of Spanish-speaking people in the world is almost 400 million – but of course we don’t need to reach all of them to be successful! We hope to reach as many as we can with quality, well-reported, impeccably produced stories. That’s universal. Everyone loves a good story. And so, yes, there are cultural differences among Spanish speakers, but we believe that our stories are capable of moving audiences anywhere Spanish is spoken.

How have you found your producers over such a large area? How big is your network of contributors now?

At the very beginning we reached out to journalist friends from Latin America to find stories, and a few months later we opened a Call for Pitches that brought us many more stories from independent radio producers in the US as well. It’s the kind of thing that becomes easier as time goes on: now we have a body of work that we can point potential contributors to and people come to us with great ideas all the time. During the last two years, we’ve seen our network of producers and contributors grow and expand all over South, Central and North America, and some other countries in Europe or Asia.

Novelist and Radio Ambulante Co-Founder Daniel Alarcón (photo: flickr/Esther Vargas CC:BY-SA)

The Gabriel García Márquez prize committee praised the collaborative nature of the project, saying its strong journalistic guidelines had given the stories a distinctive voice. Is there a common sound that you’re after?

The common sound we are after is that of great storytelling. Our editors work closely with our producers for long periods of time and we have a very distinctive format where, most of the time, we have a narrator alternate with the characters telling the story. That gives the stories a dynamism that we are always looking for since listening to the same person speak for a long period of time could be boring. We try to find a balance in the way we tell the story. Ambient sound, music and sound effects are also key elements.

The committee also pointed to the economic model of Radio Ambulante. I know you got Kickstarter money at the beginning. How are you financed now? Do listener contributions make up a significant percentage of that?

We still receive support from our listeners, and expect to launch another Kickstarter campaign early next year. But most of our funding comes from different foundations in the United States. We’re also starting to get underwriting and hope to find a few sponsors now that our audience is much bigger.

You have several methods of distribution – broadcast on radio stations, your internet site, SoundCloud, etc. Which is the most popular?

SoundCloud is the platform where we upload our content, and from there it is distributed to other platforms. So every time someone listens to our story on our website, via iTunes or via Stitcher, they actually listen to us in SoundCloud. We receive specific stats and metrics from them. But we also have a partnership with BBC Mundo, and they have their own platform and analytics, but bring half of the listeners to most of our episodes as well. We are also growing in terrestrial radio stations around Latin America. In essence, however, we’re a digital project. From reporting to production to distribution, we rely on the most current digital tools to do our work. Our very nature is transnational. So without them, we could not exist.

You’ve experimented with different formats, including live shows, multimedia and English-language specials. Are there other ways you are looking at to expand your audience and interact with your listeners?

We are always looking for new ways to grow our audience and engage our listeners. Earlier this year we launched an interview series in English with PRI (Public Radio International) called Radio Ambulante: Unscripted, where Executive Producer Daniel Alarcón interviews Latino and Latin American artists, thinkers and innovators. With this series we hope to reach those listeners who are interested in topics related to Latino and Latin American art and innovation, but who might not have the Spanish-language skills to access that information through Spanish-language media.

We also hope to expand our presence on the radio dial by distributing our content to more terrestrial radio stations in the US and Latin America. KALW, the local public radio station from the San Francisco Bay Area, just starting broadcasting our content in Spanish – which is huge! We’d love to see more radio stations around the country follow KALW’s bold move. Live shows are a big part of our mission, too. We have the forth one coming up in San Francisco, and we know it will be a success. It’s all part of our mission to bring diverse, complicated, moving stories from Latin America to the audiences that crave them. With that goal in mind, we’re willing to try every avenue available.

Interview conducted by Kyle James

(photo: flickr/rocío lara CC: BY-SA)

Several digital news projects in Europe have received a lot of attention over the past year due to their innovative funding method. They didn’t have a big publisher financing their start-up costs, but went directly to their potential audience and raised millions for their platforms. This kind of crowdfunding might be a model for others to follow, especially as other revenue streams slow to a trickle.

The drumbeat of depressing news about print publishing’s decline has been with us for so long now that it’s now part of the general background noise. But digital sites, even the big ones, are also hurting as online ad revenues have slumped. More and more are abandoning the “it’s free on the internet” philosophy and setting up paywalls, with some success.

But what about the new kids on the block? Those start-ups might have the drive and ideas, but aren’t the New York Times, which has enough clout to convince people to pay to access unlimited content.

Two European newcomers think they might have found a solution. Within a year, a Dutch online news platform called De Correspondent, and a similar German project, Krautreporter, managed to raise millions of dollars through crowdfunding campaigns. They wanted to launch sites following a new business model, and in a sense, to remake online journalism. In fact, Krautreporter declared on its blog: “Online journalism is broken. We can fix that.”

That’s a big goal, but one that enough people seemed to think is worth opening their wallets for. In one month, Krautreporter got more than 17,000 people to commit at least 60 euros (about $81) for a total of over $1.2 million.

Readier to pay for quality, even online (photo: flickr/401(K) 2012 CC: BY-SA)

Crowdfunding has been around quite a while, and this grassroots method of raising capital has been used by everyone from artists to fashion designers to gamers to computer manufacturers. One of the first local news crowdfunding sites, Spot.us, was founded in 2008. But as media budgets shrink, more journalists appear to be turning to the crowdfunding model.

In addition to the start-up projects highlighted in this post, crowdfunding supports one-off projects. Working journalists have turned to it when their organizations can’t – or won’t – pay for a costly assignment or lengthy investigative research. Freelancers use crowdfunding to raise money to follow stories they think need to be told, but who don’t have the resources needed to do the reporting.

One project-based crowdfunding effort helped send a small German team of reporters to this year’s World Cup in Brazil. After negotiations with a magazine fell through, three journalists put out a call, raising several thousand euros.

While a small amount, it helped send the team of three to South America where they took a different angle than the rest of the media pack, posting on brafus2014.com stories on the periphery of the games and recounting how the Brazilians themselves experienced the global contest taking place on their doorstep. Their approach garnered them a regular spot on Germany’s SWR3 public radio station.

A place for longer stories

Krautreporter founder Sebastian Esser and a group of other German journalists were increasingly frustrated at the growing popularity of tabloid-style news stories online. Longer, investigative pieces were becoming increasingly rare and pay rates for freelancers were somewhere in the sub-basement.

Krautreporter, which is set to launch in September, wants to be an alternative to that. The start-up money will support a staff of 25 part-time journalists for a year.

The pieces on the site – around five new ones a day – will be longer and more in-depth, Esser says. Gone will be the banner ads, sensational headlines, cute cats and other click bait elements.

While the articles will be free, supporters will be able to comment on articles, play a role in content creation and be invited to special events. The idea is to build a community of people around quality reporting.

A new take on the news

Krautreporter is not the first journalistic endeavor to the look to the crowd for support. In the US, there’s the aforementioned Spot.us and well-known blogger Andrew Sullivan’s crowdfunding endeavor early last year when he decided to go independent. But topping the Germans’ inspiration list is certainly de Correspondent.

Helped by an appearance on Dutch TV by founder Rob Wijnberg, de Correspondent raised commitments from 15,000 people in just eight days in March 2013. In two weeks, 19,000 had signed on and $1.7 million committed, all for a product that didn’t exist yet.

The project’s founders were also fed up with the mainstream media. What they wanted was an ad-free site that focused on the kinds of stories that usually don’t survive the daily editorial meeting. The emphasis is on background, analysis and investigative reporting. For Wijnberg, “new” was more important than “news,” and he wanted to look at developments that might be less spectacular than most news events, but which have an impact on people’s daily lives. This was not a goal shared by editors at the big legacy paper where he worked, so he left.

Some skeptics

While both sites have attracted a lot of attention, not all of it has been positive. Several spoofs of the Dutch site went online, including one that raised 90 euros to “deliver a completely unknown journalistic surprise.” At one point, someone created an exact copy of de Correspondent and put it online with a nearly identical URL, saying the whole thing had been an April Fool’s joke. But, in the end, it wasn’t. The site went live on Sept. 30.

Germany’s Krautreporter has also been the target of criticism, especially regarding the diversity of its editorial team. Of the 28 journalists featured on the site, six are women. Ethnic diversity also appears to be in short supply. In addition, while a launch date has been set for this fall, some commentators have wondered if the site will be ready.

Last month, German media reported Krautreporter was still struggling with technical issues and needed to figure out how big a role to give its funders in determining the site’s form and content. In fact, founder Sebastian Esser told the Nieman Journalism Lab, “I’m not sure we will make it beyond a year.” He describes the site as a club in progress.

Wanting something new, willing to pay for it

Whether the two sites can keep the lights on in the long term is an open question. But enthusiasm of a substantial number of people willing to cough up cash for these new kinds of endeavors suggests there’s a widespread sense that many journalism outlets have taken a wrong turn in the digital age. The need to be first at all costs and to strip articles of context, background, and yes, essential content, in a race to match allegedly shrinking attention spans has left people yearning for something else.

Giving the public what it wants? (photo: flickr/Ol.v!er [H2vPk] CC:BY-NC-SA)

But these two recent crowdfunding success stories suggest that people still want quality news – stories they might have to sit down with for a while instead of reading on their tablet as they down a morning cup of coffee before rushing out the door.

For entrepreneurial editors willing to look beyond the familiar conventions of news gathering/writing and to try something new, the early success of De Correspondent and Krautreporter is encouraging. For independent journalists with a powerful story idea but weaker bank account, appealing to the audience is a very feasible option. But you need to be smart about it, as this list of crowdfunding tips recommends.

It won’t work for everyone, and not every crowdfunding appeal meets its goal. Last year, the photojournalism crowdfunding site Emphas.is closed after two years of life, saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

In addition, sustainability is always a challenge. Perhaps an innovative thinker can inspire the public with a novel idea or approach, but learning how to create social and economic value once the site is up and running is probably even harder.

But if the idea is good and the execution done well, the wisdom and wallets of the crowd might well start changing the digital news landscape for the better.

Author: Kyle James

Photo: J Mark Dodds, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

With such a frenzy around everything related to football and the World Cup in Brazil, media departments are madly experimenting with how they can grab readers’ attention. One thing they are doing is coming up with some stunning ways of telling football stories with numbers. From a slick image of the most popular beer in each World Cup country to a map displaying how comfortable different nationalities are about the idea of a national player coming out as gay, there is literally something out there for everyone.

Every day, our colleagues over at DW Innovation are combing the internet for innovative visualizations, infographics and storytelling all around the 2014 Brazil World Cup. Their collection is in a ScribbleLive document embedded below – this means that you just have to check back to this blog post and it will update automatically with DW Innovation’s daily discoveries.