Let’s Talk Knowledge

A couple weeks ago I participated on a panel at the 2010 Buying & Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, AZ. First, let me send my compliments to the organizers of this great conference. It was a really interesting and engaging single-stream program, and a great reminder of the value in getting out of the office once in while and connecting with smart people who think passionately about your business and industry.

The theme of the conference was “Reigniting the Content Economy”, and as you can see from the conference program, there were a lot of great sessions on how to develop content that engages your users and deal with the changing forces in our industry. Unsurprisingly, then, there seemed to be a pervasive theme running across all of the sessions around the question of how users will react to the attempts of a number of publishers to erect or reinstate paywalls around content.

My own panel session was called “Whose Eyeballs Are They Anyway?”, and was a lively discussion between myself, Patrick Spain and Mark Walker around the tension between content creation, content aggregation, the link economy, and where the value lies for endusers. Charlie Terry did a great job moderating the discussion. And although we tried to focus the conversation on the issues around the link economy and free news aggregation, the questions about the economic value of news itself, and whether news organizations who are trying to extract direct revenue for their products are foolhardy to do so, kept creeping in.

Obviously, at News Corp. we’ve been out front in the idea that good journalism should often be paid journalism (this is probably a good place to note that I am here offering my own opinions, and not representing any official position of either News Corp., or my employer, Dow Jones), and we’ve taken a lot of heat for it. With some suggesting that we’re challenging the very values of Journalism itself.  Perhaps I don’t understand the premise behind the notion that putting our content behind pay walls somehow challenges the values of Journalism or, worse still, leads to the end of Journalism as we know it.

To my mind, our experience of the last decade–in which it became conventional wisdom that all information wants to be free and that nobody would ever be willing to pay for content again–was the anomoly that challenged the values of journalism, not the other way around. Sure, the world of journalism today has changed (e.g., the emergence of freemium, niche microsites, content linking and free news aggregation) , but that’s not to say the model we currently have is sustainable.

Prior to the advent of the Web, traditional journalism has always existed with a paywall, even if that was the newstand or home-delivery price of your favorite newspaper, magazine, journal or newsletter. And people have always been willing to pay for quality content, even when free alternatives existed. Even in the recent past, just because you could hear or see news on your radio or television for free (albeit subsidized by advertising), you wouldn’t necessarily cancel your various paid content-subscriptions. If you valued specific content because it provided you unique value in either quality, form or channel, you were willing to pay for it.

Of course, none of this means that our media andscape hasn’t dramatically changed. And of course, many of these changes have been for the better. The advent of real-time news through channels like Twitter, the expansion of community-generated content via the blogosphere, and the lowering of the overall cost of entry in our industry have made things richer and more dynamic for all of us. These innovations have further democratized the publishing space and often with dramatic consequences, as we witnessed in the Iranian elections. We should be be embracing these changes whole-heartedly, as both publishers and consumers of news (and at Dow Jones, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of doing so).

But these changes have also greatly increased noise for news consumers and challenged the economics of our business. As online advertising revenue alone has proved to be unable to support the high cost of rich news generation activities and the death of print classifed advertising drained newspapers of some of their most important revenue, many newspapers have been unable to survive. In addition, the rush by many news organizations to feature their otherwise paid content for free on the Web created a false economy. The perception that quality, reported news was a cheap commodity spread, even as the producers of that content were going broke providing it. A push to move to an entirely free news model, or one mostly driven by community-generated content and citizen journalists, would lead to the eventual loss of things I believe most news consumers take for granted and rely upon: foreign bureaus reporting on high-level government sources, extended development and reporting on important long form stories, source cultivation, fact checking, etc. All these are a by-product of professional journalism with an adequately resourced news organization standing behind it.

Some have argued that the emergence of a highly linked content world has dramatically changed how we practice journalism, and I would agree with that. However, the existence of our highly linked content environment isn’t threatened any more by the existence of paywalls around some content then it will be by the eventual financial collapse of many of the major news providers if a partial paid-content model can’t be made to work.

So how do we adapt to this environment? Actually, I think we at Dow Jones & News Corp. are a pretty good model for how to do so: (1) ensure that the content you provide provides real and unique value to your users, and then (2) steer the commercial model for news production back to an economically sustainable model–which means a mix of free, advertising supported and paid-content. None of this is to say that all content providers will or should demand a paywall system for their content. Each publisher will have to decide if their content provides enough unique and demonstrable value that users will then be willing to pull out their wallets and pay up.

Either way, companies like News Corp. are challenging accepted wisdom around things like whether giving all your content to Google is necessary for survival or that all content should be free. This kind of experimentation is good for all of us in the publishing industry, and as Richard Hull, President of Blowtorch Media & Entertainment, noted in one of the early sessions at BSeC10, what’s too often missing in traditional print media is a willingness to experiment.

Our Factiva aggregation business is another model that’s been both historically successful and we think still has a strong future. A paid aggregator like Factiva helps publishers monetize their content and reinforces the value of the content being licensed, while also providing real value to the user by helping them cut through the noise of the Web and search or track news against a sub-set of higher-quality, trusted sources. In the end, a paid aggregation model like Factiva, or some other way of connecting the paywalls of multiple, competing publishers will probably required in order to maintain the kind of dynamic, linked content environment we’ve all come to value.

Most of these aren’t new questions, or new tradeoffs, just new inputs and a new framework in which to operate. Paid content has always been a part of the traditional journalism, and I think a critical part of keeping the world of journalism both vibrant and healthy.

Ryan (@ryanpwarren)

Although we try to keep this blog focused on interesting or thought-provoking items impacting the Knowledge Management space, every once in a while we all need to toot our own horn, and this time I’ll do it because of how proud we are that Factiva.com has won the 2010 CODiE Award for Best Content Aggregation Service for the 2nd year in a row! Another DJ product, Dow Jones Investment Banker, also won for Best Online Professional Financial Information Service. It’s a big accomplishment for us, and we’re proud because it’s validation of the hard work we keep putting into making this the world’s best business news and reseach solution.

More importantly, however, it’s the continual feedback, inspiration and general prodding from our thousands of customers and million+ users that keeps us on the right track. Among the enhancements we’ve put into Factiva.com, just in the last year, include our new Concept Explorer, Discovery in Factiva Alerts, Dow Jones Idea Share, Factiva Workspaces, Factiva content podcasting, and automated translation for many sources (English to Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese–and those languages back to English).

It’s also a good reminder that, even though we have a lot of exciting new initiatives that have recently or soon will be coming down the pike, solutions like Factiva.com still play an important role in the knowledge management landscape.

Thanks again to all of our users!

- Ryan

The analyst firm Outsell published an interesting report (you’ll find it here. Sorry about the paywall, but we in the premium content biz have to hang together …  ) this week on the narrowing of the technological generation gap in the enterprise. Interesting, because it indicates that the three generational groups we now see coexisting in the workplace (Millennials, Generation X & Baby Boomers) are now converging in their use of technology and level of information savvy. As the report notes, “It is [now] not safe to generalize about younger people vs. older people when it comes to information habits and preferences.”  Their analysis concludes, in other words, that most workers—regardless of age—are using capabilities like Web searching, information alerting, email and mobile solutions in about the same way.

I agree with Leigh Watson, the report’s author, that this is good news for enterprises, as it means that we can ease up on some of the handwringing we’ve all been going through lately about how to reconcile these seemingly disparate information technology users internally, and how those of us in the information solutions business can create products to meet all their needs. As the report concludes, the problem seems to be taking care of itself. Right?

Well, maybe partially, but I think there’s an aspect of this gap that still exists, and is even more important for us close, and that’s the different ways in which Millennials (who, as Brigitte noted a couple of weeks ago, are newly entering the workforce today) approach knowledge sharing as an integral part of both their personal and professional lives. Speaking broadly, this generation of users has tightly integrated social networks into their daily lives, and they’re often using those networks not only to socialize, but to gather knowledge. They do it through peer-to-peer sharing via a community rather than through a solo hunting and gathering activity—which can mean a diminished reliance on traditional research tools. Ken referred to this as ‘Social Intelligence’ when he wrote about it back in April.

It‘s an example of The Strength of Weak Ties, and how finding connections outside your own area best stimulates innovation. Leveraging large social networks of weak ties to share and collect information changes the way people gain knowledge. Rather than finding and synthesizing vast amounts of information, they collaborate with subject matter experts, and then validate and extend what they have already learned. This has profound implications for us information providers, who will need to find ways to integrate with and into the social networks, or perhaps more importantly, to leverage the underlying capabilities and standards developed by the networks, to maintain their presence in front of potential users.

It could also indicates a perhaps more profound change under way in user behavior that is an outcome of both the social networking and self-serve information markets. That is: a move away from the notion that research is an activity that is best built on lessons of the past, toward more of an in-the-moment activity that looks for similar experiences. With the immediacy of the internet to connect people who share similar questions or concerns, we could see researchers move away from the notion of finding someone who previously answered the question and instead finding someone who is also asking the same question. If this change takes hold and sticks around, research tools will be less valued than community tools, and will have to evolve themselves to support this need.

And that brings us back around to the technological generation gap. Although use of social networks by Baby Boomers has increased significantly in recent years, young people still have significantly higher rates of use. But even more important than the tool that social networks are, is the different way of managing information that they represent. Even if older generations of users like the Gen Xers (such as me) and Baby Boomers are closing the gap on the use of electronic information tools, it will be more interesting to see if we can close the gap in leveraging the actual networks behind those tools and make those weak ties work to our advantage in the enterprise.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts, so let me know if you’re seeing examples of how people are beginning to use those networks of weak ties in their business lives (the use of networks like LinkedIn to prospect for jobs during the downturn is one obvious example).

-Ryan