For those keeping track….
- First new job description: “professional news recomender.”
(That’s not a joke – I actually had that job for a bit with AOL).
- Second new biz model: The newsroom cafe.
Update: In Berlin the Taz newspaper already does this. The newsroom’s bottom floor is a public cafe and they advertise one might see reporters or editors on their lunch breaks.
Reading a post from Mark Potts about an interesting experiment in Iowa my brain had a fart of an idea. Or maybe it is just too late again (still adjusting back to the time difference).
Here it is.
Ever seen live customer support via chats on a website? Go to Provides Support or KariChat for a semi-example. Google launched a free version of one of these for bloggers in 2008. I played with it for a bit, but found it a distraction. But if I had a staff, or an intern, why not just leave it up and have someone dedicated to answering questions of site visitors all day?
Not “Dear Abby” but “Dear reporter.”
The reporter is marketed as human powered search.
People are coming to my news site for information, right? If they can’t find it – they most likely will leave and try the all knowing Google. But what if they could type a quick question to a real live person: “Hey, what is going on in my neighborhood.” And the person on the other end would say “What type of news do you want? Looking for food, a bar, or just recent events?” Turns out the person just wanted to know what the local little leagues are. A tough question, but the person on the other line is a professional info-searcher. They know about everything from EveryBlock to Yelp, to SeeClickFixm and how to search those annoyingly complex city sites and are quick to manipulate the gazillion FireFox extensions that help them do their job fast.
A few minutes later – customer gets an email with a list of local little leagues curated by an actual person.
Who does this now? Mahalo.
I haven’t kept up with Mahalo – but for awhile they had hired experts (think Squidoo) and you could Tweet @mahalo a question and they’d give an answer: Human powered search.
But much like Google – it doesn’t leverage the local. Newspaper have an edge here. Just as Google could never open a coffee shop hang-out in every town, Mahalo could never have an expert in every city or town.
What I suspect will happen: Every local town will have an independent blogger who fills this role of “ask a question, get an answer” whether or not they use chat software (think Chris Prillo but instead of talking Geek, they talk “Miami, New York City, etc” all day. An ambitious newspaper could invest in it now (assuming they had money of course).
I realize the realities involved: For this to work you’d need
- A good hire – a quick, smart, well-rounded individual. Those aren’t hard to find.
- The right positioning (framing this as a place to ask questions – not to report conspiracy theories or complain).
- A news org willing to try this.
- I mean – they’d have to rock out with it and promote this on their front page.
- Enough market penetration in your home town to continue to merit the job.
I suspect three and four above would never happen.
But it makes for an interesting sci-fi scenario where every paper has a community journalist who doesn’t report the news – he/she answers questions for the community. Now is that so bad?
P.S: Maybe this is what Daniel Victor is already doing in some respects? Not directly – but I think his project is a move in this direction. He responds more directly to what the community asks/wants to know.
I would love to be this person. It’s very similar to the way Ask MetaFilter operates already, though.
You’d need more than one hire! Once people realize they get a human response, email volume increases quite a bit. It can get overwhelming, and quality suffers, so you’d also need a news org willing to recognize and grow a team as needed–and that is dedicated to keeping them plugged into the information loop. I don’t know about newspapers, but I know that with other forms of media, people ask a lot of random questions that you would never imagine.
Sounds kinda like ChaCha, but with smarter, better-paid employees.
We’re early in the development of tools that will enable this. I don’t think anyone will disagree there’s often a disconnect between pro media and the communities they cover. Mindset is part of the problem, but so are tools. The mindset will come along, we believe, driven by necessity.
I love these comments.
@steph – I suspect you are right. Humans don’t exactly scale. Which means there would have to be some picking in what questions to actually answer. In some respects it is similar to what Daniel Victor is doing (see p.s. in the post).
@Scott Roberts – I’m eager to see this tool when it is done.
hey. interesting prospect and I heard you speak when you visited Columbia J-school last year, thanks for all your wisdom. Help me here: how will the “dear” reporter get paid? risk of conflict of interest is obvious – whenever I want to know something in a city I’m visiting, I call a hotel concierge… I like this idea but as with everything, these days, what’s the financial model??? thanks.
@Susan
Not sure if I have an innovative model for how to pay this person. This post wasn’t about new revenue’s – but new jobs that might bring in readership and loyalty to a news brand.