7 free journalism startup ideas

Today I realized that August marks more than a year since I quit my full-time gig to work on my own company.

Since starting the technology news site Technically Philly we’ve since spun off Technically Media (the parent company and consulting arm) and created a week long festival among other projects.

Along the way I’ve stumbled across a series of roadblocks that have forced us to pivot, devise our own solutions or go looking for outside help. I’ve found myself wishing for certain services and companies that don’t exist yet.

Below are 7 of those road blocks that I think would help make the journalism world a better place.

The ideas:

CRM for publishers – As I wrote in June, current customer relationship management options are not created with online publications in mind.  As we experiment with paywalls, one off e-books and events we could use a system to help better facilitate sales. I’m currently experimenting with KISSmetrics to help make this happen, but need an out of the box solution that connects to my site analytics.

Tumblr for advertising networks – Every publisher I have ever spoken with has attempted¹ to group together local sites to form an ad network. The inevitable stumbling blocks make a grassroots local network incredibly difficult to execute. Mostly, current ad serving technology is unnecessarily detailed, difficult and expensive. Let’s face it: most journalists don’t have a clue about online advertising. I don’t need detailed demographics. Or campaigns. Or sample creative sizes.

Give me a bare bones system that allows several sites to easily select ads they’d like to run on their site. That’s it. Keep it so simple that a child could use it. My ad partners and I should be able to set up an account in less than 20 seconds. Make the buttons big and keep it jargon free. Think more Tumblr than WordPress. More iPod Shuffle than full stereo system. More BankSimple than Bank of America. More Coursekit than Blackboard.

The service should have no upfront costs in exchange for revenue share and offer sales training and support for a premium upgrade. Remember: online publishing needed tools like Blogger and Livejournal to gain popularity among the common user. Advertising networks could be democratized similarly.

Voice transcription software for multi-person conversations – Journalists often waste hours transcribing phone and audio interviews from sources. It’s 2011, and we still haven’t figured out a way to easily automate this process that doesn’t involve a disgruntled intern, two cans of Red Bull and lots of muttering about going to law school. I once cornered a Dragon Voice salesman at a conference and he told me that the tech just isn’t available for computers to transcribe two voices at once. The software even struggles with once voice unless “trained.”²

I’d pay hundreds of dollars for such software, especially if it let me click parts of the transcript and jump to the related audio clip. Bonus points for tying the person I’m speaking with to my address book. Related: Google could pull this off if they wanted to.

Context makers – A large part of a blog post or story is often wasted catching the reader up on previous events to help provide a bit of context for the latest news. However, not all readers need this information and its often information that the journalist has written dozens of times. Typically, when humans identify a repetitive behavior, its only a matter of time before technology is created to streamline and automate the process, so where’s our context creator?

When reading stories about the Philadelphia Eagles signing star defensive back Nnamdi Asomugha, I don’t need the paragraphs about his time with his former team. As a football fan, I already know.

However, when it came to Rupert Murdoch’s phone hacking troubles, the paragraphs offering context were incredibly useful in informing me about the intricacies of a story that I was not intimately familiar. Yet both stories had to break from the new information being delivered to offer context. This forces news to constantly cater to the lowest common denominator: the person who has never heard of the story before³.

Not all readers require the same amount of context. Perhaps this can be solved through some sort of uber-personalization or tools that help quickly create snazzy timelines⁴ and sidebars for context.

Easy online quizzes – Is Quibblo the best we’ve got?

Facebook Comments + Facebook page comments – Why can’t we connect the comments on our Facebook page with those on our site?

Custom post-type creator – Smarter people than I have long opined that the journalists need to rethink the article as the “atomic unit of journalism.” I agree, but I’m still waiting for the technology that allows me to easily assemble different data point in a structure I create⁵⁶.

Right now publishers are bound to the content types of their CMS. This most often includes pictures, quotes, links, articles and blog posts. But what if I had a user interface to drag and drop elements of different content types? What if I could even use saved snippets of text from other stories, source documents, my site’s taxonomies and social media to arrange them in anyway I’d like?

What if I could take a PDF of my local school board agenda and highlight all of the times and tag them as “time.” I could highlight the board member that led each discussion and tag them as “people” and highlight each agenda item and tag it as “event.”

I could then dump this data into an “event coverage” content type that I created with a WYSIWYG editor to create a quick story recap that is already properly designed, tagged and categorized. This same information could be used for my “timeline” content type as well.

Boy, I hope that made sense.

Closing thoughts

• I’ll admit, I wrote this post to elicit people to tell me that some of the tools above already exist.
• Also, you may have noticed a pattern above: publishers need tools that help streamline revenue-producing aspects of a content-focused business.

1. And I include myself in this category [↩]
2. Right now there’s a Geek Squad commercial touting back school software that includes Dragon Naturally Speaking. Even the YouTube commentors are skeptical about the service working in a quiet classroom, so don’t even think about using the service when there are two professors. And yes, I did actually find value in YouTube comments. [↩]
3. True story: I knew nothing about Casey Anthony until I got a CNN Breaking News text alert about the verdict [↩]
4. SacPress has the best solution for this problem so far with its “Storyline” tab on article pages [↩]
5. And I’m not the only one [↩]
6. Someone needs to come up with the “Jarvis Number” which takes the date of all Jeff Jarvis ideas / blog posts and figures out the average amount of time it takes the rest of the world to catch up. For Christsakes, the dude told mainstream media in 2007 to get linking and it took the AP until 2011 to listen. Maybe the Jarvis Number = 4 years. [↩]