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NEWS ZEUS PROPOSAL TO KNIGHT NEWS CHALLENGE
by Derick HarrisThis proposal to Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge requests test bed supportfor a year-long project titled News Zeus, in Hawaii . The proposal can be viewed on theInternet or embedded in a web site by clicking here.The proposed project will test the theory that a reverse online newswire thataggregates, organizes and stores community news will reduce the news gatheringinefficiencies that occur when multiple news outlets, both online and offline, gatherlocal news.To test the concept, the News Zeus project will design and build the prototype interface(API) for an online ‘news hopper’ that allows community entities of various kinds to actas ongoing news sources for all local media, as well as for residents.Content aggregation from community sources will occur in the local hopper, whileretrieval and subsequent news distribution happens in a
 
distributed network of addressable ‘news pods’ that make it easy for news organizations and anyone else withan Internet connection to zero in on the original content from news sources.There are three intended outcomes from the project: first, mitigate administrativeoverhead and news gathering costs for local media which then allows journalists to dowhat they do best, which is tell the news; second, liberate community news fromdistillation and gate keeping prior to news propagation by local media; and, third,create a replicable and open access blueprint for all other geography-basedcommunities that can use the combined news hopper and news pods model after thetest phase ends.
 
-2-The test bed community for the project is the Big Island of Hawaii which has apopulation of approximately 100,000 residents. The underlying catalysts for the project,are as follows:The Gordian KnotWithout alternative models the outlook for news gathering and distribution as well asand subsequent access by citizens outside of large urban areas is not good. Thetransition of news as a doable business from the material platform of print to anethereal arena where news propagation is almost instantaneous and content isreplicable on the Internet is not promising. Audiences are ambivalent about paying for news. Their ambivalence is a problem forprinting the news as well as gathering it in the first place because of conflicting goalsbetween news in the quest for money and journalism in pursuit of the public good.News as a business is constrained by a top down, one to many, 20
th
century businessmodel at odds with a 21
st
century technical infrastructure where content is replicable byanyone on the Internet and, thus, audiences decline to pay. At the heart of the conflict is a Gordian Knot. Another name for the knot is a threesided dependency formation where newspaper solvency stems from an advertisingmodel that is increasingly less effective in print. The model no longer works becauseaudiences receive news in close to real time from the Web which is ‘always on’, andcirculation is a function of a one-person audience or, in some cases, one household.Nonetheless and almost without exception online newspapers persist in trying to pourone-size-fits-all news content into online replicas of print edition newspapers as if onlineeditions are nothing more than the mirror images of equivalent versions in print.
 
-3-It is clear by now that audiences prefer their online news in the form of a digitalbroadsheet, instead of single subject items. But interdependence amongaudiences, circulation and revenue from ads demands from the standpoint of businessthat one-size-fits-all print editions of daily papers also produce one-size-fits all Internetaudiences for advertisers.The present trend toward long term drops in circulation and diminishing ad revenuesalso clarify that all-purpose news is a questionable response to a serious problem fornearly all mass media which evolved over time and to date has not produced answers.Thus it is useful to ask whether an alternative news gathering and distribution modelthat severs the dependency relationship between advertising, audiences and newscirculation is required.Pushmi-PullyuLike the mythical animal in George Bernard Shaw’s Doctor Doolittle, we see thatthe cycle of dependency in news arises from two opposing goals: one of the goals ismammon, without which the business of news can’t exist; the other goal is journalism;and neither goal can exist without advertising.Media companies (understandably) focus on monetization whether news propagationoccurs in print, online, or on radio or television. However, the focus on money andaudience size as measures of news do-ability misses a pivotal aspect of the dependencydilemma, which is that audiences always self-organize around content, including thenews. This has nearly always been so. From the agoras of ancient Greece, to townsquares in the hinterlands, to office water coolers after a television show.
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