The Texas Tribune gets it

The New York Times had an interesting piece about the Texas Tribune, a not-for-profit news organization that launched last week to quite a bit of buzz in new media circles. The Trib’s buzz has come from its unique business model: a mix of entrepreneurship, donations, premium content, and other revenue sources to create a product that is targeted to and paid for by a select audience.

It reminds me a bit of what they’re trying to do with Minnesota Public Radio, and indeed a colleague in my department said that the Trib’s model reminds him of a radio model that has worked internationally for years.

The Trib’s model interests me as a scholar and a journalist. The welcome change of the past few years is that we’ve stopped trying to save newspapers, which may not have ever been possible anyhow, and instead focused on figuring out how to try and save journalism. Newspapers can come and go, but American democracy is built on the notion that citizens need information to be self-governing. The re-emerging partisan press, while not mutually exclusive to a robust public debate, has weaknesses that are best addressed by a strong independent press.

What this type of model means is that you need to figure out what you are, then be who you are. The Tribune is built on providing investigative reporting of state and regional politics and coverage of public policy in general, not being a mass-audience publication such as a newspaper that has a little of everything. It is the very definition of niche, tailor-made for the Web age. This approach says the future of delivery on the Web is meeting niche audiences where they are with a narrow topic-band of content they want and cannot get anywhere else, not competing with everyone in pursuit of a million eyeballs. Old media is built on the idea of few competitors, and so the mass model works; in new media you are competing with everyone, and so the model has to change.

But like any model that is partly built on theory – with a dash of idealism, a sprinkling of capital, and maybe even a unicorn or two thrown in – the idea has to meet practice at some point. That moment came last Friday, as the NYT story notes, with the Fort Hood shootings. The story has a particularly interesting account of how the “old journalism” crept in at first – indeed when there is big news it brings some buzz to the newsroom. Except the Tribune was not intended to be just any newsroom.

“We were all sitting around talking excitedly about what we were going to do with it,” said Elise Hu, who came to The Tribune from KVUE-TV. “And then you could see Matt,” she said, indicating her colleague Matt Stiles next to her at lunch, “was about to blow his stack.”

“It wasn’t our story. Should we have just been one more news organization rushing to Fort Hood? I don’t think so,” said Mr. Stiles, who joined the Web site from The Houston Chronicle.

(later)

“We’re about public policy and politics,” Mr. Smith said. “What I wasn’t going to do was send someone racing up the interstate to cover something, however important, that wasn’t ours.”

“It wasn’t our story.”

I have no idea if the Tribune will succeed or fail (although I’m happy someone is trying to take a public radio model to the Web), but I do know this: This anecdote is a great example of getting “it.” The old approach is to see breaking news, and then every organization sends a reporter out to cover the same event, usually in the same way so as to not get scooped. And so what is the purpose of this approach if you end up with the same story, especially when a reader can get it anywhere? It’s not like we had a dearth of Fort Hood coverage, and I doubt their readers were confused at what the story was since the Tribune didn’t deign to send a reporter.

Here’s what the Tribune has instead that is sorely missing in newspapers during the era of cutbacks and purges: investigative journalism, consistent coverage of public policy, context, etc. In other words, the Trib knows what it is and it strives to be that.

Every news startup these days should pin Stiles’ quote to their wall and remind themselves that every story means spent resources, and that resources need to go toward building a product that reinforces who you are. This is not an easy change; all those experienced journalists in the room still fell into the old ways, and it’s understandable because that is years of training at work there. But changing the mindset means slowly changing the culture.

Good on the Tribune. Things like this are reasons why the buzz is justified.