True/Slant Tests Another Model Of Web Journalism
April 8, 2009
by Walter S. Mossberg
As newspapers, magazines and TV stations face dire economic challenges, and journalism moves increasingly online, debates are raging about how best to preserve quality news and commentary while still making money.
There’s lots of experimentation with different approaches. Many journalists, old and new, are operating as stand-alone bloggers, but finding it hard to make a living. Web advertising has weakened with the economy, and often can’t cover the costs of expensive reporting. A couple of respected traditional publications have successfully attracted large numbers of paid subscribers online, but many others who have tried have failed.
Meanwhile, advertisers also are scrambling to figure out the best way to sell their products online, in a manner that both attracts potential customers and blends in well with the content and style of news sites. And publishers are trying to capture the conversation and sense of community that permeate services like Facebook and Twitter.
This week, a new Web news site is entering the fray, with a novel approach to journalistic entrepreneurship, new forms of advertising, and an effort to blend journalism and social networking.
The site, called True/Slant, at trueslant.com, is opening its doors via an odd preliminary status it calls an “open alpha.” This means it’s rough around the edges, and not yet taking in revenue, but hopes to attract enough participation to hone its design and operation.
True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.
It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,” assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the originating outside site.
The initial group of contributors includes current or former writers for publications such as the Financial Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Time magazine and the Boston Globe.
Readers can go directly to the page of their favorite contributor, but the site’s home page will knit together popular content and contributors, and each reader will be able to track multiple topics and contributors through a streaming feed called “I’m following.”
True/Slant will run regular Web ads throughout. But, in a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists’ pages, but will be labeled as ad content.
The journalists are paid a small amount, but the plan is to turn them into minipublishers under the True/Slant umbrella. They will be offered a share of the advertising and sponsorship revenues their individual pages generate and, in some cases, equity in True/Slant, which is backed by venture capital.
These contributors are allowed to keep writing elsewhere, either online or in traditional media, and even to promote these outside efforts on True/Slant. But they are expected to post original commentary and analysis to True/Slant. They also are allowed to arrange for their own advertising or sponsorships, in addition to what True/Slant can sell, and even, in some cases, to add other authors to their pages.
In another unusual move, the contributors also are required to actively engage with readers on the site. They must post a minimum number of comments in reader discussions about their articles and curate the comments, giving prominence to the most interesting. They are even expected to comment on each other’s posts.
This required engagement is an attempt to capture some of the excitement of a social network, and it ties in directly with a contributor’s success. On the home page, and elsewhere throughout the site, True/Slant promotes not only the most popular contributors, but also the most active ones. High rankings in these categories can lead to higher traffic on each contributor’s page, and, indirectly, to higher income.
Readers who are active commenters can also gain prominence on the site, especially if those comments are popular or called out for special attention. A front-page panel will highlight the most active commenters, and the most called-out comments.
The layout of the site is clean and handsome, a decent effort to meld a news site and a social network. One layout flaw the company hopes to fix: There’s no easy way to find a list of all topics, only those it considers hot at any moment.
It’s way too early to know if True/Slant will succeed. For one thing, it is still dependent on advertising, not subscriptions. And ethical questions could arise, because the site’s operators don’t edit or preapprove the content, and the model of blended journalism and advertising could prove problematic.
But it’s another example of how the Web is changing traditional media, and might be worth a look.
Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.
Comments
“Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Time magazine and the Boston Globe”
Man, I’m glad they have such a broad spectrum of the political rainbow. I’d hate for them to load it up with editorialists/journalists from the left like so many failing newspapers and magazines….
Oh, wait; yikes!
What’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
Posted by John Carey at April 8th, 2009 at 7:02 pmIt sounds like they might have the recipe for success…but recently I just found another site that I love which just launched. Newsy.com takes video clips from news outlets around the world and put them together to make a short segment. It works because they can get all of the facts in one place and analyze it (eliminating the parrot aspect).
Posted by Christie Schmidt at April 10th, 2009 at 9:53 amNewsy.com also pairs up with the journalism school at the University of Missouri and so students get hands on experience working in the newsroom. To me, this is a pretty cool site simply for this reason. And for the fact that I have no time and so would rather watch a 2 minute clip about the days top headlines than sit and try and scan through a paper.
This is a blog aggregator model, nothing new here at all.
There is no way that online advertisers will stump up enough money to support first class journalists/writers, even if the advertisers have their own page (advertisers already have their own “page” it’s called their web site and they try to build social networks around them. This would be extra work for them). Why would they pay more money to advertise here when they can pay a lot less and advertise next to a search engine box: it’s far more effective and less expensive than advertising next to a column of journalism.
And a snazzy design won’t save journalism. Money will save journalism. We need to create an effective mechanism that harvests the value created by journalists. It’s certainly not online ads. But it could be virtual cash…: http://www.siliconvalleywatche.....al_gol.php
Posted by Tom Foremski at April 10th, 2009 at 6:37 pm