reporterist at asne/naa/nexpo

I had the immense pleasure of attending the NAA/ASNE/NEXPO conference in DC this past week. I was more of a "fly-on-the-wall" - listening to and soaking up what editors, publishers, and owners of newspapers were saying; and what other vendors were trying to sell to the industry.

It was extremely educational for me, though it might take a while for me to distill out a list of 'what i learnt'.

Apart from the great bar and hallway conversations I had, the sessions were also pretty good. My favorite was a talk + Q&A about company transitions with the CEO's of Dow-Corning, P&G, and Kodak. The talk by the Kodak CEO was fantastic. He ended by showing a video (embedded in the link - definitely watch it to the end) that was great. Kodak, as you can imagine, went - and is going through - the same kind of transition that newspapers are. All three CEO's had similar themes but the strongest message for me was - focus on your customer, and focus on your core competencies - be willing to change everything else.

I haven't seen the kind of out-of-the-box thinking from newspapers that I would have expected, as there are some really cool things that they could do if they follow that mantra. More on that in future posts.

I was happy to hear the Q&A with AP President and CEO Tom Curley in which many editors voiced their frustration over the newspaper/AP relationship. This is something we'd heard anecdotally from editors we'd talked to, but it as good to have it validated by such a large audience.

reporterist is based on fundamentally different economics from wire services. We believe that offering recycled wire-service stories to readers is useful in print, and may add some value to the (few) online readers that directly visit newspaper sites; but is just undifferentiated content for the rest of us that find news through social media sites, or aggregators such as google news.

And that is why we aren't trying to build up a large database of content for you (an editor) to syndicate or link to. Instead we're building a platform that lets you supplement your newsroom resources by assigning stories to qualified freelancers, or find relevant contributions from reliable journalists, and purchase exclusive rights to that work. (exclusive? yes. exclusive. In the world of online news, geographic restrictions have little value).

Finally, I was very encouraged by the positive response that I got from editors I talked to about what reporterist is doing. I look forward to working with more of you in the coming months!