Nichepapers: the future of journalism
July 27, 2009 · Filed Under Essays and Commentary, Future of Media
“A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers,” Umair Hache writes in the Harvard Business Review. “Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.”
Hache writes:
Nichepapers aren’t a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They’re a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They’re not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what “news” is.
Here are four models for Nichepapers that apply these rules in different ways.
Each is named after an archetypal historical newspaper — because the key to reinvention is getting back to the basics of making better stuff:
The Sentry — Talking Points Memo. The incomparable TPM is the gold standard of a Nichepaper. It’s also a very specific kind: a sentry, always patrolling the political arena for malfeasance, misbehavior, and broken promises. By combining reportage, commentage, opinion, and muckraking, TPM delivers perhaps the most hard-hitting, most persistent, and most fearless investigative political journalism in America today.The Chronicle — Perez Hilton. Perez Hilton is the first 21st century gossip columnist. He chronicles whatever’s lewd, crude, and most likely to be viewed in the entertainment world — in such excruciating detail, the result is a paradox: the lurid becomes banal. Yet, like TPM, Perez is unafraid to challenge the status quo, persistently, chronically, and often, funnily.
The Intelligencer — Business Insider. Henry Blodget used to be an equity analyst, so it’s no surprise that his latest venture, Business Insider, crosses the line from pure news into deeper analysis — intelligence. Though BI often gets it wrong (here’s Joe Weisenthal arguing that bribes create value, for example), the analysis is what counts: it gives readers more food for thought per word than News 1.0.
The Pioneer — The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is perhaps the classic Nichepaper — and what makes it different is that it’s always pioneering new ideas, concepts, stories, and angles. The HuffPo’s perspective is politically liberal — and that’s its domain. But it is the pioneering that makes the HuffPo different. And it’s open to pioneering new ideas from nearly anyone — as long as their ideas are good enough to matter.
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