DATA EXPERTISE: A NEW FRONTIER FOR JOURNALISM
In their piece Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present, Chris Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky remind us of a historical reality: “Good journalism has always been subsidized”. This is a fact: unraveling vast corruption schemes, investigating criminal organizations, and covering location that are remote, unsafe or otherwise difficult to access such Syria under armed conflict or the depths the Amazon requires time and money.
Alongside resources obtained through subscriptions or syndication, INDIE envisages a third branch of business that can aggregate and analyze data for its own use and for use by non-governmental organizations, entrepreneurs, and public as well as private initiatives. These actions will reinforce INDIE’s financial sustainability and independence.
INDIE DATA will be INDIE’s big data strategy agency. Apart from being a business opportunity that generates resources and enables investments in news stories, INDIE DATA is a necessity since no 21st century journalism company can survive without mastering technology.
Let’s explain. Journalistic publishers gather huge amounts of information (text, statistics, audio, video, photography, graphics) and social media relations with every article they publish. Readers, simply by choosing to read an article, produce a data point that reveals their interests. If
a journalism company has the technology to gather and analyze this information in an effective manner, it can recycle it not just into new high quality articles but also and mainly into funding for their activity. Developing this technology will be useful beyond journalism and the internal management of the project.
For this reason, INDIE DATA trusts that the technology that collects and analyses data in an ethical and transparent way will be used as a source of income to be applied back into journalism, through the production of on demand reports and the sale of digital expertise acquired by INDIE and its partners for public and private NGOs.
Because INDIE will develop a substantial database it will be able to evaluate its performance, setting targets and developing strategies to engage readers, get more visitors and increase its subscription base. By using data intelligence, INDIE and its partner start-ups will be able to follow performance statistics in real time, and follow the increase in payments, a tool that will allow forecasting and help keep the journalism sustainable. Data management will also allow the project to invest in growth hacking and ad hoc marketing towards specific targets, reducing costs and increasing the effectiveness of the project promotion. Additionally, performance analysis will give INDIE and its partners a better Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capacity and better content analysis.
INDIE WISHES TO INTEGRATE FROM THE BEGINNING DATE EXPERTISE TO JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES AND TO ITS BUSINESS MODEL, DEVELOPING AT THE SAME TIME TOOLS FOR CONTENT CUSTOMIZATION AND INNOVATIVE FUNDING SOURCES
