A NEW ORGANIZATION MODEL FOR JOURNALISM
As Chris Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky explain in the essay Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present, “the newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old structures of the broadcast and publishing models”.
If the old business model no longer serves, new media outlets need to devise a new organization structure. INDIE believes that this model will be based on the collaborative economy, relying on peer-to-peer value creation to produce content.
This model requires a new way of working: instead of a pyramidal and vertical industrial enterprise, based on the work of thousands of paid employees and subject to the decisions of a management committee, we would be looking at a galaxy.
This galaxy would be a series of start-ups connected
through networks that orbit around a nucleus, a digital platform: INDIE.
This network-based work structure would allow for a more flexible and horizontal way of producing content, but it is not anarchical. Each start-up would keep its team of journalists, establish its editorial focus, its work routine, its area of operation. Then, it will connect to the digital platform, INDIE, which will produce its own content and also aggregate, edit, fact-check and publish, then disseminate, the content produced by its partners.
INDIE will also be responsible for generating revenue that will be redistributed to peers.
This strategy brings together independent and autonomous start-ups in a bigger initiative, with a clear objective: to amplify their reach and scope, and enable them to compete with mainstream media outlets in the news market — all while giving a voice to people and themes that do not appear in mainstream.
INDIE WANTS TO COMPETE WITH THE LEGACY MEDIA. FOR DOING IT, WE WANT TO GATHER THE BEST OF INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM, WHICH REQUIRES AN INNOVATIVE ORGANIZATION MODEL BASED ON COOPERATION AND COLLABORATIVE ECONOMY
