As we have been developing this platform, we have also thought about how this project and projects like it become sustainable. NewsLynx is certainly not unique in wrestling with this question since foundation or grant-funded journalism tools are just as ascendant as foundation-funded newsrooms. A number of former and current project leaders spoke to us about what they thought they did well and what they would have done differently. What follows are the main questions projects like these should be asking themselves and discussion of some consensus around how viable various alternatives may be.
Most people respond to this question by saying either, “you’ll never make money off of newsrooms,” or they take the Bill Cunningham approach: “You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.”66Neither is completely true.
For the former, whole industries (analytics being one, commenting platforms being another) do make a lot of money off of newsrooms. As for the latter—that the lack of a price tag grants creative freedom—Miranda Mulligan, digital creative director at National Geographic and former executive director of Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, succinctly put it: “Users have expectations whether they give you money or not.” While one could argue about just how much users expect from a free tool versus a paying one, answers to this relate to issues of value and utility. If the platform is not useful, people will neither use it nor pay for it. Either way, getting people to use a platform—even one that has the highest utility of any tool out there—is still a question of overcoming existing workflows and getting organizational buy-in from multiple levels of management. Shane Shifflett, one of the developers of FOIA Machine—a platform for newsrooms to easily send and track large quantities of Freedom of Information requests—echoed this sentiment. “Once you have a [platform] set up in the newsroom,” he said, “you still have to constantly remind people of the benefit, especially if it’s a shared, newsroom-wide benefit.”
Sometimes open source projects don’t cost enough for a newsroom to easily buy it. In other words, they don’t charge what newsroom finance departments are built to pay. As Brian Boyer said about his experience with PANDA—a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner that enables newsrooms to store and query shared data resources—staff can sometimes run into a speed bump getting a credit card authorization for the minimal computer costs required to maintain a PANDA server. “The kind of money [news organizations] are used to spending is 50,000 dollars, not 300 dollars. They’re used to getting a purchase order, not using their credit card.” Inflating prices and charging an arbitrary multiple of 10,000 dollars can be a viable solution for some folks, but in the Venn diagram of people who are comfortable with doing that and the people who pitch open source, civic-minded technology platforms for journalism, the intersection is small.
On a simpler level, many newsrooms simply don’t have the budget for a new product. Many project leaders we interviewed echoed the sentiment that, for them, they would want to charge the full value of their system, or simply make it free. Undercharging, they felt, would alienate too many potential newsrooms while not providing material benefit to the developers. Shifflett said this was true for him, emphasizing as well that the team already had full-time jobs and didn’t see this project as a business it wanted to start running.
Others indeed felt that they could be more true to their own priorities without the pressure from paying clients—and that can be true if the project has a solid enough foundation that its utility is not in question and is relatively stable.
One of the things Boyer would have changed about PANDA was broadening the idea of who its user was. “We did user-centered design, but I would have thought more about the managing editor as a user—the person with the checkbook—along with the reporter as a typical use case,” he said. He continued:
What we struggled with is there are only a handful of news organizations that have decided that this is a priority. PANDA has some pretty amazing tools to create efficiencies and make people work smarter, not harder and [things] like that. Managing editors as a class, however, aren’t necessary thinking about it in these terms yet.
Understanding the attractiveness of a product to different stakeholders is the crucial takeaway. NewsLynx, for example, could appeal to management, as it could help keep the organization afloat financially. As we discussed in the section on how impact standards could eventually be shared across newsrooms, a multi-speed approach seems absolutely necessary—“reporter-tested, editor-approved,” so to speak.
Simply making a project open source is far from a silver bullet in achieving sustainability. We would love to see a community of developers building its own NewsLynx modules and we have done our best to enable that type of system in the future, but it’s important to consider that community-building is a skill in itself and takes a concerted effort. Boyer and Shifflett both pointed out that if they had to do it over again, bringing more people on to cultivate and manage relationships with user groups would be key.
And while the word community is so overused in the tech sphere that it’s become the subject of satire,67underlies this issue is the simple economics that, with some exceptions, one to three people cannot develop, maintain, and steer a technology project of significant size in the long term. All project leaders with whom we spoke echoed the sentiment that even with the newest tools, which lower the barrier to entry, technology is hard—and user-facing technology is even harder.
What we are really discussing with the community question is, “how do you get people invested in your project?” More often than not simple utility is not the deciding factor, since, as we’ve discussed, “useful for whom?” is its own political question. The solutions to this bind range from the mundane (go speak at conferences) to the novel (Mulligan pointed out a group of South American developers who created a game to help crowdsource data for their urban cycling company),68gave NewsLynx a magical lynx mascot,vii Merlynne Jones, whose image and GIFs populate our site with some personality). While difficult, the community question is an expression of this underlying need for not just utility but ways to fuel buy-in and enable a network effect (the idea that enough people using it makes it the default choice), which can be aided by anything from traditional promotion efforts to usability, or even emotional preference for the interface.
Another phrase for community is “highly-interested newsrooms.” FOIA Machine is pursuing a strategy of working with a few key organizations as a way to fine-tune the platform and offer a jumping-off point for wider adoption. If we can keep working with motivated organizations and refine the tool to their needs, a community could develop to share tips and ideas for NewsLynx, and eventually contribute code as well.