Andrew Gruen will be speaking at a major journalism conference about his research into the viability of online news.
How do you make online journalism economically viable? It’s one of the biggest issues in journalism today as more and more newspapers migrate online and it’s one that Gates Cambridge Scholar Andrew Gruen will address at a major journalism conference next month.
Gruen [2008], who is doing a PhD in Social and Political Science, will be speaking at the annual conference on journalism practice at Science Po’s School of Journalism in Paris on 10 December.
His subject is Viability in born digital news and he will draw on his research investigating what a successful business model would look like for a new media start-up.
Gruen, who has himself worked for a range of media including BBC News Online and an NBC affiliate tv station in Florida, is interested in the kind of accountability journalism which many fear is on the way out, the kind which holds people and institutions in power to account.
He is studying whether media which has started up in the digital era without the baggage of a traditional media beginning does accountability differently, what its business model is and how successful it is.
Other speakers at the event include Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Centre of Digital Journalism and ex-Guardian editor, and Scott Lamb, editorial director of Buzzfeed, who will debate how Buzzfeed is revolutionising digital journalism; Julia Beizer, editor of mobile projects at the Washington Post, on editorial content for mobiles; Stéphane Distinguin, president of faberNovel, on whether entrepreneurial journalism is the future of journalism; Joshua Benton, editor of Neiman Lab on top trends in digital journalism; and Mark Hansen, professor of statistics and director of Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism on journalism and big data.
Gruen said he was delighted to be speaking at the conference and added: “During my research In Austin and Seoul I found a potential model of viability for future news enterprises. The Texas Tribune and OhmyNews rely on the reduced costs of digital distribution, ‘revenue promiscuity’ to develop monetary resources and a specific set of non-monetary assets that enhance both their editorial products and incomes.”
Read Andrew’s blog on his research here. Picture credit: Stuart Miles and www.freedigitalphotos.net.
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