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From Banyan Project
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Welcome to the Banyan Project, which aims to strengthen democracy through high-quality, Web-based journalism that engages the civic energy of less-than-affluent everyday citizens -- people who are the bread and butter of American life but are ill-served by mainstream journalism and too often out of the public spotlight.
Our mission and value proposition -- delivering useful news tailored so that this specific public finds it relevant, respectful and trustworthy -- flows from a sound and massively scalable business model that requires little advertising to thrive. Banyan's professional editors and reporters will work in close relationship with readers as co-creators of its journalism.
We are a group of 27 senior journalists, academics, Web developers, sociologists and researchers, business and financial strategists, and advocates for strengthening democracy brought together by Tom Stites, the veteran journalist and entrepreneur who founded the Project.
After three years of conceptual work, Banyan is now seeking funding for software development and for launching three pilot community sites that we expect to publish under the brand name of NewsCoop.org.
See our Knight News Challenge Grant application.
Contents |
Executive Summary
Societal objectives
The Project's objectives are societal: to revitalize journalism and nourish civic engagement, thus helping to mend our frayed democracy.
To achieve this objective, Banyan will take these distinctive steps:
Serve less-than-affluent Americans -- the Banyan Public -- a huge population now all but ignored by quality journalism. The project will start with local pilot sites but is designed to scale so that at maturity it will provide this public with comprehensive news and service journalism, from hyperlocal to global in scope, that is directly relevant to their lives and thus helps them make sound life and citizenship decisions. Through integrated software that will create Banyan's robust and scalable structure, it will empower turnkey NewsCoop.org franchise sites throughout the United States.
Amplify the civic impact of its journalism by publishing on the Web through sophisticated and welcoming software that incorporates the most up-to-date best practices for high-functioning Web communities and from Facebook and the Barack Obama and Ron Paul presidential campaigns. This civic-networking software will create a welcoming Banyan online community and equip reader/users with bottom-up Web tools that enable them to use the power of networking to organize in pursuit of their interests. "The product of journalism is no longer content," says a 2009 report issued by The Media Consortium, "but community."
Build unprecedented relationships between Banyan's professional journalists and the Banyan Public. Software tools will invite reader/users to participate in the journalism by contributing many forms of information and feedback; this will enable Banyan editors to have unusually deep knowledge of their reader/users and to network with them to create news and features they find deeply relevant. Because Banyan will be a consumer co-operative, with shareholders strictly limited to reader/users, the editors -- gatekeepers -- will be directly accountable to tend their gates in ways that serve their reader/user/owners.
Thus Banyan will give voice to the economic and life interests of a huge public whose members are little heard in the national discourse, creating what the 2009 Knight Commission Report on the Information Needs of Communities calls “informed communities.”
The report, entitled Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, defines these as "places where the information ecology meets the personal and civic information needs of people. This means people have the information they need to take advantage of life’s opportunities for themselves and their families. It also means they can participate fully in our system of self-government, to stand up and be heard. Paramount in this vision are the critical democratic values of openness, inclusion, participation, empowerment, and the common pursuit of truth and the public interest."
Banyan's approach to the news will inject a needed perspective –- responsible populism –- into a discourse long dominated by neoliberal dogma and, in the 2008 presidential campaign and later in the health care reform debate, stained by demagoguery that stirs fears and base instincts. And as Banyan matures and grows it will draw more and more draw attention away for image media -- especially cable news -- that appeal to emotion rather than reason.
Banyan's business rationale is to fill a great unmet need, even a yearning, for civic engagement nourished by journalism that fulfills the Banyan value proposition: the public it serves will find it relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust.
Overview
Banyan is the first Web-native effort to create an entirely new institutional-scale model for quality journalism with what Clay_Shirky calls structures optimized for digital data.
Opinion has dominated Web journalism to date but Banyan will be devoted first to reporting -- and at the same time it will use the Web to reach out to welcome the participation of reader/users. Decisions about what to cover, and how, will be grounded not in the usual agenda set by experts and elites but in a deep understanding of the Banyan Public's needs, largely through this direct input from them.
Banyan's business model shuns advertising as a primary revenue stream. The model identifies six sources of revenue and combines the consumer co-op with a franchise structure that provides a turn-key platform for independent journalist groups that cover localities and issues in ways that meet Banyan standards. This platform may end up as the home for some of the local news Web ventures that have already sprung up but are financially fragile.
The Banyan name is based on the metaphor that has been foundational to our conceptual work; we see it as a fine name for our project but not for our product. Pilot sites will operate under the name NewsCoop.org but brand development efforts may find a more powerful name as the Project scales. To keep things simple, we use Banyan as shorthand for the overall concept throughout this website.
Banyan's business model and structure are novel in five interlocking ways:
Distinctive Audience
To ensure that it fulfills the distinctive needs of the less-than-affluent public, Banyan's journalism will be original or carefully repurposed from existing data and journalism. Banyan cannot be still another aggregator of mainstream journalism that largely ignores the Banyan Public's lives and interests.
Economic Premise
Banyan will provide quality journalism that the Banyan Public finds relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust. This value proposition arises from a distinctive economic premise: 1) integrity and trust have become vanishingly scarce in the U.S., so 2) people yearn for trustworthy information and institutions, and 3) this will create demand for Banyan’s journalism and make it valuable to the a significant segment of the huge Banyan Public. To ensure that editors live out this premise, Banyan will be structured to make them accountable to the reader/users who are its only owners (see Publishing Co-op, below).
Synergistic Software
Banyan's multifaceted, synergistic software platform will not only deliver relentlessly useful journalism and invite civic networking among reader/users but also offer tools that make it easy for reader/users to 1) contribute many forms of information that enrich the news report and 2) offer direct feedback to editors. The feedback, along with analytics and semantic Web tools, will help editors hold themselves accountable to Banyan’s reader/user/owners (see Publishing Co-op, below).
Publishing Co-op
In consonance with the Banyan value proposition, the entity that owns Banyan will be a consumer co-op, the most trustworthy of business entities. As for revenue, there is no expectation that people will pay directly for the journalism alone. What Banyan will sell is low-cost membership shares in the co-op. The selling proposition is that people who find Banyan's journalism trustworthy and helpful to their lives, and who value the tools it provides for expressing themselves in civic engagement, will gain a sense of belonging, power and self-worth not available elsewhere-– and that this will make them want to have an ownership stake in the institution that makes it possible. Banyan foresees a continuing flow of small payments from co-op shareholders as its primary revenue stream -- and that when Banyan is fully realized the number of co-op shareholders will number at least in the hundreds of thousands.
Profusion of Franchises
The co-op's scalable franchise structure will provide turnkey services that empower a widely distributed profusion of small, entrepreneurial journalistic enterprises to operate in Banyan’s platform. The software will seamlessly meld the journalism these entities create into a comprehensive report that's tailored to meet the needs of the Banyan Public in communities from coast to coast. In keeping with the nature of the Web –- and of democracy –- Banyan has no interest in being a centralized, monolithic editorial hierarchy.
Stages and Goals
To date Banyan has been an entirely volunteer effort. Stage I, engaging expert and thoughtful people in conceptualizing how to convert a corner of the Web into a fertile seedbed for quality journalism on an institutional scale, has reached critical mass. While much detailed research and planning remains to be done, the final quarter of 2009 is time to turn to Stage II: designing, planning, funding and launching three community pilot projects.
There are many untested assumptions in any wholly new business model and the pilot will be the first step in testing them and learning about needed adjustments. Part 2 of Stage II is arranging funding and conducting survey research to gain a deep understanding of The Banyan Public's preferences and Web skill levels.
Stage III will be creating a detailed business plan for the overall Banyan entity.
Stage IV will be refining the pilot, adding features consonant with the overall plan, and scaling it.
Our site's mission is to be a work in progress, updated continually. The thinking about some aspects of the Banyan model is much farther along than others, so the site can be expected to progress at an uneven rate.
Vision for News
What's pioneering about Banyan's approach to journalism is that it's profoundly relational, resulting in news from the public up rather than from institutions down.
Legacy media are unidirectional, emanating out from the press or the transmitter with almost no meaningful feedback; this reader/editor relationship has long been broken, with editors answering first to corporate executives who are accountable to advertisers and Wall Street. And relationships in the blogosphere are faint to nonexistent -- writers post their stuff and hope that the curious will connect with it in the Web's abstract marketplace of ideas.
Banyan is pioneering a wholly new approach: Using the rich feedback from reader/users that its 2.0 software will make available, editors will base news decisions in a deep understanding of what the readers need. We think of this as call-and-response journalism. Banyan melds the power of networking with the accountable gatekeeping ensured by cooperative ownership -- the reader/users come first, not advertisers or Wall Street. This ensures not only a strong relationship, but right relationship -- which results in the kind of trust that creates not only excellent journalism but also the value that drives the Banyan business.
News report
We envision delivering a comprehensive daily report of news and service journalism, starting with community pilot sites and adding stages until mature. While the report will be carefully tailored to serve the Banyan Public, we expect many affluent readers, and some poor ones, to find it as compelling and valuable as the Banyan Public does. In its coverage Banyan will strive always to find common ground for all walks of life; because of the breadth of its socioeconomic perspective it will be uniquely equipped to succeed in this.
Banyan's journalism will be primarily text, but extensively supplemented with still images, graphics, video and audio. The devotion to text rests on the commitment to strengthening democracy, in which text has special power. Out of respect for its public, Banyan's journalism will be written in clear, practical language rather than the policy abstractions and jargon of experts that's so common in mainstream journalism.
To ensure continued engagement by its community, Banyan will offer RSS feeds and a daily e-mail blast of headlines as least as alluring as that produced by The New York Times, the leading Web news site. Banyan's presentation software will make no effort to reinvent the wheel but draw from the best practices of the most successful existing Web journalism sites.
We foresee that as franchisees cross-pollinate with each other and with emerging digital forms, fascinating hybrids will emerge.
Seamless package
The mature daily report will be created not by a single monolithic news operation but rather it will come together in Banyan's software from an array of independent institutional sources -- franchises or licensees -- and Banyan will distribute it as a seamless package under the intended brand of newscoop.org.
Banyan will accomplish this by serving as a standard-setting body that makes sure the original journalism from franchises that it distributes has a common quality and character, that its daily package is tailored to be relentlessly useful to the Banyan Public.
We expect the franchisees to be quite diverse -- groups of journalists laid off by crumbling newspapers who come together to cover the news of their communities, perhaps with the aid of placebloggers; national investigative reporting nonprofits; ask-the-doctor sites sponsored by public-spirited physician groups, and so on. The contributing entities would share four things in common:
Deep engagement with reader/users through Banyan's synergistic software, melding citizen journalism techniques with traditional reporting forms.
News from the public up. Professional journalists will base decisions about what to publish more on the rich reader feedback and citizen participation the software delivers than on top-down institutional sources.
Commitment to quality narrative reporting, in contrast to personal opinion blogging, although franchise/licensees may offer columnists who work in a blog format.
Adherence to Banyan standards grounded in its value proposition of relevance, respect and trustworthiness. These standards will be set out in contracts that franchisees must sign, taught in required trainings, and baked into Banyan's software. Banyan's goal is a system that, like the World Wide Web, exerts no more control over distributed sources of information than absolutely necessary -- only enough to make the value proposition sacrosanct.
In addition to the journalism franchises produce, the Project foresees that the central co-op will produce a national and foreign news report tailored for the Banyan public and an editorial page expressing a responsible populist worldview. These will be added when several local pilot projects have reached stability.
Vision for the Business
Banyan's business success will grow from the trustworthiness inherent in the integrity of its publishing model, which will set it apart from mainstream commercial media.
Commercial media strive to amass and hold huge audiences so they can profit from advertising sales; publishers' and broadcasters' integrity is thus subverted by a structural conflict of interest -- the need to serve reader/viewers vs. the need to please advertisers, who must come first because they are the dominant revenue source.
By contrast, Banyan will be structured so that its reader/users will always come first. It will employ a "serve them and they will come" model, striving to serve its public so well that word of Banyan's trustworthiness and value spreads virally and eventually hundreds of thousands of people will want to join in the 2.0 community that Banyan's software will make welcoming.
Banyan's entirely new business model shuns advertising as a primary revenue source and combines a consumer co-op owned entirely by reader/users with a franchise system that empowers widely distributed independent groups of journalists to cover the news of their localities or provide service journalism.
All Banyan journalism will be available on the Web at no charge. But reader/users who want to engage in the 2.0 community will need to pay a tiny amount -- at a rate of less than a dime a day -- to be co-op member/owners; reader/users who are not inclined to community participation will be urged to join as well. At $3 per month, 500,000 members would yield $18 million a year, enough to fund an ambitious if frugal news operation and run a lot of servers.
This large number of tiny payments will provide the primary stream, but Banyan foresees at least five other sources of revenue: 1) advertising, limited by careful screening that bars untrustworthy advertisers; 2) payments from the independent franchisee/licensees that provide the journalism that come together as Banyan's comprehensive report; 3) crowdfunding of specific reporting projects from readers, 4) donations from foundations for other such projects, and 5) an array of ancillary products.
For the independent journalism franchisees whose news and features come together in Banyan, the co-op will provide a turn-key publishing environment -- software, national ad sales, membership functions including marketing and payment collection, etc.; this way the journalists who form the independent entities can concentrate on reporting and writing without having to deal with publishing issues. Banyan will share revenue with these entities in proportion to the attention their pages generate.
Whatever name Banyan chooses for its journalism, it will be crucial to have it as the center of a very strong brand that the Banyan Public can count on to deliver great value in the form of relevant, respectful and trustworthy journalism. Without a strong and well-supported brand, the value proposition will be of modest value -- and the project will likely fail.
The Banyan Project is proposing an entirely new approach to the business of journalism, and will thus be riskier for its funding sources than the standard risky new ventures. To minimize this risk, extensive research will be needed -- starting with the most fundamental assumptions about the journalism needs and Web habits of the Banyan public.
The business planning offers several major intellectual challenges, including creating software that will seamlessly meld journalism from widely distributed sources, encourage viral spread of the brand, welcome readers into the 2.0 community, and maximize civility of the community experience; creating the ideal relationship with co-op member/owners, and designing a staged launch for a complex undertaking.
Resources
Journalism Research
State of the News Media 2009 (comprehensive survey from the Project on Excellence in Journalism)
Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (report from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which is eloquent in laying out the societal needs Banyan is designed to meet; see the introduction)
The Reconstruction of American Journalism (A 2009 report, commissioned by Columbia Journalism School and conducted by Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson; offers a timely, wide-angle snapshot of the journalism landscape; its analysis is useful but lacks an understanding of the class divide in journalism; the recommendations, not surprisingly, come from an inside-the-beltway perspective.)
Blending Online and Traditional Sources of News (2008 edition of biennial survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)
The New Washington Press Corps (Pew Research Center examines decimation of Washington bureaus)
Journalism's Shortcomings, and Hope for Better
Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue? (Keynote speech by Banyan Project founder and moderator Tom Stites at the 2006 Media Giraffe Conference on the future of journalism)
Old Growth Media and the Future of News (Outstanding analysis of news as an ecosystem by Steven Berlin Johnson, author and Brooklyn hyperlocal journalist, in an address to the 2009 South by Southwest Conference)
Tabloids, Talk Radio and the Future of News (prescient 1995 monograph by Ellen Hume about the breakdown of mainstream journalism and remedies for the future. Hume, a journalist who has reported for PBS and The Wall Street Journal, is a former executive director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and former research director of the new Center for Future Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab; she is currently an Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University in Budapest)
Democracy and Populism
The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life by Michael Schudson (insights on the differences between populism and progressivism)
The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America by Lawrence Goodwyn (how the rural populists organized millions and all but succeeded in changing the political and economic system of the United States)
Banyan Business Background
Basics on Co-operatives (from Wikipedia; Banyan will fall under the category of Consumer Cooperative)
What Happens Next
The site you are reading is a preview of what's to come. Phase I has brought us this far; Phase II will be a pilot project. Meanwhile, Banyan volunteers will continue more detailed work on the larger structure through four initial task forces:
- News and Features, including the editorial page and the platform that is its intellectual basis.
- 2.0 Community, including research about the Banyan Public, acquisition of co-op members and relationships with them, encouragement to organize around issues of mutual concern.
- Technology, the software that will bring Banyan's journalism together seamlessly from widely distributed news entities and publish it, provide 2.0 tools that enable the community to form, engage in Banyan journalism as citizens, join the co-op, and engage with other members to make change.
- The Enterprise, including the co-op entity, its administrative structure, fund-raising, and coordination of all aspects of the project.
Other committees and subcommittees may form as the project progresses. As it does, this site will be sprouting new branches and subsidiary trunks, so if the Banyan Project interests you be sure to bookmark this page and check back.
If you're interested in being part of the Banyan conversation, email the project moderator, Tom Stites.
Thank you!
