This section addresses several factors shaping investments in news organizations’ strategies to build online communities.
- Creation of online communities is something that many news organizations pursue in order to explore the journalistic outcomes of such an experiment. However, online community strategies are also gaining favor with investors who believe that such initiatives may result in new and sustainable sources of income for media companies.
- Levels of investment and implementation strategy varied widely among the organizations we profiled. Levels of investment did not correlate strongly with success, but implementation strategy did.
The business reasons for these sites are plain enough.
First, as more and more readers move online, with circulation dropping and advertisers leaving the print and broadcast products, the Internet is the growth market. Consumer Internet businesses make revenues in several ways, including advertising, an arena traditional media organizations know well.
Second, we have a sense that some if not most of the players in the user-generated content arena see it in part as free labor. We strongly discourage this thinking, but the successes of sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Digg have given too many in the traditional media the idea that people will work for nothing indefnitely. This is a mistake; business models -- patterned after existing "offline" ones -- are already springing up to meet this emerging marketplace.
Perhaps the best business reason for creating these sites is the hardest to quantify in the short run. The media organization that becomes the key hub of community conversation, helping the community to have the conversation with itself that all communities need to have, stands to be a survivor in the new digital world.
The technological hurdles are not trivial, meanwhile. They bedevil even the smartest organizations. We found a variety of approaches.
