All about the Benjamins

The Journal Register Co. has completed an undertaking known as The Ben Franklin Project. The experiment, developed by John Paton, was to find only free ways to produce two newspapers online and in print with the credo being, “Digital First, Print Last.”

And, for the first time, the industry is embracing the paradigm of HhJ.

The project, called a “success,” will be implemented at all the Journal Register Co.’s daily newspapers by July 4.

What Paton’s project demonstrates to industrialized journalism is the ability to not take a back seat approach to a rapidly changing news business. Too many news outlets are taking a “wait and see” attitude, while the Journal Register Co. may very well be what they’re waiting to see. After all, in the era of HhJ, waiting always is a bad move.

Journalism is morphing into an environment that allows for seamlessly free-flowing information fast, accurate and unbiased (at least that’s what the most recent study shows). It is, however, this exact environment that old media pollutes by far too many checks, balances, filters and fear of litigation. Not to mention being chained to the printing press.

The ultimate goal of the HhJ era is to find a cheap (maybe free, but fast is more important than free) way of producing news (but not sacrificing content) for the consumer that brings in cash for that producer.

It’s not easy. But what Montgomery Media and News-Herald (the two newspapers who were the crash tests for The Ben Franklin Project) are showing us is that production can be seamless. So much so that it can allow journalists to work anywhere via their handheld devices—cutting costs and allowing news outlets, in particular newspapers, to focus on initiatives such as future advertising models (i.e. tags) and future editorial models (i.e. ideaLab).

The tools used for The Ben Franklin Project included Survey Monkey, UStream, Vimeo and Photoshop.com. All of this software is available for use outside a newsroom and in the field. What news outlets should be doing is investing time and staff (if they can) into developing new media initiatives—a sort of Q’s lab for journalism—where all new technologies are tested and used by journalists immediately to better advance media.

Such thinking, as done by Paton, combined with the courage to take on such a project, proves that innovation is possible within an entrenched industry. Innovation, though, never has happened where industry leaders direct their minions to “wait and see what becomes popular,” or, worse, bring only ideas that make money immediately so that we can keep the dying model alive. Extinction is the reward for failing to adapt.

In six months from now, will Paton’s project still be used at these newspapers? I’m hopeful—and optimistic. Because there is no stopping this new media tsunami. It’s not restructuring the old model. It’s not developing new ways to implement into the old model. Instead, it’s creatively destroying the industry and reinventing the way news is collected, produced and distributed in the era of new media: HhJ. That’s where we should start to focus—not in the past, but in the very near (and sometimes distant) future.

Ultimately, we all want to be counting the Benjamins.