Another stab at the media revenue model
Jinfo Blog

1st June 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

Item

On May 27th yet another player threw the proverbial hat in the ring with a model for financing online news. CircLabs (http://www.circlabs.com/) is a brand new Silicon Valley-based tech company, emerging and receiving seed funding from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the University of Missouri. Co-founders of CircLabs include veteran daily newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld , Joe Bergeron, Bill Densmore and Jeffrey Vander Clute. Bergeron and Vander Clute have strong backgrounds in technology development and are based in Palo Alto, Calif.; Densmore and Langeveld contribute significant experience in journalism and publishing. Langeveld blogs on media topics for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. CircLab plans to introduce a suite of services called code-named "Circulate" to help media companies increase traffic and help consumers of news find connections and news, post-search. Circulate is an outgrowth of research led by Densmore, who was a 2008-2009 Reynolds Fellow at RJI. Among the media companies said to be ready to experiment with Circulate - once it's out of development later this year - is the Associated Press. Micropayments and subscription options are expected to be a part of Circulate's appeal to publishers. CircLab's co-founder Vander Clute says "We believe that newspapers should explore charging for online content when that content is both scarce in nature and of high utility to a segment of the audience. At the same time, we believe that revenue from advertising and other forms of commercial interactions will continue to be a critical means of financing news in the online ecosystem. Circulate will incorporate ways of generating high-value advertising revenue for participating news organizations." In April a similar announcement was made by another group of well-connected media types, about the formation of Journalism Online (http://digbig.com/4ytsn). The CircLabs announcement is light on details about exactly how Circulate will capture revenue, but it's great to see two competing groups come up with models. The question that still remains: is this too little, too late to save the newspaper industry?

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