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Welcome to the Banyan Project, which aims to fill a gaping need of the U.S.'s troubled democracy by pioneering a sustainable and scalable business model for Web journalism that serves the broad public of everyday citizens and engages their civic energy.
Original reporting of news has been in steep decline for five years, tracing the decline of newspapers, and the hope that citizen journalists would fill the gap has foundered. Worse, no nonprofit or for-profit Web journalism business models to date have proven to be both self-sustaining and easily replicable from community to community, as was so long the case with newspapers and broadcast news. As a result many communities –- particularly less-than-affluent ones –- have become news deserts. Without news as nourishment, civic engagement starves -– as does the informed electorate that’s so crucial to democracy.
The Banyan Project offers a lasting remedy – a reader-owned co-op business model that can scale massively, in the way credit unions and food co-ops have scaled, and thus serve news-desert communities from coast to coast. Haverhill, Mass., a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper and radio station have folded, will be Banyan’s pilot community. Its demographics fit Banyan’s mission: to serve and activate the voices and civic energy of the broad public, not just the upscale readers who are newspapers’ focus.
Banyan co-ops will be community-strengthening institutions that can thrive in news deserts, filling civic voids with original news and features and other reliable information that everyday people need to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Banyan's content will be free for all to read. Further, its publishing software will amplify its journalism’s power by inviting readers to join others its civic networking space and use its digital tools to organize for constructive community change.
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 journalist and entrepreneur who founded the Project.
Stites worked on detailed business planning as a 2010-2011 fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and is now laying groundwork for Banyan's Haverhill pilot.
Read Banyan founder Tom Stites's December 2011 essay series on journalism's future as published by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab:
• Survey of the debris-strewn digital and print journalism landscape.
• News deserts as a frame to elevate the issue of how weakening journalism weakens democracy.
• Why it’s time to test co-op business models -- such as Banyan.
The Banyan Project pledges to to be Transparent, Accountable, and Open. Learn more about the TAO of Journalism Seal
Executive Summary
Societal objectives
The Project's fundamental objectives are societal: to revitalize journalism and nourish civic engagement, thus helping to mend our frayed democracy. Its pioneering business model -- rooted in community-centered co-operative news organizations owned by community members -- reinforces its societal goals. Banyan co-operatives will:
Focus on serving less-than-affluent Americans -- the Banyan Public -- a huge population now all but ignored by sources of original and reliable journalism. Banyan journalism will be tailored so that members of the Banyan Public will experience it as relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust. The project will start with local pilot sites focused on community news and life-issue features, and when the pilots mature such sites will be seeded in communities from coast to coast. As Banyan scales and matures its news and service journalism will widen in scope from hyperlocal to global, all of it tailored to the particular needs of the Banyan Public -- but not tailored to exclude the affluent or the poor. People from all walks of life are expected to find Banyan journalism useful.
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. 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. In the process, communities served by Banyan co-ops will discover their own voices. "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 readers to collaborate in the journalism by contributing many forms of feedback, information and images; this will enable Banyan editors to have unusually deep knowledge of their readers and to engage with them to create news and features they find deeply relevant. Because Banyan will be a consumer co-operative, the editors -- gatekeepers -- will be directly accountable to tend their gates in ways that serve their reader/owners. Banyan will pioneer covering the news from the readers up, breaking from the legacy journalism practice of coverage decisions made from the experts and institutions down. The Web, and Banyan's approach to the news, makes this kind of relational journalism possible; in print newspapers, it is unthinkable.
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.”
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 debate over health care reform, immigration and other issues, stained by demagoguery that stirs fears and base instincts. And as Banyan matures and grows it will more and more draw attention away from 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 original, reliable journalism.
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 direct input from them through Banyan's welcoming software. This bottom-up and highly relational approach will set Banyan journalism apart from the legacy approaches.
Banyan's business model does not count on advertising as a primary revenue stream. The model identifies six sources of revenue and combines the community-level co-ops with a national federation that licenses a turn-key package that includes Banyan's software, training, and automated marketing and back-office services. Only co-ops that uphold Banyan standards will be eligible for the turnkey licenses.
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. We plan to operate the pilot sites under the YourTown.Matters.coop naming scheme, e.g. Haverhill.Matters.coop and Springfield.Matters.coop. 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.; 2) people yearn for trustworthy information and institutions, whose scarcity gives them value; 3) this will create demand for Banyan’s journalism and 4) make it possible to monetize Banyan's integrity the way that other intangible values, such as status, are routinely monetized. To ensure that its editors live out Banyan's value proposition, the venture 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). The software must privilege constructive behavior and create obstacles to behavior that is disrespectful and worse. It must ensure an experience that reinforces trust, one of the pillars of the Banyan value proposition.
Publishing Co-ops
In consonance with the Banyan value proposition, Banyan journalism will be published by community-centered consumer co-ops, the most trustworthy of business entities. The Banyan Publishing Corp., incorporated as a Massachusetts nonprofit, will act as a co-op federation to license software and other services to the community co-ops. As for revenue, there is no expectation that people will pay directly for the journalism alone. What Banyan sites will sell is memberships in the co-op, with each reader/user limited to one share (and one vote) and making recurring small payments to keep their membership active. 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. An array of practical member benefits should generate a continuing flow of small payments from shareholders as its primary revenue stream.
Profusion of Co-ops
Banyan's scalable federation structure will provide turnkey services that empower a widely distributed profusion of small news co-ops to operate in Banyan’s platform. 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.
We have now entered Stage II: designing, planning, funding and launching pilot projects while completing detailed research and business planning for the overall project. There are many untested assumptions in any wholly new business model and the pilots 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 refining the pilot, adding features consonant with the overall plan, and scaling it.
This website'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 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 in a format at least as alluring as that of 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.
Vision for the Business
Banyan's success as a business will grow from the trustworthiness inherent in the integrity of its cooperative 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. Community-level Banyan sites will strive to serve their public so well that word of their trustworthiness and value spreads virally, engaging a critical mass of community members and inspiring a significant fraction to buy co-op memberships.
Banyan's business model, synthesized from approaches proven in other business settings but never before combined in Web journalism, sidesteps advertising as a dominant revenue source. Its community-centered consumer co-ops are owned entirely by reader/users.
All Banyan journalism will be available on the Web at no charge. But engaged reader/users will be solicited to buy a co-op membership, paying at a rate of less than a dime a day -- $3 per month, or $36 a year. Banyan foresees this large number of tiny payments as a primary source of revenue, but only one of six revenue streams.
Banyan journalism will scale community by community from coast to coast, with independent co-ops owning each community-level site. Banyan journalism co-ops will license turnkey "franchises" from Banyan Publishing Corp., which will serve as a co-op federation. The federation will provide software, IT support, national ad sales, membership functions including marketing and payment collection, etc.; this way the editors of each co-op can concentrate on reporting and writing without having to deal with technical and publishing issues.
Resources
Journalism Research
Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age (2011 survey by the Federal Communications Commission)
State of the News Media 2010 (comprehensive survey from the Project on Excellence in Journalism)
Understanding the Participatory News Consumer (2010 survey of how people engage with and participate in the news)
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.)
Americans Spending More Time Following the News (2010 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 president Tom Stites at the 2006 Media Giraffe Conference on the future of journalism)
The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation (The NYU journalism thinker Jay Rosen's clear, comprehensive and masterly 2010 view of how the journalism landscape is shifting as Web journalism ascends. Happily, the Banyan Project's vision meshes almost perfectly with Rosen's analysis.
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 foreign correspondent based in Budapest, 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)
