Cuny unveils its news business models

The Cuny graduate school of journalism has come up with four business models for a new news ecosystem.

You can go to their site and download the models incorporting them into google docs or an excel spreadsheet and test out the assumptions

The first two models are

hyperlocal and the sales, support, and technology framework that we believe is necessary to optimize businesses in the ecosystem. We believe an organization that enables advertising networks and other services to support the local news ecosystem is both a sustainable business and will make individual hyperlocal news organizations more profitable. We divided a sample metro market of 5 million people into many smaller markets (20k, 35k, and 60k) to reflect the towns and neighborhoods that comprise a large metropolitan market

The third model is

a new, metro-wide news organization serving a market of five million people that operates on a smaller scale and performs a wide variety of tasks. It will produce original unique beat and investigative reporting and it will also work collaboratively with the other members of the ecosystem and its readers to add value. Advertising will remain the key business driver, but to maximize profits the new organization will diversify its revenues

and the fourth is a not for profit model

We want to show the level of resources that might be available in a given market to augment local news gathering efforts. Researching the available charitable money in a market, we picked a hypothetical bottom line of $3 million and built one possible organization to augment journalism in the market