Investigative journalism takes time. How could one person do it alone, and distribute the stories with profit when they are ready?

"Return of the paperboy" is one of my Top 10 Media Innovation Ideas. I'm publishing one media innovation each day during the ten first days of October.

Only free newspapers (e.g. Metro) are delivered face to face in subway stations in Finland. However, modern phones and even the travel cards of the Helsinki inhabitants could be used to purchase quality magazines, or individual stories.

I'm proposing here a structure for investigative journalism, but the distribution channel could benefit various kinds of media operations.

In my idea one journalist uses her time to write and publish one story at a time. The story needs to be interesting to the wide public.

When the story is finished, it is printed on paper. The story could be, for example, 16 pages long. A small nfc chip and qr-code is included in the magazine. They are used to purchase the magazine, to comment the story on a dedicated blog (that doesn't publish the story, at least not during the same day. The blog is merely for comments) and to share the blog and story title on Facebook.

Junior league sports teams are used to sell the story at transport hubs. The publishing interval is not frequent nor set, so buyers never know when the next story will come out.

Readers buy the paper with their phones so that the sellers don't have to handle the money, only advertise the headline loudly like they did in London in the old days (I've seen this in the movies). They get a share of the total sale amount, the rest goes to the investigative journalist.

Required team:

• NFC person who knows about marketing
• Passionate journalist
• Junior league sports teams

We have the tools. Where is the cool stuff?

"Wallhack" is one of my Top 10 Media Innovation Ideas. I'm publishing one media innovation each day during the ten first days of October.

Today's idea doesn't have a business logic, nor it is useful to any community I can think of.

I'm only mentioning it because with it WE CAN SEE THROUGH BUILDINGS.

Wallhacks, an augmented city X-ray, is an app for iPad that uses gps and compass in addition to Google streetview. The idea is that the user can see with this app, what does the street behind the building in front of the user looks like.

Technically, the GPS information and the orientation information would be used to draw a map vector that is used to pick a correctly oriented image from the next street.

In computer games, this would be cheating. In real life, this might be the future of, errr, remembering if it was not this but the next street where that cool bar was?

Could augmented reality please have a breakthrough, please? And micropayments? And now that we are at it, it would be nice to have fusion energy as well.

Exploiting existing distribution channels opens new opportunities.

"Breakfast as a service" is one of my Top 10 Media Innovation Ideas. I'm publishing one media innovation each day during the ten first days of October.

Print magazines in Finland have amazing, fine-tuned logistics. Think about it: every morning before you wake up, someone walks behind your door, delivering you or your neighbours a daily newspaper.

So far that is. Print is dead. I started thinking what could we do with their great distribution channels.

What do we need every morning that we cannot get digitally?

Breakfast.

And you know what? I'm serious. I'm seriously proposing that someone at Alepa or in those companies who deliver airport food should consider this.

The distribution costs cannot be very high. It is possible to package fresh and nutritious breakfast in slim containers. I'm thinking pancakes, omelettes, sandwiches. Sliced fruits. Everyone knows a healthy breakfast is a nice start to a new day.

Maybe they could even wrap it in a newspaper?

Perhaps publishing platforms should be constructed the whole story in mind instead of just optimizing the process for each individual article.

"Narrative built in the platform" is one of my Top 10 Media Innovation Ideas. I'm publishing one media innovation each day during the ten first days of October.

One article is seldom the whole story in journalistic narratives. Just like any other story, also journalistic stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Modern web publishing platforms take this into account by providing "relevant links" below each story. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

I'm proposing that someone could built a publishing platform, perhaps with Drupal, that takes the characteristic of a journalistic narrative into account. In this publishing platform, journalist first selects if the article she is writing is a beginning, a continuum or a closing statement regarding the story. Then she writes and publishes the story as she normally would.

To the readers, the beginnings are shown as new stories. If the story continues, for those who find the middle article first there is always a link to the "beginning" story providing additional context.

In the publishing platform, journalists can always see what stories have not been concluded yet. What happened Julian Assange after he was finally out of the scope of the press? These stories could be a very nice addition to slow news days.

Rethinking the news photo business is not done one picture at a time.

"News photography as a service" is one of my Top 10 Media Innovation Ideas. I'm publishing one media innovation each day during the ten first days of October.

The structural change in the press business environment has hit hard on newspapers, but even harder to press photo companies. Nowadays there is always someone with an authentic, on-the-scene image. The web is full of dirt cheap or free stock photos.

Innovative companies can radically disrupt their business with new ideas. The time for change is now. I'm looking at you, STT Lehtikuva.

Offering photography as a service to end customers means that the magazine or newspaper does not purchase an individual photo - they purchase a service which aims to deliver best possible photo to each reader, individually.

Imagine an article about a football game Manchester United versus Barcelona. Our service would show a different picture to the reader depending on the team the person supports, whenever that data is available. A fan of Wayne Rooney? The press photo company shows you his face, a bit depressed due to the recent loss. You prefer Messi? After this game, you get the happy face.

Offering a service makes it tricky to copy the business assets: data about reader preferences and a wide variety of quality photos. Further, each photography-as-a-service frame on websites can function as a gallery of different, scrollable photos that are curated by professionals.