Entrepreneurial Journalism
I. What Is It, Why It Matters and Can You Teach It?
II. My Plan.
by Kim Nowacki
Graduate Student, University of Southern California
Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
May 2010
I
An Introduction
During a talk about citizen journalism this past February here at the University of
Southern California, Jan Schaffer made a statement that could have been written about
me.
Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism
in Washington, D.C., said that journalists striking out on entrepreneurial ventures have
often ―engaged in acts of liberation.‖ 1
I couldn‘t agree more.
This is a time of upheaval – a revolution, many argue – of the entire journalism
philosophy and newsroom culture, which means journalists, from the old guard to my
classmates, not only have to redefine our role but really rip apart what it means to be a
journalist and, perhaps, alter some of the ideals we‘ve held so sacred.
This is the time to make mistakes, to throw out some of the old rules, to accept
that things won‘t go back to the way they were and that being a journalist right now is
scary and murky – and very exciting.
The truth is, though, for many, that excitement isn‘t going to be found in the
traditional newsroom. It‘s just not.
It‘s going to be something we create ourselves.
1
―Citizen Journalism with Jan Schaffer,‖ USC Annenberg, Feb. 24, 2010.
How We Got Here
In March 2009, Clay Shirky, author of ―Here Comes Everybody: The Power of
Organizing Without Organizations,‖ wrote a now well-known, circulated and cited blog
post called ―Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.‖ It was a brutally honest
assessment of the state of the newspaper industry.
“Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving
newspapers demanding to know „If the old model is broken, what will
work in its place?‟
To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general
model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
… It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing
industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible
difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the
public — has stopped being a problem.”
What legacy media just couldn‘t understand, or anticipate, was that there was no
one-size-fits-all fix for newspapers. That ―the big, old, dumb newspaper company is not
going to be replaced by some big, smart new newspaper company.‖ 2
So what would save news?
With the crumbling of legacy media, there came a whole barrage of journalism
buzzwords and phrases explaining how the industry was changing, and in turn, how we
had to change with it.
2
Jeff Jarvis, ―The Hard Sell,‖ On the Media, Jan. 15, 2010.
There was:
• Transparency over objectivity. 3
• The great democratization of media. Or, how the Internet allowed anyone and
everyone to be a publisher. 4
• We must engage, engage, engage5 with the people formerly known as the
audience.6 (That‘s a two-for buzz phrase.)
• Build your own brand.7
All of this was true; the Internet did bring about the democratization of media —
with much thanks to Blogger and WordPress. But that didn‘t just apply to J.Q. Citizen
Blogger. It also applied to … well, journalists, who before were also limited by editors,
publishers and legacy media in their ability to publish their work.
The Internet has freed us from old conventions that just don‘t ring true anymore.
It has, in fact, allowed us, to engage, engage, engage with the people formerly known as
the audience.
It‘s encouraged us to build our own brand, to be transparent, and to break down
the silos between the newsroom and the various other, and equally important, parts of
getting a message to the masses.
Time Magazine named ―You‖ — and your computer — as the Person of the Year
for 20068, and J-school teacher/media commentator/blogger extraordinaire Jeff Jarvis has
3
Gina Chen, ―On transparency, objectivity, and the near occasion of subjectivity,‖
Nieman Journalism Lab, Dec. 2, 2009.
4
Stephen Strauss,―Farewell to the Tyranny of Reporters,‖ MediaShift, March 25, 2009.
5
Mercedes Bunz, ―Engage your users to survive, Google tells newspapers,‖
Guardian.co.uk, March 10, 2010.
6
Jay Rosen, ―The People Formerly Known as the Audience,‖ PressThink, June 27, 2006.
7
Alfred Hermida, ―Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand,‖
MediaShift, Aug. 19, 2009.
not only criticized, but boxed up and returned his iPad because it is a tool, he argues, for
consumption of media rather than creation of content.
―The iPad is retrograde,‖ he writes on his BuzzMachine blog. ―It tries to turn us
back into an audience again.‖9
All of this, though, was just the warm-up.
What it was leading us to is what we‘re now calling entrepreneurial journalism —
a mash-up of freelancer, enterprising beat reporter, niche publisher, small business
owner …
And Something Totally New.
*** *** ***
“I presented a study in New Business models for News to our facility at
CUNY, and it argued that the big, old, dumb newspaper company, is not
going to be replaced by some big, smart new newspaper company. It‟s
going to be replaced by an ecosystem of a couple of hundred different
places who operate under different motives and means and business
models. That‟s the world our students are going into.
We'll still make calls to NPR and The New York Times to help our students
get jobs, but the reason I'm teaching entrepreneurial journalism is so we
can also prepare our students to go start their own jobs, create their own
jobs and their own work.
Now, at the end of the day, what does journalism look like as a whole?
Well, as Clay Shirky says, we don't know. Nothing works and everything
8
Lev Grossman, ―Time‘s Person of the Year: You,‖ Time Magazine, Dec. 13, 2006.
9
Jeff Jarvis, ―iPad danger: app v. web, consumer v. creator,‖ BuzzMachine.com, April 4,
2010.
works. But I have faith that there is a market demand for journalism and
that the market can meet it … ”
— Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at the City University of New York‘s
Graduate School of Journalism, speaking Jan. 15, 2010 on the public radio
show ―On the Media.‖
*** *** ***
Where We’re Going — Or, What The Heck Is Entrepreneurial Journalism
This past February, the Carnegie Corporation of New York in partnership with the
Paley Center for Media presented ―A Way Forward: Solving the Challenges of the News
Frontier,‖ a one-day gathering of journalists and J-school deans, faculty and students to
discuss the future of journalism education. I was there as a student representative from
USC Annenberg.
At the opening reception the evening‘s best quote, according to the amount of re-
Tweets, came from Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation. He
said: ―We‘re in that period right after Gutenberg and the monks are going crazy.‖
It‘s so easy to compare what‘s happening now to the invention of the printing
press. But I think everyone knows that what the Internet has done to journalism is a
thousand times more disruptive/exciting/liberating/democratizing/earth-shattering than
that of movable type.
To invent and re-imagine, you need to be able to start with a clean slate, says the
J-Lab‘s Schaffer.
Entrepreneurial journalism, she defends, is not a fad: “It‟s a necessity if
journalism is to survive and remain useful and meaning to the public.”
*** *** ***
“The idea of entrepreneurship means that emerging journalists will need
to have the ability to re-imagine journalism in many facets and re-invent it
to address the changes.
The best journalists will no longer be the just the ones who can write a
pretty story. Chances are in the future, not many people will read that
pretty story to the end. The best journalists will be the ones who can figure
out what news is important to people, how it should it be reported,
displayed and distributed. They will need the imaginations not just to
construct a story, but to DECONSTRUCT it so that its component pieces
might belong on a website, in an email, on a cell phone, on an iPad, on a
niche site, in a networked journalism project … Or whatever.
They need to have a sense of what parts of a story should be narrative, a
graphic, audio, video, a database. They need to build the tools for
consumers to find their own stories by searching available data.”
— Jan Schaffer10
*** *** ***
CJ Cornell is the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Knight Center for Digital Media
Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University‘s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and
Mass Communication.
He says the idea of entrepreneurial journalism can be broken down into three
categories:11
10
Jan Schaffer e-mail interview, April 7, 2010.
11
CJ Cornell phone interview, April 18, 2010.
• It can be done within an existing media company.
An example is the digital media projects coming out of the New York Times.
• Or, it can be what Cornell calls ―random acts of entrepreneurship.‖
Think in the same vein as ―random acts of journalism,‖ such as the Huffington
Posts‘ ―Off the Bus‖ project. Exactly what this looks like in terms of entrepreneurship,
I‘m not sure, but we‘ll probably be seeing more of it in the future.
• Most prevalent, though, are media projects that are their own entity.
Examples are: Voice of San Diego, Oakland Local, West Seattle Blog and
Spot.Us, a nonprofit project of the Center for Media Change founded by David Cohn
(through a Knight News Challenge grant).
Spot.Us is an ―open source project to pioneer ‗community powered reporting.‘‖
How it works is someone suggests a story idea, called ―news tips,‖ or journalists suggest
―story pitches.‖ Then, the public is asked to donate money to fund the story. It‘s what
Cohn calls ―the Obama model.‖ Basically, raising small sums, say $10 each, from a vast
amount of people. The donations are tax-deductible.
The finished stories are offered to news organization to republish for free. But if a
news organization wants exclusive rights, they have to pay.
When it comes to entrepreneurial journalism, Cohn says:12
―Entrepreneur = one of two things.
1. Pushing boundaries - think of the tech entrepreneur - somebody who invents
something.
12
David Cohn e-mail interview, April 5, 2010.
2. Small business owner - think restaurant owner - somebody who starts a small
business.
We need both.‖
What Makes An Entrepreneurial Journalist?
“ … comfort with change. A curiously about technology and how it can
advance journalism. And an understanding of how a business might make
itself viable. Basically, an emerging journalist should think of how they‟d
do something, not how it‟s always been done.”
— Jan Schaffer13
“Savvy and hustle are the most important.”
— David Cohn14
At ASU‘s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
Cornell hopes his students will leave with a mindset that includes:15
• The ability to deal with ambiguity.
There is no checklist or roadmap anymore to journalism. The key is to anticipate
the future and, most importantly, to take risks. If you wait until something becomes
mainstream, says Cornell, you‘re already too late.
• Take ownership.
A journalist‘s job no longer ends with the ―send‖ key. Entrepreneurial journalists
are cognizant of all the working parts of getting a story/project from idea to the user.
• A desire to innovate.
13
Jan Schaffer e-mail interview, April 7, 2010.
14
David Cohn e-mail interview, April 5, 2010.
15
CJ Cornell phone interview, April 18, 2010.
• Resourcefulness, i.e., knowing how to get the job done without traditional
resources (i.e., money).
This also very much applies to technology. The debate over whether journalists
also need to be programmers is a whole other issue, but most agree, including Cornell‘s
fellow faculty member Dan Gillmor, that journalists at least need to be able to
communicate their ideas with programmers.
• Speed.
Get it out, then polish it up.
Can You Teach That … And Why You Should
On Friday, Jan. 8, 2010, City University of New York (CUNY) hosted a
conference call16 for educators from around the world who are teaching or starting to
teach entrepreneurial journalism. Participants included:
• Moderator Jeff Jarvis and Jeremy Caplan from CUNY, which offers an
entrepreneurial journalism elective course with the opportunity to win money to start
your project.
• Bill Grueskin from Columbia University‘s Graduate School of Journalism. Here,
master‘s students are required to take the Business & Economics of Journalism class as
part of the core curriculum.
• Jay Rosen of NYU, which offers its STUDIO 20 concentration, a master‘s level
instruction with a focus on innovation and adapting journalism to the Web.
16
Jeff Jarvis, ―Teaching entrepreneurial journalism,‖ BuzzMachine.com, Jan. 11, 2010.
• Dan Gillmor and CJ Cornell from ASU. At the Cronkite School, 21st Century
Media Organizations and Entrepreneurship is a required symposium class for graduate
students. Digital Media Entrepreneurship is an elective. Several projects born here have
won funding.
• Alan Mutter of UC Berkeley. Here, the Entrepreneurial Journalism class is an
elective that helps students refine and advance their own ideas for innovative journalistic
and other information-delivery projects.
During the hour-long conversation, the educators talked about goals, students‘
needs, educators‘ needs and the challenges of how academia is trying to answer the call
for entrepreneurial training at J-schools.
At the most basic level, the instructors want students to understand the world
they‘re going into. After that, they want to encourage them to start thinking of their own
projects. They also acknowledge that not every J-school student is going to be an
entrepreneur, but that this is a part of the media landscape now and students need to be
aware of it.
Here are some of the more telling statements from the conference call:
• Bill Grueskin: ―Most people in the world are not cut out to be entrepreneurial.
And most small businesses fail. One of the things we want to get people to understand is
not just how to start your own business but how to be entrepreneurial within the context
of medium or large media company.‖
• Jay Rosen: ―What we‘re trying to do in the STUDIO 20 program is no so much
teach everybody to be entrepreneurs as to get every student to wrestle with the entire
puzzle of sustainability in journalism, that‘s my goal. I want them to have the whole
problem on the table. That means the journalism part, it means audience and users, it
means technology and it means business. It‘s not so much that I want everybody to go out
and start own their company, but I want to override and completely demolish the
siloization of journalism …‖
• Jeff Jarvis: Most students are in J-school because they want that ―in‖ to the
business. It‘s still surprisingly necessary to ―scare the shit out of them about the state of
the business‖ but then show them the opportunities out there.
The following month was the Paley Center conference. One of the panelists there
was ASU‘s Gillmor, who serves as director of the Knight Center for Digital Media
Entrepreneurship there and is the author of the book ―We the Media: Grassroots
Journalism by the People, for the People.‖
In preparation for the Paley Center conference, he wrote on his Mediactive.com
blog17 19 ideas for how he‘d run a J-school:
“If I ran a journalism school, I would start with the same basic
principles of honorable, high-quality journalism and mediactivism, and
embed them at the core of everything else. If our students didn‟t
understand and appreciate them, nothing else we did would matter very
much.”
With those principles as the foundation, Gillmor would:
• Do away with the “track” system for would-be journalists where
students focus on print, broadcast, online, etc.
17
Dan Gillmor, ―The Future of Journalism Education,‖ Mediactive.com, Feb. 2, 2010.
• Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary
learning and doing.
• Teach students not just the basics of digital media, but also the
value of data and programming to their future work. This doesn‟t
necessarily mean that they need to become programmers; but they
absolutely need to know how to communicate with programmers.
And he‘d also:
• Require all journalism students to understand business concepts,
especially those relating to media. This is not just to cure the longstanding
ignorance of business issues in the craft, but also to recognize that today‟s
students will be among the people who develop tomorrow‟s journalism
business models. We‟d discuss for-profit and not-for-profit methods, and
look at advertising, marketing, social networking, and search-engine
optimization, among many other elements.
• Make entrepreneurship a core part of journalism education.
―Some people are more cut out to be entrepreneurs than others,‖ says Gillmor.18
―But everyone should understand the startup culture … My major goal is helping students
appreciate the startup culture and encourage them to give it a shot.‖
18
Dan Gillmor phone interview, April 11, 2010.
What Students Want
At the Paley Center conference, following each discussion the panelists were
asked what makes the ideal journalism graduate. No. 1 on the list was the skill set to be
an entrepreneur.
And when the students were asked what we want to get out of our J-school
education in addition to the basics of journalism, the answers were: computer
programming skills, how to build an audience, finance, branding, Web analytics, search
engine optimization, how to monetize blogs.
While not every J-school student may be thinking ―entrepreneur,‖ we do know the
landscape of the career we‘ve chosen doesn‘t just include ―reporting.‖ It‘s what
Columbia University doctoral student Chris Anderson calls ―news work,‖19 a term
Schaffer says helps us understand our emerging new roles at journalists:
“ … journalism in the future must involve more than just gathering,
validating and writing news stories. „News work‟ also requires such things
sharing information, facilitating conversations, crowdsourcing, smart
curation and aggregation, data mining and data visualizations,
commissioning news games, gathering lists and resources and shouting
out your good work to others.
It is in this area of news work where there is much experimentation and
lots of entrepreneurial opportunities.”20
19
Chris Anderson, ―Web Production, News Judgment, and Emerging Categories of
Online Newswork in Metropolitan Journalism,‖ International Symposium on Online
Journalism, 2009.
20
Citizen Journalism with Jan Schaffer, USC Annenberg, Feb. 24, 2010.
Journalists driven to succeed can no longer count on desk jobs and age-old
defined roles, but will have to be curious and tenacious, brake the rules and not let
traditions impede their vision for what can and will work.
I‘m with Shirky and Jarvis, I don‘t know what the future‘s going to look like. But
I think whatever it is, it‘ll be defined by people who can seamlessly mesh — and
reconcile — solid journalism with business savvy and inner hustle.
And it‘ll continue to be Something Totally New.
II
“Anyone who‟s doing a digital starup with a traditional business plan
with spreadsheets … that tells me they‟ve wasted a lot of time. The idea is
to get going and make adjustments.”
— Dan Gillmor
My Plan
In the process of researching and writing this paper, I‘ve solidified two
entrepreneurial projects I plan to pursue during the next academic year. They are still
quite in the idea phase, but isn‘t where entrepreneurial journalism — heck, any
entrepreneurial endeavor — begins?
The first idea is one of those projects of the heart with no business plan or
spreadsheets, but simply a desire to explore the topic and create a media website from
scratch.
The second falls under the category of entrepreneurial journalism within an
existing company. Will it work or will the company even be interested? That I don‘t
know, but regardless, it‘s an idea I think that can work at numerous newspaper
companies.
I plan to work on both projects as my graduate thesis. Stay tuned.
Primary Sources:
• ―A Way Forward: Solving the Challenges of the News Frontier,‖ presented by the
Carnegie Corporation of New York in partnership with the Paley Center for Media.
Feburary 11-12, 2010, New York City.
• David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.
- E-mail interview, April 5, 2010.
• CJ Cornell, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Knight Center for Digital Media
Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University‘s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and
Mass Communication.
- Phone interview, April 18, 2010.
• Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at
Arizona State University‘s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass
Communication.
- Phone interview, April 11, 2010.
- ―The Future of Journalism Education,‖ Mediactive.com, Feb. 2, 2010.
• Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at the City University of New York‘s Graduate School of
Journalism.
- ―The Hard Sell,‖ On the Media, Jan. 15, 2010.
- ―iPad danger: app v. web, consumer v. creator,‖ BuzzMachine.com, April 4,
2010.
- ―Teaching entrepreneurial journalism,‖ BuzzMachine.com, Jan. 11, 2010.
• Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism,
Washington, D.C. J-Lab is a center of American University's School of Communication.
- E-mail interview, April 7, 2010.
- ―Citizen Journalism with Jan Schaffer,‖ USC Annenberg. Part of the series
―Entrepreneurship and the Future of News,‖ sponsored by Dean Ernest J.
Wilson III. Feb. 24, 2010.
Works Cited:
• ―Engage your users to survive, Google tells newspapers‖ by Mercedes Bunz,
Guardian.co.uk, March 10, 2010.
• ―Farewell to the Tyranny of Reporters‖ by Stephen Strauss, MediaShift, March 25,
2009.
• ―Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand‖ by Alfred Hermida,
MediaShift, Aug. 19, 2009.
• ―Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable‖ by Clay Shirky, Shirky.com, March 13,
2009.
• ―On transparency, objectivity, and the near occasion of subjectivity,‖ by Gina Chen,
Nieman Journalism Lab, Dec. 2, 2009.
• ―The People Formerly Known as the Audience‖ by Jay Rosen, PressThink, June 27,
2006.
• ―Time‘s Person of the Year: You‖ by Lev Grossman,Time Magazine, Dec. 13, 2006.
• ―Web Production, News Judgment, and Emerging Categories of Online Newswork in
Metropolitan Journalism‖ by Chris Anderson, International Symposium on Online
Journalism, 2009.