Entrepreneurial Journalism

Entrepreneurial Journalism

Summary and short explanation incl. links to lower-sections

1. LEARN

HOW

Why EJ Matters

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What is Entrepreneurial Journalism?

WHO

2. LAUNCH

3. GROW

4. EARN

5. LEAD

The Collapse

Entrepreneurial Journalism is a brand new field that has emerged alongside the collapse of traditional business models for news. Historically, the news industry has sustained itself with revenue derived primarily from advertising and paid content. In recent years, this reliance on ads and analog subscriptions/content…

The Golden Age

Tech platforms have a tremendous amount of power in today's media ecosystem, but we are living in a golden age of journalism. Here's why:

The Necessities

Summary: Given massive problems of our time, new solutions and approaches are crucial + link to sub-sections

The 4 Types of EJ Startup

The four types of Entrepreneurial Journalism ventures can be divided up into the following four categories: OWLS Niche startups (The Information, Clear Health Costs, The Skimm) LIONS Local startups (LION members) WATCHDOGS Nonprofit enterprise (INN; ProPublica, Marshall Project, The Trace) Giraffes Large…

10 Commandments

Tools

How to Identify Startup Opportunities

Introduction Every entrepreneur starts with an idea. Or a question. Each entrepreneur picks something to build. A problem to solve. An opportunity to seize. An idea to puzzle over during late night ramen suppers and early-morning showers. But the idea is not step one. Before settling on the idea, entrepreneurs go on a…

5 Ways to Develop an Idea

Launch for $0

How to Launch Quickly, Cheaply and Easily The terrific thing for entrepreneurial journalists is that it’s so much easier to launch things than ever before. Here are estimates of what it would have cost to launch professional media products in 1980. TV Channel: $10 million Magazine: $1 million Newspaper: $1 million…

Testing Assumptions

Clarifying Assumptions and Expectations To begin, it’s useful to document your own assumptions and expectations. That way you can test whether they’re realistic. Assumptions are beliefs you have about how people behave or how things work. Expectations are beliefs you have about how people will behave or how things…

Why to Test Early

How and Why to Launch Early Isn’t journalism about avoiding mistakes? There’s a misconception some would-be journopreneurs have that entrepreneurship is like tightrope walking. They think of it like this: train, prepare, and perfect yourself before risking your neck in public. When you master the tightrope, the public…

3 Quick Ways to Launch

1) Pilot an Idea on an Existing Content Platform The quickest way to create content that people engage with is to post it to an open platform like Medium. If you tag your material, people interested in your subjects can find it whether or not they’ve ever heard of you. Medium distributes content to users based on…

Essentials: Engaging and Earning

Marketing Essentials

Paid, Earned, and Owned Marketing

short or long-read?

Growth Hacking Tactics

short or long-read?

What has to happen before growth

short or long-read?

7 Primary Revenue Streams

Mini-Case: Revenue Streams

List of 50 Potential Revenue Streams

Part of the 50 ways to generate revenue, short or long-read?

Slide presentation on revenue approaches

Part of the 50 ways to generate revenue, short or long-read?

What has to happen before you earn revenue

Part of the 50 ways to generate revenue, short or long-read?

Profiles of EJs

Looking ahead

long-read-article

Owls = Niche Ventures

Lions = Local News Orgs

Watchdogs = Nonprofits

Giraffes = Funded Indies

Zebras = Socially-Minded

Slides

New Communities

New Topics

New Formats

New Business Models

New Voices

Declining barriers to entry

Powerful new tools

Shifting business context

Technological change

Shifting consumer behavior

Endgame: Moving Onward

3 Kinds of Exit

Part of the 50 ways to generate revenue, short or long-read?

12 Key Aspects in Running an EJ Venture

Part of the 50 ways to generate revenue, short or long-read?

Launch

Drawing On Your Strengths

Drawing Inspiration from Small Startups

Design Thinking & the Lean Canvas

Resources for Learning More

For lots of links and resources, visit bit.ly/ejresources and watch the following short video for some recommended books:

Definitions of Entrepreneurial Journalism

Entrepreneurial Journalism can be described as the process of developing new projects and ventures to sustainably address the information needs of underserved consumers. This definition can be broken down further into three component parts. The development of new products and services to help shape what’s next in…

Examples of Market Gaps

Here are some examples of media-related problems that former students have identified: Native Americans lacked a quality source of consistent coverage of community arts and culture. The lesbian community of NYC didn’t have a shared media space for news and events. Many urban women in their 20s enjoy cooking but lack…

What Is a Need?

The Bottom Line: People don’t care about what you want to do. They care about their own wants and needs. The beauty of the free market is that it rewards makers in multiple ways. Those who satisfy people’s wants and needs are rewarded by the market. When makers create value, they capture some of that value in the form…

The Detective Approach

The Detective Put on a detective hat to learn about a community that interests you. The two things detectives do first: look around and ask questions. Entrepreneurs tempted to dive right in may sometimes benefit from the detective’s perspective. Before investing days, weeks, months or years of your life to a new…

Mini-Case Study: WhatsApp

Mini Case-Study The founders of WhatsApp observed a series of developments that led to the founding of some of today’s fastest-growing services. Mobile phone consumers were increasingly using their phones not just for phone calls, but to send a huge number of SMS messages, even when they incurred steep messaging…

Take a Journalistic Approach

The Journalist Put on a journalism hat to seek insight that can lead to ideas for products and services. Journalists are accustomed to learning about people by asking lots of questions. In an entrepreneurial context, journalists can capitalize on that skillset to discover a lot about what customers do, how they do it…

The Anthropologist Approach

The Anthropologist Put on an anthropologist hat to develop ideas by observing how people behave and learning about their needs. Ultimately what matters more than what people say is what they do. Sometimes people will say they like something because they think that’s the acceptable thing to say. Product development…

The Coach Approach

The Coach Put on a coaching hat to look inward at your own capabilities as a way of identifying potential paths to pursue. When deciding what problem to address with a startup venture, understanding your own capabilities and resources is an important part of the equation. When you cook for guests, you probably think…

Exercise: Catalog Your Strengths

ACTIVITY: Traits and Tastes Make a list of five characteristics that you have, personality or character traits. These could be things that others have noticed or that you yourself feel are aspects of who you are. Make a list of five things you feel strongly about or have clear preferences about. Think more broadly…

Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?

SIDEBAR: Are entrepreneurs born or made? There’s a long-running debate about whether entrepreneurs are born or made. Put differently, can anyone be an entrepreneur? Competing book titles (Made, Not Born and Entrepreneurs are Born) attempt to persuade readers one way or the other. The side arguing that entrepreneurs…

The Empathizer Approach

The Empathizer Put on an empathizer’s hat to live in the shoes of others and develop a visceral sense of their needs. Before delving into the development of a new product or service, many successful innovators step into the shoes of their potential users. Spending time in a community is an excellent way to develop a…

The Scout Approach

The Scout Put on a scout’s hat to scan for value in other domains — learning from what’s working that might be applied to a community of interest to you. It might feel like cheating, but drawing inspiration from other successful ventures is a legitimate way to develop an idea. The key is to identify the core…

The Treasure Hunter Approach

The Treasure Hunter = Look at pockets of prosperity Follow the money. That’s the mantra of someone wearing the treasure hunter hat to dream up new ideas. Much of the time, we come up with ideas without first considering whether there’s money ready to flow to new ventures in that arena. As an entrepreneurial…

The Futurist Approach

The Futurist = Look for areas of change Put on your Jetsons hat. Consider the world in five years. Think about a few specific small changes you expect to see. Now imagine some bigger ones. Each technological, social, cultural, economic and political change has implications for media and opens up new opportunities. One…

Play the Futurist Game

Play the Game: Grab a stack of 10 index cards. Select 10 of the tech categories that interest you most. For each area, write down the name of the tech at the top of a card. Then jot down three ways that tech may open up opportunities for new media. For example, on a card I’ve titled “Drones,” I might write down…

The Historian Approach

Content

The Humanitarian Approach

The Humanitarian = Look for communities in need Sometimes you have to think with your heart. Most of us have causes or communities we care deeply about. If you’re aiming to have passion for your venture and to stick with it for years, it helps to explore opportunities that resonate deeply with you. Those who wear this…

Is Your Idea Worth Pursuing?

Once you’ve identified a problem, make an initial attempt to consider whether it’s a problem meaty enough to merit further examination. Spend 10 minutes (two minutes per question) assessing the following five starting questions. WHO: Who are the stakeholders who care MOST about this? HOW MANY: What is the scale of…

Preparing to Prototype

Preparing to Prototype Now that you’ve begun testing your ideas, it’s time to further flesh out your product vision. Synthesizing your insights and observations on paper is the next step toward creating light prototypes. From Brain to Paper Before creating visual prototypes or sketches, it’s useful to start with some…

Draw It Out

Draw It Out The next phase of preliminary prototyping is to start developing images. To create a picture, you have to simplify your vision into something you can communicate visually. That’s why drawing and diagramming can be helpful. They force you to focus on how the product might connect with people in the real…

Make Something

Make Something Putting your ideas into physical form can help solidify your ideas. It can also bring a different side of your creativity to the fore. Building models of various kinds can spark new ideas and can challenge you to clarify your own thinking. The objective is not to assemble an artistic masterpiece but to…

Prototyping FAQ

The Value of Experimenting with Prototypes Products aren’t birthed fully formed. They’re developed in stages. In the early phases, it’s best to create quick, easy, cheap models of your product. That’s because you want to generate input and see what people react to so you can direct your efforts toward the most…

Michelle Young, Untapped Cities

Noah Rosenberg, Narratively

Noah Rosenberg, the founder of Narratively, has played numerous roles for his venture: - Visionary who came up with the idea and found others interested in joining him to work on it. - Editor who commissioned and edited some of the work that people started submitting to his site. - Deal-maker who negotiated with…

Jeanne Pinder, Clear Health Costs

How do I decide what to build?

Critera for considering what kind of new news org to start

The Approaches

The Detective Approach Take a Journalistic Approach The Empathizer Approach The Scout Approach The Anthropologist Approach The Treasure Hunter Approach The Coach Approach The Futurist Approach The Humanitarian Approach The Historian Approach

Recommended Books

Here are some examples of media-related problems that former students have identified: Native Americans lacked a quality source of consistent coverage of community arts and culture. The lesbian community of NYC didn’t have a shared media space for news and events. Many urban women in their 20s enjoy cooking but lack…

Recommended Podcasts

Here are some examples of media-related problems that former students have identified: Native Americans lacked a quality source of consistent coverage of community arts and culture. The lesbian community of NYC didn’t have a shared media space for news and events. Many urban women in their 20s enjoy cooking but lack…

Recommended Newsletters

Here are some examples of media-related problems that former students have identified: Native Americans lacked a quality source of consistent coverage of community arts and culture. The lesbian community of NYC didn’t have a shared media space for news and events. Many urban women in their 20s enjoy cooking but lack…

Recommended Articles

Here are some examples of media-related problems that former students have identified: Native Americans lacked a quality source of consistent coverage of community arts and culture. The lesbian community of NYC didn’t have a shared media space for news and events. Many urban women in their 20s enjoy cooking but lack…

Recommended Sites

Here are some examples of media-related problems that former students have identified: Native Americans lacked a quality source of consistent coverage of community arts and culture. The lesbian community of NYC didn’t have a shared media space for news and events. Many urban women in their 20s enjoy cooking but lack…

1. LEARN

Setting the Stage for Innovation: 10 Ways to Identify Opportunities

Launching

Move from idea to product by creating simple, prototype versions

1 2 3 4 5
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