Rethinking Journalism Again by Chris Peters Marcel Broersma

Author:Chris Peters, Marcel Broersma [Chris Peters, Marcel Broersma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138860858
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

8

The journalist as entrepreneur

Jane B. Singer

The rise of ‘entrepreneurial journalism’ – the creation of publicly relevant content by journalistic enterprises that have emerged and evolved outside of legacy news organizations – is fundamentally a response to industry disruption. Veteran journalists who suddenly find themselves unemployed are rethinking their career options; so too are new journalists who have struggled to find jobs at all or been disappointed by the ones they have found.

Both groups recognize the allure of an open-access, interconnected platform that undermines capital-intensive business models but invites low-cost experimentation, and growing numbers of journalists have joined the staffs of digital news start-ups or become media entrepreneurs themselves. They have quickly encountered a need to transform themselves into savvy businesspeople and to identify the relevance of traditional journalistic norms and practice for sustainably competitive enterprises. Doing so often requires learning new skills and taking on unfamiliar occupational roles. The many resulting challenges include maintaining editorial independence while meeting commercial demands within a nascent organization; identifying, enticing, engaging and retaining audiences; and identifying and implementing viable financial strategies that are also journalistically sound.

Entrepreneurial journalists are thus forced to revisit what often are deeply held views about what journalism is, should be and might become. This chapter explores the implications for practitioners and publics, as well as for the scholars who seek to understand them. As the volume of influential journalism produced outside traditional newsrooms continues to grow, exploring its relevance to democratic society becomes increasingly vital.

Entrepreneurial journalism

Although entrepreneurialism has fascinated business scholars for decades (Kuratko, 2005), its connection to journalism is relatively new, and the term ‘entrepreneurial journalism’ remains more a label than an identifiable practice (Anderson, 2014). There is some consensus that the term should not stretch to encompass freelancers, who have relatively little power or flexibility (Baines and Kennedy, 2010; Drok, 2013), but it has rarely been defined more explicitly even within industry discourse. Most references to entrepreneurial journalism are vague enough to accommodate a variety of constructed meanings, typically drawing on a listing of characteristics or comparisons to traditional journalistic practice or forms (Vos and Singer, 2016).

Despite the imprecision, consideration of news production as an entrepreneurial enterprise has accelerated as traditional media models have come under increasing pressure, driven in part by a technological environment hospitable to innovation and thus appealing not only to individuals but also to media institutes and foundations (Compaine and Hoag, 2012). The financial environment, while dreadful for traditional media companies, has also benefited news start-ups; one example is the recent rise of ‘impact investing’, in which an investor’s explicit intention is to generate a positive social impact as well as a financial return (Bugg-Levine and Emerson, 2011; Clark, Emerson and Thornley, 2014). Crowdfunding has also gained ground as a revenue stream during this time (Bennett, Chin and Jones, 2015; Carvajal, Garcia-Aviles and Gonzalez, 2012), enabling distributed funding for journalistic projects. ‘Journalism has long been considered a public service, more of a calling than a profession. Now it is also a business opportunity’, writes Mark Briggs.

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