Journalists as Entrepreneurs….or not….

it’s over…

I like Alan Mutter and I always read his blog, Reflections of a Newsousaur.

So yesterday, when my old J-School classmate and current professor at Stony Brook, Barbara Selvin emailed me and asked what I thought of Mutter’s most recent post on why journalists fail as entrepreneurs, I thought Mutter was off the mark… somewhat.

“The newspaper business was a great business,” Alan D. Mutter told an audience of journalists and community members in the library of the Graduate School of Journalism. “It’s over, it’s toast, it’s finito, gone.”

Here, I could not agree more. Where I part ways with Mr. Mutter is when he says

The passion for the product they are creating causes entrepreneurs to work so hard on their journalism that it distracts them from the real job of building an enterprise that not only sustains itself for the good of the community but also provides a sustainable lifestyle for the journalist himself.

I shouldn’t say ‘part ways’, perhaps, but rather depart ways….

The biggest problem with most journalists’ entrepreneurial efforts is that they have a fixation on ‘the news’ as the product. As if that was the thing that kept The New York Times in business for the past 150 years.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to seek out the niches; you have to listen to the market and bring to it a product that fulfills a demand.

Is there a ‘demand’ for news?  I don’t think so.  Every year (except this one when I was in London), I am delighted to sit in Jeff Jarvis’ class in Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY.  Here, at least, is a place that is addressing the need for journalists to become more entrepreneurial in their approach. And Jarvis and CUNY put their money where their mouth is, actually giving seed grants to the students who bring in the best ideas for a new journalism based model.

The problem, with most of the students at CUNY and most journalists who want to get into business for themselves, is that they are creating businesses that reflect their own personal passions and not a crying demand for a need that needs to be filled.

Students at CUNY will regularly create and present ideas for businesses based on ‘hyperlocal news’ – in many cases extremely hyperlocal – like an online site for Bushwick (Brooklyn) local news.  Do you think that the people in Bushwick are out in the streets clamoring for more news about themselves?  Do you think they are going to pay for that news that they don’t even know exists or care about?  I don’t think so.

In point of fact, when newspapers were a viable business, only a small part of the reason people bought papers had to do with the ‘news’. As much of their desire to purchase it had to do with the classifieds (which Craig Newmark cleverly cleaved away), or what was on sale in the department stores, or movie listings or sports scores.  Rarely, I think, did anyone go out and spend 25 cents (which is what it once was) to find out exactly what was going on in four square blocks of Bushwick.

Furthermore, the vast majority of the revenue for newspapers came not from sales, but from advertising. The purchase price of a newspaper barely covered the cost of the paper it was printed on. The real purpose of the paper was so that K-Mart could get its ads in front of a million people a day. And K-Mart also could not have cared less about what was going on in Bushwick.  For them, and for most of the readers of the paper, the ‘news’ was the part of the paper that filled in the spaces between the ads.

Today, K-Mart can go directly to the shoppers. They don’t need the papers.  That’s why the papers are dying. They are an institution that has outlived its time. And as the papers go, so next will be magazines (Business Week, which just sold for $1; Newsweek which is on the block now). And then local TV news will follow next in this procession to the executioner’s block.

So what about the ‘journalists’?  What do they do for a living when no one wants ‘the news’.

Listen up!

Journalism is not about running around Bushwick finding out when the next Community Board meeting is going to be on noise abatement.

Journalism is about gathering, processing and publishing information; it’s about managing information.

And the web is about gathering, processing and publishing information.

Do you see a match there?

Do you see why any decent journalist should have been able to look at the papers and the web and create Craigslist themsevles?

THAT is entrepreneurial journalism.

Find an information niche that people want (there’s the key word), and do it faster, better, cheaper and you win.

Journalism should be about harnessing and directing the information revolution (to our own profit)….not about finding stories in Bushwick.

See the difference?