Slides from my lecture today to the City University International Journalism MA students... it's meant to be the introduction of thoughts, rather than to provide any certain and specific plans.

1. entrepreneurial journalism
n
robin hamman (@cybersoc)
with guests!

3. Entrepreneurs choose a level of personal, professional or
financial risk to pursue opportunity.
Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and
exploit it by organizing their resources effectively to
accomplish an outcome that changes existing
interactions within a given sector.
Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally
important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish
business entrepreneurs as either "political entrepreneurs"
or "market entrepreneurs," while social entrepreneurs'
principal objectives include the creation of a net social
benefit.
Other entrepreneurs are necessity entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship, particularly among women in
developing countries seems to offer an improvement in
the standard of living as well as a path out of poverty.
Entrepreneurship is now growing at nearly three times the
rate among women as it is among men.

4. business model as usual

5. Sell content to an audience:
• some people willing to pay for (scarce) content
• some people willing to pay for packaging and/or delivery device
• subscriptions ensure lock-in to daily, weekly, monthly or annual payment
• direct subscription with content provider (eg. magazine subscription)
• indirect subscription via third party, usually a platform (satellite providers,
etc)
• royalties from use (cuttings services, Performing Right Society (PRS),
Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), etc)
Build an audience, and sell eyeballs to advertisers... price depends on:
• size of audience
• demographic (age, sex, location, education, income; niche vs general)
• advertiser perception of importance of brand

6. http://www.muztec.com/spotify/spotify-earnings-lady-gaga-167-from-1-million-plays-spotify-delays-us-launch.html

7. Daily Telegraph: -10.21%
The Times: -16.29%
The Guardian: -16.98%
etc...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/16/march-abcs-the-times

8. DMGT execs have been wooing shareholders at an investors day on
Monday. We're not there, but DMGT has published all its slides online...
On charging:-
• "Readers will not pay to consume general news on the web."
• "All news has traditionally been free – EXCEPT print."
• "People pay for the convenience of print in recognition of the special cost of production and
delivery of a tangible product and because they purchase it WHOLE."
• "Which is why they will also pay for news on mobile devices."
• "And we will also experiment with niche paid-for web content."
Staying free:-
• "Like it or not, the web is free with one or two players in each sector becoming big winners."
• "MailOnline – uniquely among UK newspaper sites - is now big enough to make the advertising
model pay."
• "Staying free also allows us to expand our news brand internationally."
• "And protect and promote our group's paid-for products and services."
• "A pay-wall MIGHT make a little money – we will make a lot."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/20/mailonline-strategy-paywall

9. Problems with the old model, online
1. many people consider content to be free
2. audiences fragmented
3. almost unlimited competition from many producers (lack of scarcity)
4. mechanisms for small, one off, (micro)payments prohibitively complex and
expensive
5. google and others aggregate and repackage content, denying the original
eyeballs to sell
6. ???
discuss...

10. "In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming
portable, personalized, and participatory. These new metrics stand out:
1 Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
2 Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news
from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
3 Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented
about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a
shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social
networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of
events in discussion threads. For instance, more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or
share links in emails."
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News.aspx?r=1

11. "News consumption is a socially-engaging and socially-driven activity, especially online. The public is clearly part of the news
process now. Participation comes more through sharing than through contributing news themselves.
Getting news is often an important social act. Some 72% of American news consumers say they follow the news because they enjoy
talking with others about what is happening in the world and 69% say keeping up with the news is a social or civic obligation. And
50% of American news consumers say they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know.
Online, the social experience is widespread:
1 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52%
say they share links to news with others via those means.
2 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are also online news consumers say that on a typical day they get
news items from people they follow. Another 23% of this cohort follow news organizations or individual journalists on
social networking sites.
Some 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commentary about it, or dissemination of news via social
media. They have done at least one of the following: commenting on a news story (25%); posting a link on a social networking site
(17%); tagging content (11%), creating their own original news material or opinion piece (9%), or Tweeting about news (3%)."
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News.aspx?r=1

12. business models for social media

13. Mostly, it's about data...
• create a participatory framework
• increase audience size and loyalty through participation
• users generate most of content
• users reveal demographic data
• detailed demographic data has a higher value to advertisers
• data trail from participation reveals even more about users (facebook knows
that you're 20, recently described yourself as "unattached", attend City
University, and just friended a whole bunch of ex-classmates who recently
changed their location to Sydney - queue Qantas and dating website
advertisments)

14. But still, largely dependent upon old models...
• sell access to advanced features (flickr, linked in, dating websites)
• sell subscriptions to content (coming soon to News International properties)
• targeted advertising (facebook, premium google search results)
• general advertising (banner ads)
• sell opportunities to engage with audience (getsatisfaction.com)
• securing external funding

15. Sue Google: http://mashable.com/2008/05/28/belgian-newspapers-sue-google-for-sending-them-traffic-again/

16. Crowd Funding: http://spot.us

17. Co-Creation: http://www.threadless.com

18. the entrepreneurial journalist (?)

19. http://www.londonfreelance.org/rates/

20. • yes, there are some ways to make money
• think more widely about extracting value from your content and participation online
• build yourself as a brand
• have conversations that could lead to job opportunities
• come up with interesting projects that might attract funding from, for example,
the Knight Foundation
• you're not just a journalist anymore - you also have to sell, market, consult, network
and it would help to develop websites too...

21. Making money - obvious opportunities
• google ads - small money, but easy and doesn't involve any selling
• banner advertising - automated, and again easy, but very little money in it
• associate programmes - advertise products and services, such as items
from Amazon, using embed code - easy, and can be good money in right
circumstances
• target a niche, and sell ads to those who want to advertise to that niche
(http://www.shedworking.com)
• build a compelling proposition and sell it on
• sell your skills - whether it's setting up blogs, live blogging events, creating
and implementing a social media strategy, run audience engagement activities
etc you have skills others might want

22. Build Your Brand in a
Niche
• targeting a niche you
genuinely are interested in
makes sense
• might be fun anyway
• demonstrate ability to
create an audience as well
as content
• gets you noticed
• less competition,
particularly from “old
media” (FT - example of big
media doing ok in this
space)
• but there is a difference
between "opportunity" and
"free" - where's your
boundary?

23. Journalist, Event Organiser?: http://www.hayfestival.com/

24. Have Conversations To Create Opportunities
• point prospects to your online presence
• build your professional network, and make it visible (linked
in, slideshare, etc)
• live blog industry events
• become the centre of the audience community you target

25. Market and Sell Your Skills, Not Content
• you can create content - identify who, both within in the media
and elsewhere, might be interested in it
•PR, Marketing, Industry, Government, etc
• show others how you do it - teaching and consulting can be
rewarding, and it pays

26. More...
• Devise applications (see
Glamour Ask a Stylist app)
• Sell and manage clever
content + social media
propositions
•Extract data from your
audience and sell it (data
mining)
• Repackage data to build
new things (and sell it -
councils, news, marketing
agencies, etc)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glamour-ask-a-stylist/id365360023?mt=8

27. Alex Johnson, who lives around the corner from me has, from his garden shed,
created a business out of writing about, what else, garden sheds (http://
www.shedworking.co.uk) with a bit of consulting on the side.

28. Richard Lander is a founding director and investor in Citywire (http://www.citywire.co.uk) which started in
1999. Before that he was a journalist with Reuters, The Times, the London Daily News and other
publications. He spent a strange year working in current affairs television before returning to print. Scared that
he would end up with his fate in Rupert Murdoch’s hands, he took an MBA at this very university in 1993 and
has been eternally grateful ever since for what he learned here.