Entrepreneurial Journalism

Kevin Rafter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367264628
• eBook ISBN: 9781351629676
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Entrepreneurial journalism has emerged as a 'hot topic' for 21st century journalism, not just in the industry itself, but also in the academic community. This timely book seeks to make sense of the dramatic transformation of journalism, with a specific focus on what entrepreneurialism means for the world of journalism.

The volume brings together leading international scholars to examine critical topics including the ethics underpinning new funding models such as crowdfunding; best practices in entrepreneurial journalism education; the implications of the emergence of a start-up culture; and differing interpretations of what is understood by the term 'entrepreneurialism' in the field of journalism. The collection analyses and discusses the future of journalism from the perspective of entrepreneurial culture drawing on relevant case studies from the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Canada, and the United States. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

MEDIA DISCOURSE ABOUT ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNALISM

Implications for journalistic capital

Tim P. Vos and Jane B. Singer

Drawing on insights from field theory, this article examines journalists’ textual and discursive construction of entrepreneurial journalism from 2000 to 2014. The goal is to understand how such discursive practices contribute to the articulation and legitimation of entrepreneurial journalism as a form of cultural capital as the field’s economic imperatives change. The findings suggest that “entrepreneurial journalism” is a condensational term: it is defined broadly and loosely but generally in a positive way. Despite the potential for disruption to long-standing journalistic doxa, particularly normative stances related to the separation of editorial and commercial interests, much of the examined discourse seems to reflect a belief that entrepreneurialism is not only acceptable but even vital for survival in a digital age.

Introduction

In the wake of technological and economic upheaval that has cost thousands of journalists their jobs and shuttered some media enterprises altogether (King 2010; McChesney and Nichols 2010), growing numbers of observers have advocated entrepreneurialism as an alternative to legacy media work (Briggs 2012). Journalists now envision careers outside traditional newsrooms, either working for an entrepreneurial news company or starting one themselves (Picard 2015). While it is not always clear what entrepreneurial journalism means, it has nonetheless become an industry buzz term and a source of hope.

This exploratory study culls references from a broad range of industry publications and general news sites in the United States in order to examine the textual and discursive construction of entrepreneurial journalism by writers within the journalism field. Of special conceptual interest is discourse related to the tension between the field’s economic and cultural capital, the latter particularly encapsulated by normative principles, which have consistently been important in journalists’ consideration of industry innovation (Singer 2015).

On its face, the terminology of entrepreneurialism raises important issues. Entrepreneur magazine defines an entrepreneur as someone who “organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.” Although twentieth-century journalism was a fairly stable social institution, the emergence and promotion of something labeled “entrepreneurial journalism” thus implies the need for risk and revitalization, inherently signaling instability. Moreover, the idea that journalists would strike out on their own to organize an innovative enterprise and assume the accompanying financial risks potentially collapses long-standing normative notions of a strict separation—indeed, a “wall”—between journalism and business functions (Coddington 2015). In the past, publishers were the ones who took on an entrepreneurial role, while the journalists’ role involved editorial judgment. Entrepreneurial journalism potentially conflates those roles. In doing so, it raises issues distinct from the notion of entrepreneurial companies, media or otherwise, and focuses on concerns at the level of the individual practitioner.

The conflation raises many questions about the complex and controversial relationship between journalistic practices and norms during periods of upheaval. Some have argued that digitization has left the principles of journalism unchanged (Craft and Davis 2013), but others propose that technological and economic transformation has occasioned a revisiting of the ethical frameworks that constitute journalism’s cultural capital (Elliott 2008; Hanitzsch 2007; Singer 2010). In general, the ways in which changing practices do or do not affect normative principles are open to debate. As Schudson (2001, 150) has cautioned, an assumption that the former explains the latter “skips over a necessary step,” since normative prescriptions can be, and often are, offered in contradiction to prevailing practices.

This article uses the framework of field theory to analyze professionals’ discourse about entrepreneurial journalism in a way that raises the normative dimensions of the discourse to a plane of explicit consideration, potentially opening the concept to more systematic ethical theorizing. In addition, it provides insight into how changing institutional practices are related to that discourse.

The Journalistic Field

Bourdieu (2005, 36) has argued that despite inevitably heterodox ideas and practices among members of a social field, such as journalism, those members “accept a certain number of presuppositions that are constitutive of the very functioning of the field.” He and others call these presuppositions “doxa.” A kind of ideational and practical orthodoxy thus defines the broad contours of a field, so that a discussion of journalistic doxa encompasses a set of implicit concepts tacitly held by news workers (Schultz 2007). Yet although fields are characterized by this broad agreement on their own unique practices and outlooks, they also are arenas of struggle, with both individuals and organizations competing to valorize specific forms of capital that they possess (Benson 2006).

Bourdieu also outlines the tension between economic capital—within the journalism field, typically expressed in terms of advertising revenues, circulation, or audience ratings—and cultural capital, articulated in terms of skills, expertise, knowledge, and similar characteristics (Benson and Neveu 2005). However, Hanitzsch (2007) narrows the focus to three key types of institutional knowledge—institutional roles, epistemologies, and ethical orientations—as cultural capital constitutive of the journalistic field. This knowledge finds expression in normative discourse, which constructs certain practices, arrangements, and beliefs as proper and moral. For example, as indicated above, journalistic cultural capital has included the ethical admonition for news organizations to maintain a wall of separation between what US practitioners refer to as “church and state,” their news and business functions.

Bourdieu reminds us that cultural capital is subject to change (Benson and Neveu 2005). While the received doxa of the past is an important source of inertia in the present, the field of journalism is continually subject to disruption by both exogenous and endogenous forces. Political and economic forces, for example, can and do challenge practices and beliefs (Baker 2002; Herman and Chomsky 2002); indeed, journalism has been described as “a contested practice embedded in larger political, economic, and cultural struggles” (Carlson 2009, 273). In particular, Bourdieu’s field theory underscores the pull of economic capital, a pull that potentially affects the structure of journalism’s cultural capital. Meanwhile, new entrants to the journalistic field can inject new beliefs as well as new practices (Elliott 2008; Singer 2007). Such forces—including the rise of entrepreneurialism as an acceptable type of journalistic practice—therefore have the potential to reshape the field’s cultural capital.

A number of scholars, particularly in the United States and Britain, have actively explored connections between field theory and journalism. Benson, for example, has highlighted the emphasis of field theory on media change, including the impact created by new actors attempting to enter and make their mark in the field, as is the case here. “A rapid influx of new agents into the field can serve both as a force for transformation and for conservation,” he writes. Nonetheless, “entry into the journalistic field requires acceptance of the basic rules of the game, which themselves are a powerful force of inertia” (Benson 1999, 468). Similarly, Couldry (2003, 673) points out that digitally enabled decentralization in the means of media production and distribution create a need to understand “how, in what ways, and to what extent the rules, categories, and capital” are changing for actors in journalistic and related fields.

Unlike doxa, cultural capital includes normative directives and thus must be explicitly, discursively expressed (Vos, Craft, and Ashley 2012). If changes in journalistic practice are to lead to a shift in cultural capital, that shift should be evident in the normative discourse of the journalistic field, which will cast some new practices and ideas as legitimate and some as illegitimate (Craft, Vos, and Wolfgang 2015). Moreover, whether emergent practices and ideas are defined as heterodox or as orthodox, relative to established cultural capital, is important in positioning the newcomers within the field (Waisbord 2013). For example, Hartley (2013) examined the struggle of online journalists to achieve legitimacy within a field whose doxa tend to position top-quality journalism as deep, investigative, informative, polished, and time-consuming to create.

Entrepreneurial Journalism¹

Entrepreneurialism has been a hot topic in business schools for decades, since Drucker posited systematic innovation as integral to the management process (Maciariello 2015). Today, a range of academic journals, mostly within the management field, are devoted to the topic, as are innumerable books and extensive media coverage (Kuratko 2005). The connection of entrepreneurialism to journalism, however, is relatively new and not extensively explored or theorized in the journalism studies literature. As Compaine and Hoag (2012, 30) drily note, “Entrepreneurship of any sort is not a concept that has been closely identified with the media industry”—despite evidence that particularly in the United States, the industry as a whole actually has been more entrepreneurial in recent years than other service or manufacturing enterprises (Hoag 2008). This section summarizes some of what has been learned to date about entrepreneurial journalism, as a practice and as an area of curricular attention.

Entrepreneurial Journalists Today

In a wide-ranging literature review conducted in the mid-2000s, Hang and van Weezel (2005) identified two strands in a thin body of work, most of it published in the 2000s: entrepreneurship in the media and the media impact on entrepreneurship. Much of the research in the first category focused on film and music industries rather than journalistic enterprises. The second, consisting of fewer than a dozen relevant studies, included profiles of media entrepreneurs such as Rupert Murdoch, as well as challenges facing women entrepreneurs, in particular. In contrast, our work here focuses on discourse about the journalists engaged in work that can be considered entrepreneurial.

But over the past decade, as traditional media models have come under increasing pressure, attention to new journalistic approaches has accelerated. The voices urging journalists to understand news as a business have grown louder, with much of the rhetoric positioning such an understanding as necessary to survival (Coddington 2015). Although the tone of much of the published work has been relatively uncritical, two broad areas of concern can be identified, one economic and the other normative—much in line with Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the tensions within the journalistic field itself.

Media economist Robert Picard has long been attuned to the financial side of entrepreneurial journalism, including business models, opportunities, challenges, and implications. In an early consideration of online business models, Picard (2000) stressed that the success of technological innovations hinged on the extent of overlap among the needs of competing interests: customers, content producers, and financiers. When those interests “converge or can be accommodated, the likelihood of success of a new application or technology increases,” he wrote. Innovations “will succeed only if the market believes that they create value that is currently absent” and cannot be fulfilled by cheaper or simpler alternatives (61).

In a 2011 report for Open Society Foundations, Picard delved more deeply into the challenges facing media enterprises and those behind them. The fundamental problem, he said, is that traditional media content was created in “technical, economic, political and information environments that no longer exist.” The industry challenge today is to ensure that it is providing a core value that consumers want and doing so in unique or distinctive ways appropriate to a digital network (Picard 2011, 8). According to Picard, existing business models are losing their effectiveness in this environment, but new ones have yet to prove sustainable over the long term.

A number of recent attempts to examine and categorize the efforts of entrepreneurial journalists have highlighted the challenges. While traditional journalism relies heavily on just two revenue sources—advertisers and media consumers—start-ups also must scramble to generate income from consulting, design work, syndication, event hosting, and whatever other opportunities present themselves (Sirkkunen and Cook 2012). Moreover, entrepreneurial enterprises inherently operate in highly uncertain circumstances, dependent on fickle users and investor whims; indeed, the elusiveness of sustainability suggests that “survival in itself must be recognised as a form of success” (Bruno and Nielsen 2012, 102).

The preconceptions of journalists-turned-entrepreneurs also can be a problem. In case studies of three US news start-ups that sought to replace community coverage lost because of newspaper shutdowns or cutbacks, Naldi and Picard (2012) found all three were characterized by what they called “formational myopia”: unrealistic expectations about demand for their services and the economic value of their work. Each start-up tried to shift professional newspaper practices and norms to the new medium—a cost-intensive, hierarchical endeavor poorly suited to the online environment. All three sites failed to reach their goals of “providing broad coverage and community impact using significant numbers of professional journalists” (91).

The other general area of concern reflected in the literature has been normative. In particular, a growing emphasis on the perceived need for journalists to embrace economic imperatives can be seen as necessarily compromising the vaunted “wall” separating editorial and commercial considerations. More concretely and again in line with field theory, the widespread gutting of newsrooms in the late 2000s has served as “a concrete indicator of the power of the profession’s business side and the degree to which it must be sated” (Coddington 2015, 78).

Media ethicist Stephen Ward has been ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Understanding where entrepreneurial journalism fits in
• 1. Media Discourse about Entrepreneurial Journalism: Implications for journalistic capital
• 2. Ideology as Resource in Entrepreneurial Journalism: The French online news startup Mediapart
• 3. Entrepreneurialism or Cooperativism? An exploration of cooperative journalistic enterprises
• 4. Accountability and Transparency of Entrepreneurial Journalism: Unresolved ethical issues in crowdfunded journalism projects
• 5. “It’s Like Having a Second Full-Time Job”: Crowdfunding, journalism and labour
• 6. Discourses of Enterprise in Hyperlocal Community News in the UK
• 7. Freelancing in Flemish News Media and Entrepreneurial Skills as Pivotal Elements in Job Satisfaction: Perspectives of masters or servants?
• 8. Towards a Broader Conception of Entrepreneurial Journalism Education: Starting with everyday practice
• 9. The Journalists of the Future meet Entrepreneurial Journalism: Perceptions in the classroom
• Index