Entrepreneurial Journalism

How to go it alone and launch your dream digital project

Paul Marsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138190351
• eBook ISBN: 9781317278979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Entrepreneurial Journalism explains how, in the age of online journalism, digital-savvy media practitioners are building their careers by using low-cost digital technologies to create unique news platforms and cultivate diverse readerships. The book also offers a range of techniques and tips that will help readers achieve the same. Its opening chapters introduce a conceptual understanding of the business behind entrepreneurial journalism. The second half of the book then presents practical guidance on how to work successfully online.

Topics include:

• advice on launching digital start-ups;

• how to use key analytics to track and focus readership;

• engaging with mobile journalism by utilising smartphone and app technology;

• developing revenue streams that can make digital journalism sustainable;

• legal and ethical dilemmas faced in a modern newsroom;

• the challenges of producing news for mobile readers.

The book features leading figures from the BBC, Google and the Guardian, as well as some of Britain's best entrepreneurial reporters, who offer advice on thriving in this developing media landscape. Additional support comes from an online resource bank, suggesting a variety of free tools to create online news content.

Entrepreneurial Journalism is an invaluable resource for both practising journalists and students of journalism.

1
What is News and what is Journalism in 2016?

Rebecca Whittington and Catherine O’Connor

Where have we come from?

The creative opportunities for storytelling have never been greater – journalists can use technology and platforms to innovate, enhance and engage. But to reach this point, the news media has been through vast and fast change of a scale and pace which has framed innovation within a debate that swings from despair about the looming death of journalism, conversely to the means of saving the same industry.

The advent of the internet opened up an array of publishing opportunities for journalists – but it also ingrained in audiences the idea that news could be accessed for free. Decades down the line the issue of who pays for the news – and how to encourage consumers to pay for online and digital news – remains one of the core challenges facing the industry.

Newspapers lurched from one plan to another in terms of how they should react to the arrival of the internet and, for writer Clay Shirky, the principal issue was that all ideas generated amounted to the same thing – ‘here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organisation in a world of cheap perfect copies!’ This led to an assumption that the basic organisational form of newspapers was sound and only in need of a digital facelift.¹

It was an assumption that left the industry resolutely tied to an ‘old’ method of production and distribution while not responding robustly enough to fast encroaching technological developments – and struggling with what the change meant for their business models. News organisations might have made sure they were ‘present’ on new platforms and via new means of access but the modus operandi tended towards replicating the print product rather than rethinking the product for the platform.

For those looking in from the outside, it might be hard to decide which mast to nail their colours to in the ‘life v. death’ debate about journalism. Those with long-held experience on the inside might despair that decisions about how to secure the future are being held in the context of excitement that footage of rubber bands being used to explode a watermelon attracted 10 million views for Buzzfeed.²

According to New York Times lead media writer Jim Rutenberg,³ ‘executives who run news organizations almost universally say that we’d all better find our own watermelons – and find them yesterday’.

Rutenberg talks about the ‘rushed panic’ in which huge changes are being made to the content news organisations generate and the way their content is presented in an effort to ‘draw big, addicted audiences’.⁴

As Guardian columnist John Naughton points out, we have shifted from a pre-internet age where information was scarce to having an ‘unmanageable abundance of information’ but where time and attention are scarce, resulting in a battle between traditional media and online media, the latter coming out on top in terms of ‘grabbing more and more of people’s time and attention’.⁵

Crumbling power bases

Technology has cracked open the news market, given the means of content delivery to all, fractured once powerful revenue streams, and left industry behemoths struggling for control and fighting for their futures.

Futurist Ross Dawson drew up a ‘newspaper extinction timeline’ in 2010, predicting that newspapers in their current form would be insignificant in the US by 2017 and in the UK by 2019, although his forecast did point out that newspapers becoming insignificant was not the same as the ‘death of news-on-paper’.⁶

The UK did witness its first casualty in 2016 when the Independent stopped its printed product, although the company was extolled for its new position as the first UK national newspaper ‘to embrace a global, digital-only future’.⁷

Almost in tandem with the closure of the Independent, Trinity Mirror announced a February 2016 launch for New Day, the first new national newspaper to hit UK streets for thirty years. Targeted at a ‘time poor’ audience, it spurned the idea of running a parallel website but aimed to engage readers in dialogue on social media.⁸

Despite a promotional print run of around 2 million copies and a £5 million TV advertising campaign, New Day closed after just ten weeks, having failed to achieve only around 30,000 of the 200,000 daily sales it had hoped for.⁹

Rewinding back to January 2001 shows the scale of the long-term decline in circulations. Then, the UK’s ten major national newspapers sold on average 12.06 million copies a day, according to Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) data,¹⁰ but that figure has now more than halved. By April 2016, the remaining nine major daily national newspapers sold on average a total 4.87 million copies a day.¹¹

Figures detailing online access to news are more positive. ABC data published in May 2016 detailing users year-on-year showed some substantial increases. Mail Online maintained its position as the UK’s largest national newspaper website recording an increase in unique daily users of just over 3 per cent. The Guardian, in second position in terms of its website, returned a year-on-year increase of more than 21 per cent and the Independent, apparently not dented by the loss of the print product, recorded an increase of just above 24 per cent.¹²

In addition, the National Readership Survey (NRS) suggested in early 2016 there had been significant growth in the monthly reach for national newspaper titles, with most of that growth coming from mobile devices (although a change in NRS methodology had itself pulled in more mobile readers).¹³

The NRS estimated most national newspapers had double the number of readers on mobile devices compared to desktop computers. The survey showed that the Daily Mail is the most read national newspaper in print and online, with a monthly reach of almost 29 million people. The Guardian, which has the lowest print sales of the nine major national titles, was estimated to have a monthly audience reach of 25 million.

In terms of television news, the power of the major broadcasters has also been disrupted, although one in five adults in the UK use only TV for the news they access and the BBC remains the top news source, with 48 per cent of adults citing it as the place they get their news.¹⁴

Back in 1989, the arrival of Sky News in the UK heralded an era in which 24-hour news was able to hold audiences in its grip with its rolling coverage of major news stories, perhaps most memorably two Gulf wars and the events of 9/11. But now it is social media which beats the rolling news channel machinery to coverage of major events, and without the multi-million pound costs which come with running output centred around an expensive studio with anchors, contributors, behind-the-scenes production staff and correspondents in the field. The notion of anchors poised in a studio waiting for something to happen is at odds with the need to provide on-demand and more personalised services. Richard Sambrook, former director of BBC Global News, and Sean McGuire, former BBC News head of strategy, have argued in favour of: ‘Returning newsgathering to what it says on the tin – a service that goes out to speak to people, investigates, considers and then files packages as need, with updates and commentary, freed of the need to fill empty space.’¹⁵

Journalism professor George Brock is clear about the challenge posed by consumers who know how to find what they want, at speed in a ‘river of endlessly renewed material’ which they can dip in and out of at will, conditions which mean they are likely to find the ‘conventional pattern of mainstream television reporting to be slow, mannered and ritualistic’.¹⁶

Sambrook cites the shrinking audience share as the core issue – with the major news programmes costing £50–60 million a year but securing only a 2 per cent share of the available audience. Sambrook does see a future for the main evening bulletins ‘as the Harrods shop window for the digital services that lie behind’. Sky’s John Ryley sees things slightly differently, with television leading a multimedia service, with social media and mobile giving television news an additional impetus.¹⁷

From gatekeeping to gatewatching

A key element of legacy news production was the role of the journalist as gatekeeper – or rather the role of everyone in the newsroom as a form of gatekeeper.

Before the internet came to dominate the news media, the relationship between journalists and their sources was closed to the outside world. A source could pass on information, a journalist could ask questions about it, try to negotiate access to further detail, decide to ignore the information or even agree to delay or suppress publication of certain details. All this trading was done out of sight of the audience and without their knowledge, input or even influence.

The gatekeeping function might have filtered and brought some orderly decision-making to information which fed into the news agenda, but it can also be argued that this very process allowed journalists to serve their own interests and the commercial interests of the organisation they worked for over and above the needs and interests of the audience.

The internet has changed that balance of power ‘by allowing sources (to) communicate direct to the public and by facilitating collaborative journalism’, a shift that led reporter Alex Bruns to develop the notion of journalists ‘gatewatching’ an audience with the power to produce and be involved in disseminating news.¹⁸

Author Ken Doctor called 2016 the ‘year of the platform’, with Facebook, Google and Apple all striving to win at getting audiences to spend maximum time on their products. But, he argued, ‘As platforms gain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is news and what is journalism in 2016?
• 2 The business of journalism
• 3 Innovation
• 4 Building your idea
• 5 Being an entrepreneurial journalist
• 6 Starting your website and writing online
• 7 Engaging, measuring and reacting to your audience
• 8 Your smartphone as your best reporting tool
• 9 Using social media to promote your work
• 10 The boundaries you must not cross and remaining ethical in the journalistic Wild West
• Index