This post was prepared for a SembraMedia webinar on 10 July, “How to teach entrepreneurial journalism” (Cómo enseñar el periodismo emprendedor) . The session was attended by professors from all over the Spanish-speaking world. The 1-hour session was recorded on video (Spanish).
This blog post is aimed at those who teach entrepreneurial journalism–basically, how to start and run an independent news organization.
Many times when I hold workshops or seminars on entrepreneurial journalism, the participants want to begin right away with how to produce income.
It’s a mistake to start our teaching there. First, we have to guide them to figure out who their audience is and second, how they can create something that their audience will truly value.
If we can guide our workshop participants to find answers to those two questions, it will be much easier for them to create a business model that incorporates tactics and strategies to monetize the audience. Everything flows from that.
Part 1, who is the audience
When journalists launch a news organization, they often create a product with characteristics that they themselves value. There’s nothing wrong with that. They may have identified a niche in the market that other media are not serving.
But the key for a news organization to attract users and earn their loyalty is to understand the users’ information needs and the everyday problems they confront. The news outlet has to help people deal with issues of importance to them, such as health care, public safety, education, public transportation, the environment, the justice system, public corruption, jobs, the local economy, or whatever is on their minds.
A news outlet in Latin America that I was advising had done a series of focus groups to identify what the audience valued most. The participants validated what the editors could already see from data in Google Analytics: the most loyal users spent the most time on investigations of corruption, human rights violations, cultural events, the justice system, the environment, and gender issues. As a result, the editors developed plans to satisfy those user preferences.
Another news organization I was advising in Africa was trying to reach beyond its core users to an audience that did not have internet access or were functionally illiterate. To reach them, the publication shared its content with community radio broadcasters, some television stations, popular YouTube personalities, and audio platforms like Spotify.
Those are two clear examples of the importance of identifying the audience, its needs, and then developing products to satisfying those needs.
Part 2, create value
After deciding who is the audience and what its needs are, editors have to decide how to create value for them.
Value can take take many forms:
- the uniqueness of the content, its newness
- the channels through which it is made available (for example, social networks, WhatsApp or other OTT service, SMS messaging, email newsletters, podcasts, video channels)
- the method of telling stories (graphics, interactive maps, big data sets)
- the tone and the language used
- deep analysis of news events rather than the news in itself
- any topics ignored or treated superficially by major media
Really, the possibilities are almost infinite.
The fundamental question that a publication’s editor has to answer is, Have you researched the market sufficiently to be sure that the content you’re creating doesn’t already exist? Or are you producing what already exists everywhere on sites that are more convenient and accessible?
No one is going to pay for a product that duplicates what is already available in acceptable quality from other media sites that are free to users.
For example, some media outlets that are successfully attracting the much-sought-after audience of young people who don’t consume traditional media have adopted a conversational tone, style, and language. They use a vocabulary closer to what is heard on the street than in academic and intellectual circles.
When they cover politics, these media avoid covering press conferences and the public pronouncements of political insiders. Instead they explore the forces at work behind the scenes that are affecting government policies.
Teaching entrepreneurial journalism
To learn more about how to teach entrepreneurial journalism, here are some useful sources:
Inflection Point, by SembraMedia describes several different business models and multiple revenue sources used by 100 leading digital media startups in Latin America.
Professor Jeremy Caplan of the City University of New York has created A Free Entrepreneurial Journalism Teaching and Learning Toolkit.
The handbook Business Model Generation, which contains the Business Model Canvas tool, helps entrepreneurs in any industry develop new products and services.
Related:
Job 1 for entrepreneurial journalists: create value for users