Robert Niles: August 2009 archive
An assignment for journalists and students: Talk with an entrepreneur
August 14, 2009
Last spring, OJR helped present a boot camp for entrepreneurial journalists at the University of Southern California. We selected and brought about a dozen journalists to USC's Marshall School of Business, where they spent five days learning some of the skills - and the mindset - necessary to start and sustain their own online publishing businesses.But we put those campers, and a second group of finalists, to work before they came to Los Angeles. Today, I'd like to tell you a bit about the first assignment we gave them, because I think it could help any journalist, or journalism student, who is anxious about their place in journalism's future.
It's a modified version of the assignment that Tom O'Malia, Director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the Marshall School of Business, for years has been giving his beginning MBA students.
From the assignment:
Entrepreneurship is network dependent. Just like a journalist without sources, an entrepreneur without a strong network could not function. So how do you build a network? How do you attract a mentor? How do you get first-hand information about how someone successfully built an online journalism business?Well, the same way you've gotten any information as a reporter. You ask. You will interview a successful news entrepreneur and, through the interview, learn about his or her journey to success. This exercise allows you to use your existing journalism experience and expertise to take the first step toward building your entrepreneurial network.
I believe that all journalists, and journalism students, would benefit from sitting down and talking with someone who's started their own business - ideally, someone who's started a business involving intellectual content, such as a fellow journalist, or an author, artist or publisher. More...
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Lessons from the revolution, for the revolution
August 6, 2009
My travels this summer have brought me to Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg, Va., where I've shown my California-dwelling kids some of the scenes of their nation's birth. But while they've been seeing the sights from their U.S. history classes for the first time, I've also enjoyed revisiting some of the scenes of the American Revolution, for the perspective they've given me on the business and information revolution that's now roiling the journalism industry.My kids are big fans of the "National Treasure" films, so, like thousands of other visitors, we had to stop at the National Archives in Washington. While my kids rushed to see the Declaration of Independence (once we slogged through a 90-minute wait), I slid over toward the more legally profound Constitution, then spent the bulk of my time with the Bill of Rights.
As a journalist, I find it thrilling to look upon the original First Amendment (actually, "Article the third" on the document). Straining to see those famous words, now faded almost to obscurity on the page, I was reminded that their power draws not from their presence on that piece of paper, but from the affect that they had upon a new nation, and have to continued to have since.
Words fade from paper. Websites fall offline. Books are sometimes lost to the ages. But those works' influence endures in the people that they affected - people who copy and reference and change their lives as result of the words that they read or heard.
That was the first lesson I took from my recent trip: That the power of journalism lies not in its presence on a printed page or on a website, but in the influence that it has upon the audience who reads it. We protect journalism not by restricting access to it, but by extending its influence by spreading its reach. More...
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