You have until midnight Friday (Pacific Time on February 19, 2010) to apply for the 2010 News Entrepreneur Boot Camp.
Why should you apply? Because we’ll be bringing 20 journalists to Los Angeles in May for an intense, one-week camp in entrepreneurial thinking, and showing you how that applies to publishing a news website. By the end of the camp, you’ll not only have been trained in the right mindset to run a successful publishing business, you’ll have materials in hand with which you can pursue the funding that you’ll need to continue your journalism career.
Oh, and we won’t charge you a thing for this: It’s free. (We’ll even kick in $250 to help get you to LA.)
You need more reasons to drop whatever you were planning to do today, and apply? Here are 10:
1. When you work for yourself, you’ll never get laid off.
2. Entrepreneurship provides you an option to extend and develop your career that no boss can take away or control.
3. Whatever unmet need you see in your community, as an entrepreneur you can attempt to meet that need, without having to wait for your bosses or co-workers to arrange a meeting to discuss it. Then discuss it again. And again. And again.
4. If you think you can run this place better than you boss, why not give yourself the chance to prove it?
5. That said, you didn’t learn journalism from people who’d never worked in a newsroom. And you won’t learn to run a business from other journalists who’ve never launched one.
6. Our camp is run by people who have launched and run businesses. And we’re bringing in camp faculty who’ve done that, too.
7. This isn’t the Knight News Challenge. We’re judging *you* more than your specific idea for an online news business. (We expect that most campers will end up changing their concepts before finding a successful one, anyway.) Surely you have time today to tell us about yourself, and why you’re a person who not only ought to remain in journalism, but also has ideas about how journalism can help more people in your community?
8. Do you know the difference between your audience and your customers? You’ll need to, and if you come to this camp, you will.
9. You’d be attending the camp with 19 other people as awesome as you are. You wouldn’t want to miss meeting them, would you?
10. Somebody needs to fix this industry. Why wait for someone else to do it, when you can play a part?
Here is more information about the camp. And here is the application form.
Now, get going. And good luck!
About Robert Niles
