Entrepreneurial Journalism -How To Make It Work

You can have one of these…if you want it…

Yesterday we responded to Ken Kobre’s question about whether a journalist has to be an entrepreneur in the future.

This in response to Adam Westbrook‘s new book.

Ken, (being in San Francisco and some 8 hours behind us at the moment) responded that he agreed but:

Personally we don’t think it’s quite that black and white. True, the image of the journalist as grizzled underdog had been overromanticized in books and movies (ranging from non-fiction “All the President’s Men” to the fictitious “State of Play,” pictured). But most journalists we know in real life aren’t deliberately gravitating toward financial destitution. It’s just that their passions tend in the direction of reporting and storytelling — not spreadsheets and projections. Perhaps j-school grads aren’t striving for their first billion with the same zeal as their MBA confreres, but at the same time they’re not lusting after low-paying gigs for the sheer bohemian thrill of it.

Ken, who teaches at San Francisco State no doubt knows his students and what they are after, but his suggestion on how to achieve this synthesis of business and journalism is, to me, an abnegation of our taking control of our own destiny:

Ultimately, we believe the solution will lie in collaboration — the formation of partnerships and collectives that consist of pros whose individual strengths and talents can be combined and leveraged for the benefit of the common good. Microcosms of lean, mean newsrooms — but without the dead weight of middle-management layers… and rooms.

I don’t think the model here is MBA’s, who in my experience are more technicians in search of a job.  Rather, the closer and I think

better model for us would be lawyers.

Many people who end up in J-School might just as easily have gone to law school. Many were torn between the two. It tends to attract the some kind of personality- and in many ways it’s a similar career: research, investigations, analysis and presentation.

Many people go into law driven by the same passion that drives them to journalism – the desire to do good and see right done.

The difference between lawyers and journalists, however, is the way that they have elected to organize their own profession.

Journalists end up working as employees for someone else, and are thus forever victims of the vicissitudes of the marketplace and changing technologies.

Lawyers, (while it is true some become employees), tend to organize themselves in partnerships in which they pool their skills and their business.

A law firm hires its talents out to many clients.  A Journalism Firm (to craft an interesting idea) would do the same. A partnership of journalists would contract with various magazines, newspapers, television stations and websites to offer content, as a law firm offers work. In this way, they would also be insulated from the predictable disaster if one newspaper or one magazine went under.

The Journalism Firm would be a partnership, and as a good law firm combines the high paying M&A with the lower paying family practice, so too could a Journalism Firm combine the low paying investigative journalism with the high paying Public Relations.  Don’t cringe.  Many of our grads go into PR and can make a fortune.  It’s the same skill set.

By the same token, the Journalism Firm should expand their reach and dominate the world of Information Management, which, after all, is what we really do.

As with law firms, the best Journalism Firms could charge top dollar for their combined efforts (including books and the occasional film rights to the work they had done).

As the world of media fractionalizes and as newspapers, magazines and soon TV networks begin to disappear, journalist will have to reorganize if they are to survive.

They could do worse than to emulate their friends who went to law school.

And if they do it well, they should be able to easily afford the nice Hinckley sailboat pictured above.

Maybe in the future, journalists in movies will wear Prada suits, drive porsches and sail their own yachts.

I could think of worse.