Entries Tagged 'Entrepreneurial journalism' ↓

I started reading a new blog today – one launched by a handful of writers to continue the work they were doing at a now-defunct trade magazine.

I commend them. They’re gamely carrying on in the face of the implosion of their publication, and they’re doing it without getting paid.

But I’m not linking to them here because I don’t want to embarrass them. The new site is, well, a bit of a mess.  has issues. Continue reading →

A self-deprecating aside from long ago: When I first ran a semi-big local website, sophisticated content-management systems were just becoming available. Big chunks of the site were programmed by hand, using HTML code written by producers.

Those hand-coded pages were then shipped off to our distant web server by a direct-transfer process known as FTP. To make life easier, we kept a spare computer forever linked to the server – when a producer had something to load, they’d just hop over to that empty desk, slap their file into the computer via a floppy (kids: ask your parents) and voila! Done.

Of course, an always-live connection to the server, in the wrong hands, was a guaranteed way to crash the site. And mine were the wrong hands. Don’t get me wrong: I had a lot of skills in journalism, management and business. But I had (and still have) horrible skills at coding.

How horrible? The site’s very good executive producer quietly passed the word: If I ever sat down at that live computer, someone was to run over there and slyly, but quickly, get the keyboard out of my hands.

I tell this story to make a simple point: You do not need to write code to run a website. In 2000, I needed a great staff of producers; today, all you need are some free tools. Another post of mine on the GrowthSpur blog has some basics about that.

If you’re serious about being a journopreneur, you need to be able to do this. It isn’t hard.

This blog, for instance? Launched it in the course of a weekend. Costs $9 a month for hosting (only because the $6 a month host I had previously was too dodgy for my liking).

The basic design is a free (the favorite word of any journopreneur) theme for WordPress called Bueno, from the fantastic folks at WooThemes. (Full disclosure: I did buy $70 worth of themes from them for some other sites, including my wife’s – and their free forum support was so great I tossed a few bucks at the founder’s favorite charity.)

Oh – and every bit of work on this site was done by that guy who wasn’t allowed to touch the live keyboard at a big website. Heh.

My older brother used to joke that when I wanted to learn to play baseball, I read a book. Mike’s style: Pick up the ball and throw it harder than seemed humanly possible.

Hey, we all learn differently, right? So when friends – especially newsroom lifers – ask how they can catch up with the digital revolution, I default to books. These are some of the titles that formed my thinking about information economics and the digital revolution.

Read these and you’ll understand that “information wants to be free” isn’t religious sloganeering – it’s the logical outcome of perfect, free copies. You’ll also understand how that same force Continue reading →

Like an awful lot of Americans, I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day gorging on filmed entertainment. In between fistfuls of unhealthy popcorn, I started to think about the lessons two of the movies can teach entrepreneurial journalists.

The first: Avatar, in all its 3D glory at the local cineplex. James Cameron spent at least $230 million – and maybe as much as half a billion dollars.

The second: Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, a DVD gift from a hip brother to my 15-year-old. Dr. Horrible cost around $200,000 in up-front cash, maybe double that when you factor in all the donated services. 

Yes, less than one-1,000th the cost of Avatar. (Put another way: Dr. Horrible cost less than six minutes of a mediocre hour-long scripted TV drama like Numb3rs.)

No, the point isn’t whether Avatar is 1,000 times more entertaining than Dr. Horrible. The point is that these two works are terrific in their own way; have vastly different economics; and are producing nice profits for their creators. Continue reading →