Friday, December 09, 2011

Entrepreneurial Journalism Education / Difficulty in Sports Reporting Today

Expanding a bit on my post from yesterday about the Nieman Foundation (and Nieman Storyboard), I've come across some interesting Journalism education content lately including a webinar attended earlier this week.

As could be expected, the online session was the most engaging of the various sources of wisdom and class itself the Knight Center webinar to teach journalists how to start a successful entrepreneurial project taught by journalist and City University of New York J-School professor Jeremy Caplan.

I wouldn't say I was disappointed with my time spent, but it did leave me feeling it tough to get a tremendous amount from an online learning environment. There was the opportunity to post questions to a chat board that were then answered, but not much interactive learning (which isn't a terribly damning statement as you likely shouldn't expect much more from a two hour online session).

As to the content itself, material was posted to both Scribd and Google Docs and the high-level 7 Steps to a successful entrepreneurial Journalism startup are below...

1. Market research
2. Competitive analysis
3. Content & structure development
4. Building community
5. Cultivating sustainability
6. Leading on the path
7. Adjusting on the way

Important points to be sure, but my thoughts on the content were that it was pretty basic business school type stuff (but, again... maybe that's not being critical as it could be new learning for some in the session) and that the actual application of the steps seemed to be described as most frequently towards building hyper-local community news websites.

All in all, Journalism and the business around writing (which obviously could cast a pretty wide net) is definitely of interest and attending the session was a good step in learning more.

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On this subject of new opportunities in Journalism, the aforementioned Nieman Foundation had on it's Nieman Lab site recently a Justin Ellis piece How Time Inc. is preparing for a future in digital news with a j-school of its own. Interesting concept with the old media giant offering in-house education (heavily leaning towards digital new media topics) to employees.

Finally (and also related to the idea of changes in Journalism), excellent piece titled Death of the interview posted to ESPN earlier this week. Written by Tim Keown, it delves into how sports reporting (both by the press and athletes) has changed in today's environment of short attention, tight news cycles and need for the sensational. Very solid piece that's both entertaining and thought-provoking.