Shifting Roles
Filed under: 
The new competencies outlined in Chapter 2 will help media organizations succeed in the new competitive environment. As a result, traditional roles will shift and overlap. (To read more of Chapter 2 and see charts of the shifting roles, download The Big Thaw.)
These changes threaten many people’s jobs, pensions and familiar ways of working. Yet, organizations that can successfully make the transition will succeed. One of the reasons for the Boston Globe’s troubles stemmed, in part, from a lifetime job guarantee to advertising employees that prevent it from making staff changes necessary to survive.
New Role of Journalpreneurs
As the roles in journalism shift, many people could be characterized as “Journalpreneurs” (journalist-entrepreneurs), who integrate the best practices from business and technology with journalism’s traditional public-interest mission.
Demand has grown on different fronts from people who want to be involved in the journalistic process in some way or another. More than 12,000 people signed up to participate in OffTheBus leading up to the Presidential elections. Many organizations now offer journalistic training to new citizen media-makers, such as J-Lab’s Knight Citizen News Network and the Center for Independent Media.
Journalpreneurs are a slightly different shade of journalist than citizen-writers or professional writers. They work outside traditional journalism institutions and are characterized more by the entrepreneurship of Amanda Michel than the thousands of citizens she coordinated through OffTheBus (the fourth project she has launched). Chris Dykstra and Jason Barnett are journalpreneurs. They started The UpTake, The Media Consortium (TMC) member, a Minnesota-based citizen journalism venture that helped feed mainstream reporting of the Coleman-Franken Senate race by utilizing low-cost technology such as live broadcasts from cell phone cameras.
Some journalpreneurs came from the professional-journalist ranks such as John Battelle, who founded the Industry Standard and now runs Federated Media. Others such as Xeni Jardin started in technology and later worked for news organizations (NPR and Wired). She is now co-editor of Boing Boing, where Battelle says, “She’s actually more like publisher as well as a reporter because in this world you need those skills.”
Many serial entrepreneurs, like Michel, Dykstra, Barnett and Jardin, mix a wide array of disciplines such as technology, community organizing, online media and traditional journalism. Journalism students are also graduating with a greater mix of disciplines. This growing segment of journalpreneurs could be a key opportunity to grow the independent journalism field.
By integrating journalpreneurs more actively with its current membership, TMC can help build a broader, more diverse ecosystem of people who produce content in many kinds of non-traditional and entrepreneurial ways. These innovators will push journalism to the forefront of the new media landscape.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
Leave a comment