The entrepreneurship session at the 2009 Online News Association conference was packed, which was itself the point.
Ann Grimes of the graduate journalism programme at Stanford described a new capstone course putting journalism, business and technology students together; her students wanted to start things. Her advice was to fail fast, learn from it, take feedback, revise, and not fall in love with the idea. The obstacle was temperament: journalists are risk-averse, and the “good enough” habit of technologists is alien to the culture.
Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego described running such a site. A year earlier the non-profit news site had been an odd experiment; by 2009 the model was accepted and being copied. He pitched it to donors as a public service, and said he pursued engagement with the city rather than page views. Having joined as a writer in 2005 and then taken it over, he went to bed worrying about the future of 13 people and woke up with the same thought; laying anyone off would be his own failure.
Om Malik of GigaOm had left corporate media rather than let a faceless person in New York decide his future. A personal blog had become seven blogs, 21 staff, several conferences and a research arm, aimed at reducing dependence on advertising. It looks much easier from outside than inside, he said, and 99 per cent of the days are bad. Big media’s advantage is traffic and a salesforce, not the journalism. Think like a businessperson, he said, and start doing.