MedCityNews CEO Chris Seper returned to his alma mater, Eastern Illinois University, to spend some time with today’s students on a topic near and dear to his heart, entrepreneurial journalism. MedCityNews is a journalism startup covering innovation and health care technology. He told students about two important questions every investor will ask:
(Via.)
Terry Heaton writes an open letter to newsroom employees everywhere, of which this is an excerpt:
If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to begin building and refining your personal brand. The good thing about this is that you’re in charge, so you get to pick and choose how and how much you are promoted in the world of personal media. It’s not necessarily the size of the fish in the pond that will succeed tomorrow, although that’s always a nice advantage. What will be important is your niche and how valuable you are within that niche. This will produce value to the people who will want exclusive or first crack at the content you’ll create, regardless of the financial structure available. If aggregation and curation are the filters for media consumption downstream (they are), your place in the queue matters much more than which corporate brand you represent. You control this through the quality of your work and attending to the marketing of yourself. You can’t blame anybody else for success or failure here.[...]
This is incredibly important for you, because, like it or not, we’re moving to a scenario where you very likely won’t be employed directly by a media company. You’ll work as an independent contractor and sell your work in a variety of ways. It’s simply more cost effective for media companies to hire independent contractors than it is to carry the burdensome costs of employees, but that’s not the only reason you should be thinking this way. Telecommuting is one of the big trends in employment in 2012, and people who play in this world really, really like it. You — the currently employed — will be able to live a happy and successful life outside the bonds (that’s right) of employment. Absent the old, colonialist practice of “owning the help” through a paycheck and benefits, you’ll do better, more important work, because you’re doing it for yourself. You’ll enjoy working from your home. You’ll enjoy the growing tax benefits of the independence, and I’m convinced that insurance companies will happily create umbrella options that will work better for everybody. The whole world is drifting in this direction, and the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives, the chief of which is simply fear. Fear is tissue paper disguised as a brick wall. Never forget that.
These aren’t especially new ideas, but Heaton expounds on them nicely. The full letter is worth your attention.
Don’t forsake the hyperlocal news approach just yet. Poynter has details from a panel at SXSW:
Reports about the death of hyperlocal have been greatly exaggerated.Local news sites continue to pop up across the country, despite a high churn rate among small local sites. In 2007, one in eight Americans lived in a city or town with a local blog, panelist and Placeblogger Founder Lisa Williams said. Now, closer to half of Americans live in a city with a local blog. Data from Placeblogger, an index of local blogs, show that between 50 and 60 percent of the local blogs indexed by the site don’t make it, Williams said.
Williams also pointed out they’ve indexed 4,100 independent hyperlocal sites, small businesses with typically only a few employees producing a local news product.
As in all small businesses, these projects run the risk of a high failure rate. The problem is entrepreneurial: Most don’t have a revenue model. Indeed, the data in this panel revealed only 4 percent of local and community sites have an advertising rate card.
Running your own brand requires you to be a businessperson as well.
Related: Financial models for underachievers: Two years of the real numbers of a startup
Whenever we talk about entrepreneurship this is the question that should be rattling around in your head.
They have some answers for you over at the Carnival. (Great site worth your bookmark, by the way.)
