Doing good business and quality journalism? Entrepreneurial journalism and the debates on the future of news media

Abstract

As journalism finds itself in a process of accelerated transformations, Internet seems to be a place where both the reproduction of traditional models and a wide array of journalistic and business models experimentations happen at the same time. Here, at the intersection of changes in news models, job definitions and in career trajectories, the figure of the “entrepreneurial journalist” (BRIGGS, 2011) resurfaced and gradually gained in popularity over the last years in discourses celebrating innovation, flexibility and risk-taking. In this context, how can the figures of the journalist and the entrepreneur co-exist whereas commercial and journalistic activities have been historically strongly separated? How can business development be compatible with independent and objective news gathering when it is done by the same person? How do the notions of independent news writing and respect for the public interest – all strong elements of the journalistic ethics discourses – are negotiated by these actors? In this paper, we wish to explore these issues, first by contextualizing the rise of entrepreneurial journalism before presenting findings of an exploratory study about the ways the links between entrepreneurial and journalistic imperatives have been thought and presented in the existing journalistic literature in France and United States of America.

Political Journalist Of The Future: In Search Of Professional Identity

“…At the same time, it is argued that there is no multi-method approach relating journalists' personal features, their attitude to profession, the specifics of organizations producing https: //doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2019.12.9 Corresponding Author: Alexandra Shcherbina Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference eISSN: 2357-1330 71 news content, as well as social influences to the types and characteristics of journalistic writing. By the end of the 2010s, in studies examining the qualitative side of media systems, journalists and their vocational self-awareness, the focus on the commercial side of the process is increasingly turning to technological factors (Carbasse, 2015;Fenton, 2016;Vinogradova et al, 2018). At the same time, attempts to comprehend, conceptualize and model the emerging quality of modern journalism are rare.…”

“…Competing interpretations of the media transformation era and new media theories reflecting the technological context (Carbasse, 2015;Drok, & Hermans, 2016;Fenton, 2016;Vinogradova, Melnik, & Pantserev, 2018) imply that journalism must be rethought or even reinvented. The professional culture and the journalist's identity type being shaped under the conditions of a hybrid media system require scientific consideration.…”

Entrepreneurial journalism

“…Therefore, the turning point for entrepreneurial journalism could be roughly located at the turn of the 2010s, when the term has received a lot of attention from both practitioners, journalism educators and researchers in various geographical contexts. All are widely encouraged in this path by a handful of promoters and facilitators (Carbasse, 2015) who present journalistic entrepreneurship as one of the ways out of the crisis, encourage innovation, experimentation and risk-taking and envision entrepreneurial failure mostly in a positive way (Vos & Singer, 2016). However, with the hindsight of ten years of entrepreneurial journalism projects, we must acknowledge the extremely high rate of renewal of those publications, and that of internal resistance within the journalistic milieu.…”

Why Do Digital Native News Media Fail? An Investigation of Failure in the Early Start-Up Phase

“…Indeed, previous research has stressed the following problem areas faced by news start-ups: lack of business and market knowledge due to founders' professional backgrounds in journalism (e.g., Salaverría et al, 2019); low social and symbolic capital held by journalist founders (Powers & Zambrano, 2016); entrenched legacy media thinking applied to new ventures, which leads to outdated ideas about organizations, revenue models, users etc. (Naldi & Picard, 2012;Sommer, 2018); as well as role conflicts that give rise to ethical challenges and organizational tensions (Carbasse, 2015;Heft & Dogruel, 2019). However, although failure appears to be common in digital native news media, and even the survival of a newly started organization is often considered a success (e.g., Brouwers, 2018;Bruno & Nielsen, 2012), the current state of research on this topic is still limited.…”