Ten years after leaving her previous media job in Caracas to return to her hometown of Ciudad Bolivar to teach at the local university, Venezuelan journalist Albor Rodriguez used a crowdfunding campaign to launch her own digital media outlet.
Launch The lives of our In 2016, Rodriguez not only renewed his position as a journalist. It also inspired her to transform the reporting workshop she was teaching at the Andrés Bello Catholic University into a media entrepreneurship course, for which she would prioritize discussion and analysis on the transformation of the media industry.
“My way of thinking, precisely because I come from traditional media and experienced the glory days of these organizations, is that we have to overcome the grief of what we have had and lost, and we have to invent things with the resources we currently have. ” Rodriguez said in a 2018 interview for “Starting point,» a report produced by SembraMedia and the Google News Initiative in Argentina. The report sought to identify how professors at journalism schools (J-schools) at Ibero-American universities approached the entrepreneurial mindset in their classrooms and how they perceived the state of entrepreneurial education within their institutions. education.
The diagnosis was not good. A majority believe that media entrepreneurship is not a priority within their universities. And, when it has space, it is isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Professors of entrepreneurial journalism face the lack of knowledge on the subject among their students and the disinterest of their colleagues in this subject. This contributed to a complete detachment from the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The disconnect between J-schools and media entrepreneurship reveals major tensions between academic journalism and the professional industry.
In the United States at least, this divide has historically been stronger and more persistent than in other disciplines, as a 2013 report from Columbia University shows: “Training journalists: a new plea in favor of the university tradition,” revealed. While the professional media industry demands a more hands-on approach, emphasizing skills and applied research, universities have instead prioritized academic research.
J-schools and news organizations, however, converge on one aspect: their struggles in the digital age. Both have resisted and, in turn, struggled to adapt to technological disruption. They lost confidence in their work and were forced to look for new business models. One of the most cited analyzes on this subject is “Post-industrial journalism” and it is also discussed in the Reuters Institute report Digital news reporting.
Other factors also come into play at universities, including institutional rigidity, lengthy accreditation processes, academic resistance, and student perceptions that the media industry remains as stable as it was in 1980.
J-schools are not secondary players nor do they operate in a parallel universe. They are an integral part of the journalism ecosystem, alongside traditional and digitally native news agencies, professional journalists and “the people formerly known as the public“, as Jay Rosen, a professor and media critic at New York University, once described the proliferation of voices producing news and media content today.
Not only should journalism programs help rethink the profession, how it is done and how it can be improved; they must also work to strengthen the industry. J-schools are today a forgotten link in entrepreneurial journalism.
However, some experiences demonstrate a change in the way universities approach the entrepreneurial spirit. Take Betty Tsakarestou, For example. Tsakarestou runs an advertising and public relations lab and teaches a graduate course on leadership and entrepreneurial journalism at Panteion University in Athens, Greece.
She started introducing her students to entrepreneurial journalism and media innovation in 2015. “(I followed) the prototype of incubators and accelerator programs, going through all the methodologies like Lean models (and) design thinking, and connecting students with journalists or media entrepreneurs. innovators in Greece, Europe or other countries via Skype calls,” she explained.
For the past two years, his class has collaborated with a former media partner On-air music, to respond to innovation challenges focused on the prototyping of startups around audio, radio and music. Together they also used Startup Weekends — multi-day events where participants pitch startup ideas, build teams, and demonstrate prototypes — to bring together students, professionals, and local community members in Greece.
At the same time, in 2010, Miguel Carvajal, professor at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche, Spain, completed a postdoctoral stay in New York. He studied new business models for journalism and met with media entrepreneurs and professors like Jeremy Caplan And Jeff Jarvis at one of the academic epicenters of entrepreneurial journalism: the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Today, Carvajal runs his own master’s program in journalism innovation, one of the few of its kind in Spain.
“By focusing on innovation, we can integrate not only the creation of startups, but also the creation of innovative entrepreneurial projects,” Carvajal said in an interview for “Starting Point”.
According to Tsakarestou, this trend evolved simultaneously in North America and Europe, both as a theoretical conceptualization and a discipline incorporating initiatives such as hackathons, innovation boot camps, incubators and accelerators. Various journalism stakeholders, including universities, may use similar models.
What is happening to the rest of the world, Latin America, Africa and Asia? What do we think can be done differently? The “Starting Point” findings offer insights that can be applied to other regions of the world:
- Teaching entrepreneurial journalism is a recent phenomenon – very different from traditional courses covering the news business – and there are still many opportunities for journalism schools to get involved in this topic. Among the professors we surveyed, 76% began teaching such courses between 2012 and 2018. Additionally, we identified only around fifty Latin American universities – including more than 1,700 where journalists are trained in the region — which offered courses of this type.
- The combination of experiences is important: we found that 64% of professors had training as entrepreneurial journalists. If universities do not have trained professors in this area, they can seek practitioners in the local media ecosystem.
- Nearly half of teachers believe their students are not interested in creating media because they lack financial resources and management skills. J-schools can develop workshops to introduce their students to the entrepreneurial mindset, while establishing synergies with university economics programs.
- Expert guests are necessary, but they must diversify: 80% of professors had invited an entrepreneurial journalist to their classes, but few had invited a media investor. There are opportunities to establish stronger links with the local entrepreneurial community, generating a transfer of knowledge, technologies, networks and concrete opportunities.
These suggestions are not obligatory. However, any journalism program needs to think about its training hypothesis: what type of journalist does it want to train?
J-schools cannot be excluded from the debate about the present and future of journalism. Nor should they go into exile. Today’s journalism needs to be reformulated, in newsrooms and classrooms alike, because students will either work in a weakened media ecosystem or they will have no job at all.
It’s up to us to contribute to a brighter future for them, for news organizations and for those we used to call the public.
This article is part of our Media Entrepreneurship Toolkitwhich was launched with the support of Civil. Check it out for more articles on how to launch a successful media startup.
Patricio Contreras is a Chilean journalist, university professor and coordinator of academic initiatives at SembraMedia. Follow Patricio on Twitter.
Main image under CC license by Unsplash via Victoria Heath.