Dan Gillmor: We need more experiments on revenue side of media startups

Fifth in a series on entrepreneurial journalism programs at universities and media organizations. 

Dan Gillmor, Founding Director
Knight Center for Digital Media
Entrepreneurship, Arizona State U.

Dan Gillmor is recognized as an expert in new digital media, but when he teaches entrepreneurship, he has a broader vision than just media.

He sees media as one part of an entrepreneurial culture where people are creating thousands of new enterprises. He sees a society where people are participants and not just employees. "I don't think we can call ourselves literate unless we're creating stuff, not in the world we're in," he says. In other words, we are the media, and we are media-active, to play on the titles of two of his books.

He teaches at the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. University journalism programs can play a part in creating a new media ecosystem to replace the one whose business model is collapsing, he says. But so can other university departments, training organizations, journalism nonprofits, traditional media, startups, and individuals with no credentials but with valuable experience to share. "My attitude is, the more people who want to be in the mix, the better."

In praise of engineers and scientists: their failures are learning experiences

Apollo 13 engineers celebrate safe splashdown.
NASA photo, April 1970. NBC News via AP

Versión en español aquí.

Journalists who are starting their own digital media should learn to think more like engineers and scientists. For them, solving a problem involves repeated trial and error. They view each step not as a failure but as a learning experience.

Engineers and scientists were the heroes of "Apollo 13," both in the movie and in real life.  They searched frantically against the clock to find ways to keep the damaged spacecraft's crew alive and return them safely to Earth.

They had to improvise solutions with the imperfect tools on board the spacecraft and experiment with processes they had never tried before. They had a goal but they weren't sure how to get there. So they tried and failed and kept trying. 

There's never enough time or money

Like them, journalists working in a startup will not have the ideal tools at hand nor all the money and time in the world to perfect their web project. Many of the answers they need can be found only by getting their product into the hands of the intended audience. Test it on the audience. On the web, a new product is always in Beta.

Journalism students in Madrid told to "go for it"

During a presentation at the Complutense University of Madrid (center), I talked about the new vision of entrepreneurial journalism (center photo) and some of its advocates. One of the attendees created a collage of the people mentioned: (clockwise, from upper left) Clay Shirky of NYU, Dan Gillmor of Arizona State University, Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter.

MADRID -- Traditional news media are suffering in Spain, with some 3,500 journalists laid off in the past two years. Add to that the recent news that one of the country’s most prestigious news organizations, Prisa Group, owner of El País newspaper, is laying off 2,500 workers, or nearly one in five.

The dream of journalism students to work for large media organizations is being crushed by economic reality. I urged a group of 150 at the Complutense University in Madrid to start their own digital media and be news entrepreneurs.


I told the students about a number of news entrepreneurs in Latin America, where I worked for three years, and some of the innovative news projects in the U.S., such as Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Voice of San Diego.