Journalism marketing for Colombia, via Silicon Valley

At National Congress of 8,000-member Periodismo de Hoy

About 90 would-be journalism entrepreneurs signed up for a workshop I gave recently in Medellin, Colombia.

The focus was on how to make a journalism website financially sustainable. We did some exercises in marketing, in analyzing web traffic and presenting to investors.

Like most journalists, this group had never been taught a couple of important business concepts:

• The journalism we want to create may not be the journalism that anyone wants or needs. In other words, think first about the audience. Create a community. Build that community around high-quality journalism content. Without a community, there is no business. 

10 entrepreneurs test new style of learning

Tenth in a series on teaching entrepreneurial journalism. Parts of this post are adapted from an article originally published in Revista Mexicana de Comunicación.

Latin American journalists have a great thirst for establishing independent media. Many of them are tired of working for low pay at media outlets that protect the friends and punish the enemies of the owners. 

They want to cover topics neglected by the mainstream media, such as education, health, environment, human rights and indigenous culture. They want to expose incompetence and corruption in government.

More than a dozen digital news entrepreneurs described how they are overcoming financial obstacles to sustain independent journalism during the Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism this spring sponsored by the Knight Center for Digital Journalism in the Americas. 

Editorial independence drives business of journalism on Internet

Versión en español aquí.
"Independent journalists on the Internet are able to rid themselves of the powers, practices and ideas that have defined the traditional press," said Guillermo Culell, General Manager for Regional Media in the Mercurio Group, Chile, in a talk with the participants in the Laboratory of Digital Journalism Ventures.
Culell has an abundance of experience in digital media for various Latin American news organizations and offered sensible yet profound advice. He argued that digital media can create a new model of "independent business" on the Internet. Their chief business advantage is that they have independence from:

• Influence of corporate and political powers
• Old habits and vices of journalism, such as stiff, formal language
• Standard political agendas of the powers that be
• Aversion to mistakes and risk-taking

How to decide whether to offer podcasts on your site

Versión en español aquí.

At the moment I am leading a course for Latin American journalists who have created their own digital news media (blog for the course in Spanish is here).

We just analyzed the multimedia aspects of a number of websites and a question arose about the value of offering podcasts. The simple answer is that it depends on the purpose of the site and the characteristics of the audience. 

There are tools available to offer a bewildering array of different services on your site, but before you deploy any of them, consider these questions:

• How likely is it that this new service (podcast, video, audio, poll, blog, forum etc.) will attract a new segment of the target audience?
• Do our competitors offer this service? If we can’t do it better than they do, maybe we should not consider it.