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. 

Columbia focuses on coaching journalism execs

Doug Smith
Executive Director
Punch Sulzberger Program

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

Columbia Journalism School's Punch Sulzberger Program differs from other programs in this series in several ways. 

Like them, it is entrepreneurial in focusing on innovation and transforming of a media enterprise. But the biggest difference is that it focuses on changing the enterprise rather than on mainly developing skills of an individual.

The participant is supposed to recruit people within and outside the media enterprise (for-profit, non-profit, public) to drive measurable change. The success of any individual participant in the program is based on metrics of the enterprise.