Jeff Israely: Lessons Learned in Year 1 of a Magazine Correspondent’s (Would-Be) Online News Startup
Posted on | June 4, 2010 | No Comments
[Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a "new global news website." He details his experience as a new news entrepreneur at his site, but he'll occasionally be describing the startup process here at the (Neiman Journalism) Lab. —Josh]
I realized not long ago that it’s been one full year since that night I drifted off to sleep, (suddenly) secure in the knowledge that this was going to be the new passion and focus of my professional life. With the future looking grim for any single foreign correspondent, it was time to commit to the one good idea I’d been mulling for awhile: a unique, cost-efficient way to produce high-profile world news content online. It would be a few more months before I would actually be operative, but I dozed off that night knowing that with a lot of hard work, a few good friends, and a couple of million pesos of funding, all would fall into place.
How I got to that late-night clarity is a long, not very fascinating story. But what has happened since — both much more and much less than I could have envisioned that night — may be of some interest for those tracking or taking part in the figuring out of where the news business is heading. Banging it out here will certainly be of use to me, to give a quick hard once-over at my past mistakes, and return to the counsel of Lesson No. 11 below.
So here’s the run down of the would-be lessons that I’ve learned — and keep on trying to learn.
1. ‘Plan A’ will not work…. Read more at Neiman Journalism Lab
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