Reflections of a Newsosaur: Journalists Running Start-Ups Face Tall Odds
Posted on | June 7, 2010 | No Comments
By Alan D. Mutter
Posted Monday, June 7, 2010, on Reflections of a Newsosaur
Fed up with furloughs and down-sizing – or forced involuntarily out of their jobs – journalists across the land are taking matters into their own hands by starting their own news sites.
While I applaud these brave and commendable efforts, I fear a good many journalistic entrepreneurs are doomed to fail because they are not objectively confronting the steep odds they face – or putting nearly enough thought and effort into giving themselves a fighting chance to succeed.
After talking to one enterprising journalist after another, I have found almost uniformly that they are making the mistake that has proven to be the downfall of many an entrepreneur: Instead of trying to build a business, they are trying to give themselves the job they always wanted.
The passion for the product they are creating causes entrepreneurs to work so hard on their journalism that it distracts them from the real job of building an enterprise that not only sustains itself for the good of the community but also provides a sustainable lifestyle for the journalist himself.
In an effort to calibrate the daunting, come-from-behind challenge faced by virtually every journalism start-up, I decided to compare…. Read more at Mutter’s blog Reflections of a Newsoaur.
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ALAN MUTTER
Alan D. Mutter is perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time, just like his hero, Benjamin Franklin. Mutter began his career as a newspaper columnist and editor in Chicago, starting at the Chicago Daily News and later rising to City Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, he became the No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the newspaper business in 1988 to join InterMedia Partners, a start-up company that became one of the largest cable-TV companies in the U.S. Mutter was the COO of InterMedia when he moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to lead the first of the three start-up companies he led as CEO. The companies he headed were a pioneering Internet service provider and two enterprise-software companies. Mutter now is a consultant specializing in corporate initiatives and new media ventures that combine his twin passions, journalism and technology. He also is on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California- Berkeley, where he teaches a class entitled “Journalism in an Age of Disruption.”
Tags: Blog > Commentary > digital > Entrepreneurs > Investigative Reporting > Journalist > Ventures
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