By Curtis Brainard
The News Frontier, The Observatory — August 03, 2010 12:48 p.m.

When Investigate West, an investigative journalism site, sprung up last summer after the virtual collapse of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, we called its founders—former P-I staffers committed to finding a fresh models for the news business—the “new pioneers of the west.”

Now, a little more than a year later, those pioneers have established a respectable and relatively stable homestead, and earned the esteem of the news partners to whom they have farmed content so far. Life on the frontier hasn’t gotten any easier, though. Members of Investigate West’s small staff worked on “sweat equity” until June, when they finally began paying themselves, and they have had to adapt in order to survive.

Read the entire story at Columbia Journalism Review.

By Jeremy Caplan, Poynter Online

Entrepreneurial journalists spot the seeds of start-ups where others see remnants of the news industry’s retreat. Earlier this month, I worked with 19 forward-looking journos who convened at Poynter to get a jumpstart on their new micro-businesses.

One narrowed the focus of her niche news site for Filipino Americans, while another refined his plan for RootedAustin.com, a local portal for Austin, Texas. The early-stage ideas — like many of the new notions flowing across the journalism landscape — spanned from micro-local sites to services aimed at bolstering journalism’s infrastructure. In prepping to launch their businesses, the journos are moving past some common myths.

Myth No. 1: Journalists lack entrepreneurial skills and spark

Reporters can’t do numbers. Creative types and money don’t mix. So go the stale myths. Stepping beyond that bunk, the reality is that top journalists actually have a range of relevant skills. Many have strong analytical skills, a reportorial mindset and a knack for storytelling, all of which are invaluable in helping a start-up thrive. Read the entire story here on Poynter Online.

The Pulitzer-prize winning Point Reyes Light is now owned by the Point Reyes Light Publishing Co. L3C, a low-profit limited liability company, which is owned by Marin Media Institute, a nonprofit corporation that has applied for 501c3 status.

From The Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication

They had a choice.

They could watch the Pulitzer-prize winning Point Reyes Light newspaper continue to divide their rural Marin County community or worse, sold to someone with little desire of continuing the paper’s long tradition of quality journalism. Or they could buy it and turn the money-losing newspaper into a media institution that fosters community outreach and educates journalists from the region.

So at a time when many U.S. cities are seeing mastheads disappear or newsrooms shrink in size, longtime West Marin County residents Mark Dowie, a venerable investigative journalist, and Corey Goodman, a scientist and educator, decided to buy the Light.

But the pair didn’t just buy the Light and reinvigorate a dispirited readership; they established the country’s first newspaper under a business structure that to date has been used to revitalize many struggling industries, but not journalism. Read more.

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.”

[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

By Ellen Neuborne

Special to Displaced Journalists

5.6.2010

I used to be a reporter. Now I’m a ghostwriter.

I get a lot of raised eyebrows when I say that. Usually, it’s followed by comments such as “Really? For anybody famous?” Or “Can you make a living at that?”

No, nobody famous. Yes, you can make a living. I’ve been doing it since 2004. I’ve ghosted 13 books and scads of other texts from opinion pieces to Power Points to blog posts. I tap into my journalism background (I was a business reporter and editor) and I specialize in what the industry calls “thought leadership” books for business professionals. Every CEO wants a book. Few have the time (or the writing chops) to produce one. That’s where I come in. Ghostwriters with backgrounds in health, science and sports are also in demand.

Ex-reporters make great ghostwriters for a number of reasons. My top 10:

1. We’re used to telling someone else’s story.

2. We’re adept at putting our own voices on hold, for off-hours projects.

3. We know how to interview and draw out a subject.

4. We think writer’s block is for sissies.

5. We make deadline.

6. We thrive on variety.

7. We like to meet interesting people and tell their stories.

8. We know nobody really reads bylines anyway.

9. We are used to high volume production.

10. We never get tired of writing for a living.

A lot of journalists are curious about ghostwriting. I know, because I get asked out to lunch about once a week by a journo who wants to “pick my brain” about breaking into the industry. I got smart about a year ago and created an online class in ghostwriting (next six-week session starts May 17th, if anyone’s interested.) But whether you sign up with me or investigate it on your own, ghostwriting is a good second act for a smart reporter.

Ellen Neuborne is a ghostwriter living in New York City. Email her at eneuborne@aol.com or visit her http://ghostwritingrevealed.blogspot.com/

M.E. Sprengelmeyer is ”reporter/publisher” of The Guadalupe County Communicator, a 2,000-circulation weekly in the colorful Route 66 community of Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

M.E., as he prefers to be called, was Washington correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News when the Denver-based newspaper published its final edition February 27, 2009.

He was a displaced journalist, but not for long.

The 1989 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism bought the Communicator in August of 2009. It’s not available online. Instead, M.E. is determined to prove that newspapers are not dead. If you want to read it, it will have to be in print. However, you can check out the paper’s Facebook page: Guadalupe County Communicator.

Sprengelmeyer, 42, had been a reporter for 22 years, the last 10 of them with the Rocky Mountain News, a highly esteemed newspaper that had won the Pulitzer Prize four times since 2000. During his career, he has covered stories in Mexico and the Philippines; he covered the Oakland Hills fires and the Northridge earthquake; he reported from the scene of the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, and the Pentagon disaster on Sept. 11, 2001.

M.E., as he prefers to be called, traveled with U.S. Marines in the earliest days of the ground war in Afghanistan in late 2001 and with the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade during the initial invasion of Iraq in early 2003. He also covered the U.S. Congress, with occasional trips to the U.S. Supreme Court and White House, and in 2007 embedded himself in Des Moines, Iowa, for more than a year chasing Barack Obama and friends (not) down the “Back Roads to the White House.”  (It’s a long story, but he also acquired Jack Abramoff’s pinstriped suits somewhere along the way. We’ll ask M.E. to tell us that some other time.)

When the Rocky closed a few weeks short of its 150th birthday, M.E. decided it would be pointless trying to find another corporate newspaper job as meaningful as the one that he had just lost. Instead, he sunk his entire life savings into buying a scrappy little newspaper in New Mexico — one where he hopes to learn lessons that can one day be applied on a much larger scale.

Below, we present to you a story he published in this week’s edition of the Communicator, because, you see, M.E. is about to appear in a rather important film.

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By M.E. Sprengelmeyer

Publisher, The Communicator

Santa Rosa, N.M., April 22, 2010 – No, it’s not a horror film.

Still, this week you might have seen a small documentary film crew running around downtown Santa Rosa, trying not to terrify the populace as they documented Santa Rosa’s little part in a big, national story.
Adam Chadwick and Derek Callahan are from the film “Fit to Print.” It gets its name from the New York  Times’ motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.”

That’s no accident. Chadwick was working as a copy editor at The Times when he decided to begin chronicling the tough times facing newspapers all over the country. He watched from afar as papers like theRocky Mountain News in Denver and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, and severe workforce cuts hit most other major newspapers, in one way or another.

He decided to begin chronicling the tough times facing newspapers all over the country. He watched from afar as papers like the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, and severe workforce cuts hit most other major newspapers, in one way or another.

He started working on the project and, then, irony hit.  He lost his newspaper job, too.

Perhaps 50 years from now, future Americans will look back at the Not-So-Great Recession as a watershed moment for the old school, ink-on-paper era of journalism.

These next few years will decide whether printed newspapers survive, and whether future generations will ever get the pleasure of having ink rub off on their fingertips while they’re sipping their coffee over breakfast and learning about the world.

Some might rush to say that the Internet is the future of everything.  I argue that would be terrible for our country. The World Wide Web does expand our brains by letting us travel to far and exotic lands, but it lacks the physical presence and local connections to keep us grounded in the communities where we actually live, love, laugh and, yeah, cry.

I still believe that there’s a great future for newspapers that don’t give in to the doom and gloom, and instead try to make themselves more important to the communities they serve.

And, so, I guess that’s why the guys are here.

It has really been fun watching Adam and Derek running all over town. They live in the big, bright lights of greater New York City, and so it was hilarious taking them on a little tour of Santa Rosa after dark. We drove a couple miles past the airport, into the pitch-black stretch of U.S. 84. We turned out the car’s lights, parked, and as they stared into the brilliant, star-dotted sky, they sounded like every small-town resident who sees the blinding lights of New York’s Times Square for the first time.  “Whoa!  Amazing….”

They’ve been working at a frantic pace here in Santa Rosa, and I think they’ve learned as much about our lively little community as they have about our lively little newspaper.

We’re just a small part of the big picture they’re examining.  Next, I think they’re on their way to interview philosopher Noam Chomsky about the media landscape, and they’ll be focusing on a bunch of journalists more famous, more interesting and more photogenic than me and Davy Delgado.  (Even more, I mean….)

If you’d like to follow the progress of their documentary, go check out: Fit to Print They also have a fan page on Facebook, where they explain what they’re doing and provide all sorts of updates on the real life drama facing the newspaper industry.

I think it’s great that Santa Rosa and Guadalupe County are getting a little time in the spotlight.

These guys are tireless, and they haven’t been sitting still in our newsroom. They’ve been driving Route 66 and the back roads, popping in at City Hall and a whole bunch of other places. For them, the hard part will be taking hours and hours and hours of Santa Rosa footage and figuring out how to whittle it down.

Lord knows we have more colorful characters than you can fit in the typical Hollywood film.

Like everyone, I’ve been holding my breath each time rumors regarding “downsizing,” “right-sizing,” “cutbacks” or “sacrifices to the stock market gods” started swirling around the newsroom. Unfortunately, more often than not, most of the rumors have been followed by real layoffs of really talented friends and co-workers.

Britt Conley

This past December 1st was no different. The newsroom was again rocked by talk of sudden “stealth” layoffs. One colleague had supposedly been laid off 30 minutes ago. “Who lays off one person? I asked. That doesn’t make sense. It wasn’t long before another colleague revealed that “an official announcement” was going to be made in ten minutes.

Before I knew it the company-wide e-mail message popped into my “in” basket. I remember saying aloud, “Oh boy, here we go!” It was clearly a notice about further “reductions,” but I’d made it only seven words into the first sentence when my phone rang. It was the head of my department wondering if I could come see him at my earliest convenience.

I never did finish reading that email. Whatever it said didn’t matter; I was experiencing it first hand. My more than 13 years at The Nation’s Newspaper were over.

Fortunately, exactly one month earlier, to the day, I had launched a personal blog — my own garden travel and photography website called “The Photo Garden Bee.” I had worked on it happily every evening and weekend out of sheer love.

The day after being laid off, I slept in and tried to process what was to become of me. After stumbling about trying to make a cup of tea, I realized I had not yet updated “The Bee” (as I call it). In a split second, I went from a stunned stupor to thinking, “Oh no! I have to create a new Bee post!” In that moment, I began to realize that my future was crystal clear. My journalistic life wasn’t over, it had only just begun. No matter what my job title had been for the past 14 years, I realized that from this point on, I was now “The Photo Garden Bee.”

Since then I have been getting up at the crack of dawn each day, traveling to gardens and writing my blog post. I have never been happier. I have no idea when a job offer will come in or how I’ll pay all those future bills, but I have “The Bee.” It’s my own. It’s whatever I want to make it each and every day.

I’m not technically a writer. I was a photo editor and just an assistant photo editor at that. Now I’m learning how to write and blog. I’m using all of my photo editing skills for “The Bee” and it’s been amazing!

I was a cog in a frantic wheel, and now I’m my own travel writer/photographer/editor/publisher. I have the freedom to paint my own journalistic future.

I’m taking a big leap this weekend with a booth at the Mid-Atlantic Home and Flower Show at the Virginia Beach Convention Center. I’ve made signs, I’ve rented a table and I’ll take with me about 300 signed and matted photographic prints of the “Daily Flowers” that I have been posting on my site. I have no idea how well the prints will sell, but I do know that it will be thrilling to sell my own work and spread the word about “The Bee” to potential site visitors. If you’re going to be in the area, I’ll be at booth #304.

It’s been two months since the layoff and I’m still unemployed. From my online store, I’ve only sold one $30 photographic print. My husband bought it. I’m fine with that. I simply love creating the blog each day. I love rustling up each day’s content. I love being the press person for my own stories and I love being home.

That, by the way, has been the other great gift of this layoff — time with the one I love. My husband and I are having a blast every day. I am no longer overworked and frazzled from doing the work of ten people and rustling up crazy amounts of content out of thin air on deadline. Now I just rustle up “The Bee!” My husband has his wife back and has never been happier. These days I spend a lot of time fist-bumping with him, while we say, “Go Bee!”

Getting laid off is difficult for everyone. And maybe I just lucked out. But blogging has changed my life and my future. I may succeed. I may fail. Either way I’m happier — with a healthy side scared. I am growing and changing into something I wasn’t before. Best of all, I am realizing potential I didn’t even know I had — and would not have known, had it not been for the layoff.

I can’t recommend getting laid off. But I can say, it is not at all what I expected. I’ll let you know how it goes. For now, it’s literally one post, one day at a time. I don’t know what the next day will bring, but I do know I have a lot more say in creating it.

Britt Conley

The Photo Garden Bee

britt@thephotogardenbee.com

By Jules Older

So there we were.

Jules: former magazine editor-in-chief, former website director, Global Interactive Content, former person with income.

Effin: widely published photographer, suddenly not widely published.

Hi. I’m Jules.

Not long ago I start getting email asking if I’d like to cover San Francisco for a travel website. It will be, oh, two or three month’s work. Two or three month’s work for $400.

I ask, politely, “Did you inadvertently leave out some zeros?”

I don’t hear back. Ouch.

But am I discouraged?

Yes.

Then, one day, I get an email asking if I’d like to create an iPhone app. Thinking it’s one more of those $400 gigs, I almost don’t respond.

But when I do respond, it turns out the offer is a fair one, and the subject of said app is one of my special interests. Thus is born, “San Francisco Restaurants,” the app.

Creating it is three months hard work… okay, soft work. I’m eating at favorite restaurants and writing about it… so it’s long work. Seventy-five restaurants later — text by me, images by Effin — it goes to Apple for app-roval. I settle in for the infamously long, long wait.

One (1) week later, on Thanksgiving eve, Apple approves it. We are thankful. We are mega-tres thankful. “San Francisco Restaurants” is up and for sale — 99 cents, please.

Starting at Thanksgiving, it rises from 104 to 20 (as I write this) in the iTunes listings for ‟San Francisco.” It’s Number One for ‟San Francisco Restaurants” on the iTunes site. (Choose your name well, Grasshopper. Fortune favors the descriptive title. At least for iPhone apps.)

It helps that we start publicizing it from Day One. We even make a two-minute YouTube video called,“San Francisco Restaurants, The Movie.” As I write, 283 folks have seen it. (Dunno if YouTube counts views by the video’s creator. If so, better make that 273.)

Are we rich? Uh, no. The video’s free. The app’s 99 cents gets split between us, the programmers who hired us, and Apple. Oh, and as I write, we’ve sold about 900 of ’em.

So, are we potentially rich? Too early to tell, but this may well be just another get-rich-slow scheme. Hardly my first.

If it is a financial loser, are we sorry we’ve spent the time and effort on it?

Hell, no. We’ve learned a lot, entered a new game, had a lot of fun. That’s what travel writing’s all about.

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In case you didn’t click on the links above, here’s how to find the app, the movie, and The Olders.

You can find the app from the App Store in iTunes, on your iPhone, or on your iPod Touch.

You can find the movie on YouTube.

You can find out more about The Olders here.

Jules and Effin Older are not related to Susan Older, founder of this site, which is amazing when you think about it. It’s a rare name.