Journalists as entrepreneurs - easier said than done

What are the most useful things we can teach our journalism students? According to publishing entrepreneur and fomer Telegraph writer Jack Roberts, editor of Bad Idea, the list should include: how to come up with a new idea and draw up a business plan, how to do cash flow projections and how to market and advertise themselves and their product. (Which of course is "hyperlocal", the buzzword of the moment, and done on a shoestring).

All good stuff. This is what 2010's going to be about. There's no way anyone's going to get their foot in the door in this industry as it is now unless they put themselves about and come up with new ideas. But I don't mind betting that I wasn't the only one at the Association for Journalism Educators' workshop on journalists as entrepreneurs today who has never had anything to do with business plans or cash flows. Yes, most of us have been freelance at some stage in our careers but planning didn't go much further than the next story pitch or commission. More hand to mouth than five year cash flow projection.

This could be the big problem with trying to teach our students how to be more entrepreneurial. The elephant in the room is that we've never done it ourselves. We've never needed to. Many of today's journalism lecturers started their careers at a time when the business model was to find a staff job with a local newspaper or trade paper and move steadily up to the nationals, again on a staff contract. Then we moved to a second career, yet again on a permanent lecturing contract. Not much entrepreneurial drive needed there. Some job planning skills, maybe but not the creation of a completely new idea from scratch, searching for funding and generating audiences and advertising revenue.

Guest speakers James Hatts, editor of hyperlocal site London Se1.co.uk. Jack Roberts of Bad Idea and Danny Miller, publisher of film magazine and website Little White Lies were impressive examples of what relatively recent graduates can achieve. But all of them seemed to be natural entrepreneurs, seized with the determination to make an idea work. Not all students are like that. Neither are all lecturers. 2010's going to be a busy year.

Training the journalists of the future

Nothing will be on paper in 20 years' time. Or so my colleague Adam Westbrook predicts. In five years' time we'll be downloading news, books and any other media we subscribe to onto foldable sheets of micro-thin plastic (like Kindle but slicker). There will be downloading (or uploading?) machines in stations and other public buildings so that people can load up their plastic pages with text, video and audio, a bit like an Oyster card.

At least this would go some way to cutting down on paper recycling. And getting multimedia on the move without having to read a tiny iPod touch screen and find a wi-fi connection sounds like a good idea to me. Some of my other colleagues weren't convinced. One of them bet Adam £100 he was wrong.

But Adam's main message, as he says in his blog today, is that journalism departments everywhere, including ours at Kingston, have to shift their emphasis. We need to train our students to be entrepreneurs rather than expect a job for life. Being able to market yourself, find funding, get an audience and grow a brand will be vital skills. Students must blog, have a Twitter presence and join in with the conversation. They need video and photojournalism skills. And the future is niche, hyperlocal.

This last earned a shudder from colleagues who had spent tedious years on local papers "writing about dog mess", as one put it. But the old career model of starting on local papers, moving to regionals and then onto nationals is much rarer than it used to be.

Personally, I think these new ways of thinking potentially open up exciting routes into journalism for students. No longer do you have to wait for an editor to grant you space in a paper. You just start a blog and go for it. Of course, it's not as easy as that. You have to write well and get yourself noticed. And the sad truth is that blogging doesn't bring you a regular paycheck.

Back to work - with an iPod Touch

My first day back at work after a four month sabbatical was considerably eased by the gift of an iPod Touch. All totally above board - the phone is part of a project my colleague @anthonymcneill is working on to promote Twitter as a learning tool and investigate its possibilities for creating new ways of classroom interaction. Given that students (certainly my students) have texted a whole message before I even manage to find the predictive text key, there could definitely be mileage in, say tweeting debate questions on Twitter to which students can text responses and see each others' tweets in real time. The challenge will be to strike a balance between innovation and technology for the sake of it, I think. Tony has started his own blog on the project and his ideas, which makes very interesting reading.

But he was keen to get journalism students involved because they are, as he rightly says, more obvious users of Twitter than, for example, engineers. My first move will be to set up a course- specific Twitter account as part of Tony's project, which I'll use to get students used to the idea that they can collaborate on their own stories, find sources and find other journalists to follow. I've just looked at the MA Journalism multi-media reporting module that I wrote for the first time last year and the first thing that struck me is how old-fashioned it looks (it doesn't help that I have to teach the NCTJ newswriting syllabus as part of the module but that's another story which I'll come back to). So the module is in for a complete overhaul. It won't be as hot on social media as the MA in social media run by @paulbradshaw at Birmingham City but it'll be a lot more up to date than the NCTJ's newwriting exam.

Re the iPod Touch. It's a beautiful piece of technology and the touch screen is a masterpiece. But how frustrating that wi-fi on the move is so minimal. Mobile internet access is a bit less useful when you can only really use it in places where you already have internet access through your desktop PC (ie at work or at home). Still, who am I to complain?

100 best blogs - better late than never

These aren't new (so last week, so old media) but I'm setting the links now after having not got round to it before. For future reference, so that my students and I can find them (ie not buried in my Twitter feed) are the 100 best blogs for journalism students (with US bias) and the 100 best blogs for journalism students as suggested by journalism.co.uk