“If you are a journalist and you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to have a serious, serious attitude adjustment.”
That was Michele McLellan’s advice leading off the “Turning Bits into Bucks” session here at ONA 2010. After researching hundreds of sites as part of a Reynolds Journalism Institute project, McLellan said most startups are too focused on content, and not focused enough on economic sustainability, non-profits included. “Foundations don’t want to fund operations, they want to fund new ideas, so get over that,” she said, explaining that many non-profits will have trouble keeping the grants coming.
Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News, offered great advice on the sales front. “The biggest lesson is it didn’t matter the number of users we had if the ad community didn’t know who we were,” he said, explaining how PegasusNews.com had amassed a big audience in its early days, but had trouble gaining traction selling ads. “Ad decisions are not necessarily made rationally.” Orren said the best approach is to sit down with local businesses, listen to their problems and help them figure out how to solve them.
At one moment of the panel, J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer questioned whether journalists themselves should be “making the ask,” or getting out and selling ads. Orren said that journalist entrepreneurs need to “get in their head” where to draw the ethical line, and he said that practically, it’s easy to find people to write for free, but not sell ads for free. Rafat Ali, also on the panel, was a little more blunt about Schaffer’s comments. “If you can’t make the ask, you’re in the wrong business,” he said. Rafat started PaidContent, juggling coverage and sales in the startup’s early days. It sold to The Guardian.
KING TV’s Mark Briggs showed several examples of startups that are showing promising strides: Civil Beat, Windy Citizen, Med City News, We De People and Next Door Media. West Seattle Blog and Oakland Local were also mentioned as promising business models. (Full disclosure! I co-founded Next Door Media, and we recently partnered with KING TV and the Seattle Times around a local ad network).