Entrepreneurial Journalism

Abstract

The proliferation of entrepreneurial journalism initiatives over the past decade has been inherently disruptive to the media industry. For organizations and their employees, the launch of new journalistic enterprises extends the already-significant encroachments onto jurisdictional turf in a digital environment. For individual journalists, the shift to an explicitly businessoriented mind set challenges deeply rooted notions about professional norms and appropriate activities. This chapter explores both sets of challenges.For professional journalists, the hits just keep on coming. The economic hit. The time hit.The resource hit. But a growing number of journalists have begun hitting back. Of their own volition or because they are pushed, these journalists are leaving traditional newsrooms and either joining a news start-up or launching their own. Over the past decade, new journalistic enterprises have proliferated in myriad shapes and sizes. The diversity and fluidity of these experiments make them impossible to count at any given point in time or space, and nearly as difficult to define. They range from investigative journalism consortia to hyperlocal websites to niche offerings of all sorts; some of the more wellestablished, such as BuzzFeed, have successfully attracted mass audiences. In contrast to "intrapreneurialism," the creative initiatives that push existing organizations in new directions (Baruah and Ward 2015; Boyles 2016), the term "entrepreneurial journalism" is best understood as designating stand-alone enterprises that have a journalistic mission yet are dissociated from