New Media Journalism and Breaking the Status Quo
By Xavier Rubira
Entrepreneurial journalism encompasses many things. It’s about finding innovative, engaging, and unique ways to deliver information. This can be done through the medium you choose, the personality of the reporter, and however else you can differentiate from your competitors.
Journalism has extended beyond just politics and acting as a watchdog of people in power. It’s defined by the role it plays in people’s lives. And to sustain that dynamic, journalists must inform citizens to the best of their ability and with the utmost care and attention to the truth. All of this is to allow the public to make the best possible decisions based on the information given to them.
To carry on this tradition and keep the spirit of being informed alive, entrepreneurial journalism seeks to answer how we can go about that. This makes it a very important aspect to cover, because journalism as the world once knew it, is struggling to stay relevant in its traditional mediums. And according to a data chart complied by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, online publications and digital media is rapidly growing as paper publications, radio, and broadcast news decline, or stagnant.
Journalistic entrepreneurial ventures can affect many things. For example, the way in which people interact with information and engage with person giving it. A popular example would be new media personalities, such as Philip DeFranco, trying to disseminate information on a plethora of issues using YouTube.
Philip DeFranco is YouTube icon who has been making content since its beginnings as a media platform. He started out as a gossip and celebrity channel, somewhat like TMZ, and said provocative things to illicit shock. DeFranco has criticized himself numerous times for how he acted in the past and acknowledges his mistakes. Now he appears to be a respectable and thoughtful individual who has transformed his channel into a news outlet that garners millions of people tuning in as a source of information and opinion.
This transition did not happen overnight, but it really picked up steam during the 2015–2016 presidential election cycle. That gave him the opportunity to form a niche community of people on the Internet who weren't interested in getting news through established outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. He offered a unique way to engage with his audience, via user requested story topics or having live streamed communication with his audience. And now he has hired a dedicated team of journalists, researchers, and editors to create deep dive explainer videos and a higher caliber journalism.
New business ventures like this have quite the effect on existing news organizations. Companies, such as CNN have definitely noticed his success and have tried to replicate it. Through their acquisition of Beme, an app created by Youtuber Casey Neistat, CNN wanted to use Neistat’s expertise to reach a younger audience on YouTube; that their current channel could not do. This joint-venture led to the creation of Beme News which had a promising start, but Neistat departed from Beme for various reasons. After his departure, the number of viewers declined as well, but the channel is still actively creating content.
In comparison, DeFranco’s videos are between 15 and 20 minutes, and consistently break one million views, while CNN videos struggle to break one-hundred-thousand views with videos. And it appears independent new media journalism is establishing itself as a serious competitor to long standing titans in the journalistic landscape.
