Embracing my Hidden Entrepreneur
When I received the email that I had been chosen to participate in the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP) at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, it took a few minutes to process the news. I had applied never really expecting to be chosen. True, I was already the co-founder and co-executive director of the fledgling Prison Journalism Project, an educational and publishing initiative aimed at teaching incarcerated writers the tools of journalism. But, for me that was a labor of love, not an act of entrepreneurship.
It was hard to reconcile this new identity I was being given as a journalism entrepreneur with my vision of myself. I was many things — journalist, educator, writer, mother. But the word entrepreneur was something I had never considered. I was not a tech genius by any means and seemingly didn’t have a product that I was trying to sell. I was simply a person, with no business training or non-profit experience, who had a vision of bringing more equity into journalism for marginalized voices and providing a platform for over 2 million behind bars to be heard.
But after spending 100 days with some of the most brilliant, innovative minds I’ve ever met as part of the second cohort of the EJCP in the Spring of 2021, I’ve come to see myself differently. I’ve come to see myself as an entrepreneur with a service and a product that is not only innovative but needed in journalism as the industry goes through its own reckoning with equity.
I first launched the Prison Journalism Project with my partner Yukari Iwatani Kane, in April 2020. We are a nonprofit newsroom that publishes the journalism, essays, opinion pieces, art and narrative poetry of our incarcerated writers, allowing their stories to reach a wider audience. We also engage our writers with larger newsrooms like the Washington Post and The Marshall Project so that their stories are amplified. Since launching, we’ve published over 700 stories by almost 400 writers across 29 states and Canada.
Mass incarceration is one of the biggest human rights issues in the United States today. The U.S. currently makes up around 4 percent of the world’s population. But with over 2 million people behind bars, it holds around 20 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. And the impact can be felt by millions more. I know that firsthand because I am one of them. It was the incarceration of my childhood best friend that first opened my eyes to this hidden world of prison and served as the catalyst for the creation of the Prison Journalism Project.
My cofounder and I are both journalists with over 20 years of experience at some of the biggest news outlets in the world. But we are also experienced prison educators. When we joined forces, we envisioned creating a curriculum and textbook on prison journalism that could be used across the country by prison educational programs.
But then the pandemic hit and all prison programming shut down. We realized that the incarcerated population would be completely isolated and silenced behind the walls. We then shifted gears and decided to provide these men and women with a platform to tell their stories. At first, we envisioned stories about COVID-19 in prison. But it became clear that our writers had so much more to say about life behind bars. From the George Floyd murder and the BLM movement to stories about parenting, prison economy and food, we realized that we had stumbled upon community journalism that had been largely untapped and neglected.
So we started to ask some vital questions. What if we provided our writers the journalism training to become prison correspondents and connect them to the world, both through our publishing platform and through fostering relationships with mainstream media outlets to get their stories to a wider audience?
What if we created the first national prison journalism network in the country?
We had an idea, journalism skills and a basic news platform on Squarespace. And we had support from an amazing team of volunteers from our transcribers and editors to our staff of directors, helping to shape both the news publication and the educational components of our organization.
But when I joined the cohort of EJCP participants in, I realized quickly that we had so much more work to do to make this a sustainable venture. We knew nothing about building audiences or multiple revenue streams or even balancing work and life to avoid burnout. We were feeling our way through the process, but we needed tangible skills and a shift in thinking. We needed to start seeing our organization as a business and ourselves as true entrepreneurs.
I learned at EJCP that an idea is a golden start, but it takes a lot more than goodwill and passion to make an idea a truly successful entrepreneurial venture. It takes a well thought out business model, targeted surveys and communication with audiences, testing of monetization strategies and collaboration. These were concepts that were foreign and scary to me before I joined EJCP. Now we are implementing these concepts into our day-to-day operations.
As I look back on the three months I spent with the brilliant instructors and my amazing cohort, I think what EJCP gave me the most is confidence, both in my idea and my ability to make it successful. In short, EJCP has given me a new identity. I am now an entrepreneur.
