My entrepreneurial journalism roller coaster survival plan
As with any startup, a journalism venture has to figure out how it’s going to make money. It must decide what business model it’s going to use. It has to identify its revenue streams, analyze production costs, establish distribution channels and define its clientele. Tons of important projections must be made and these can often determine whether or not the founders will be able to secure the appropriate seed funds to launch.
In my first Medium post for the Tow-Knight Center for the Entrepreneurial Journalism channel, I described why it’s vitally important to tell Latinx-focused stories in America today, especially those that elevate the Latino community. I still believe that one hundred percent, and I feel more humble than ever having spent the past four months studying the financial hurdles that entrepreneurial journalists of all stripes jump through in order to sustainably do their work.
One of the most confounding issues journalism startups face is how to establish an audience. For those that don’t have big-names or celebrity to lean on, audience numbers—or more specifically—an audience too small to effectively monetize, is a huge problem that can stymie even the best journalistic ventures. It’s a problem that I encountered with Livin’ Americana, the Latinx-focused journalism venture that I’d been bootstrapping and which I wanted to make into a sustainable business.
The thing is that today’s ad market is tough. The average rate for programmatic ads is $2.80 per 1,000 impressions or $0.0028 cents per ad shown on a page.
During my relatively short tenure here I’ve recognized that in order for Livin’ Americana to be a successful entrepreneurial journalist I’d have to throw myself into the audience-building mode as a full-time job. I’d also need to earn hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to my site. That would require me working without a salary for a number of years, and furthermore, there would be no guarantee that I’d be able to meet those goals. It’s unclear whether I’d ever be able to earn a salary, or whether I’d ever be able to sell my venture for a profit in the future.
I concluded that if I was in my twenties or early thirties, then this might be something worth doing. But now as a dad and husband, there are certain responsibilities that I just won’t risk. My future as an entrepreneurial journalist looked like something that had passed me by. If I was a boxer, it was time for me to hang up my gloves.
But while I was mourning the death of my dream of journalistic entrepreneurship something great happened. As part of the curriculum of our Entrepreneurial Journalism fellowship, the cohort was enrolled in a course on prototyping taught by John Keefe, head of bot technology at Quartz. His class is incredible. It exposed me to a new way of delivering news and advertising that uses artificial intelligence and text messaging technology. While I was learning about this platform I also realized that I wasn’t alone in my fight to establish a journalistic venture that was financially sustainable.
In fact, there are thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of independent journalists and hyperlocal bloggers all over the world that have put in years, sometimes decades, of work into covering a particular topic, community, or locality without being profitable or sustainable. These journalists and content creators are passionate about the topics they cover. Their audiences trust them. And they continue to do their work even though today’s ad market makes it super tough for them to make a decent living, even if they have tens of thousands of readers. Remember, it’s hard to earn a decent living “doing journalism” when you can only charge $0.0028 per ad.
“What if I could help these unsung heroes to earn a decent living from the work that they do? Could I create technology that targets audiences with the news, information and deals they want and which leverages those audiences that are the most highly engaged — often local news and hyperlocal blog sites? Could I create a service that helps establish stronger local economies by encouraging consumers to shop near their homes rather than from a big-box retailer or online site? And wouldn’t consumers welcome — perhaps even ask for — discounts and special services from local retailers to be delivered to them in a consistent way that isn't spamming?”
I believe that all this is possible and it’s why I’m launching a new company called XConnects. My new venture is in the service of journalism. Our first media client is The Uptown Collective, a hyperlocal blog site with 50,000 active users that serves the Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights, Harlem and Inwood. In the next few months, I’ll be developing a beta-prototype called a “Virtual Concierge” that will be white-labeled to Uptown Collective. As the development of the product ramps up, XConnects will be conducting focus groups to get feedback and expose readers, retailers, and the general uptown community to this new type of product. Leading up to the launch this summer we will also be onboarding advertisers that meet our criteria and who want to appear on searches that happen on the virtual concierge.
We will also begin to produce original content for Uptown Collective that will be published on its sites and eventually will feed the bot interesting, useful journalism about the Uptown community that will live side-by-side with the trusted recommendations that the Virtual Concierge will deliver to the audience.
Once we launch our beta, we hope to prove that our virtual concierge achieves the following goals:
- It should become a valuable tool for readers to consume news and to connect with local businesses.
- It should increase traffic and sales for local businesses who appear on searches that happen on the concierge.
- It should increase ad revenue for independent journalists and bloggers.
If we can prove these points, we believe it means that there is a quickly scalable market for this method of news, information and advertising delivery. And if this is true, then this is just the beginning. We may just be on the cusp of a movement to empower local economies to thrive, assist local journalists to cover their communities sustainably and help communities all across the world become better informed, more dynamic, healthier places.
Stay tuned here to read future posts with my thoughts on how chatbots might be the foundation for delivering news and information in a 5G-powered augmented-reality world which is currently being developed and which, as technology improves, exists just over the horizon for mainstream media consumers…
