Catch up with our Redefining Journalism Entrepreneurship event
Memorable quotes from participants in our Let’s Talk News Business: Redefining Journalism Entrepreneurship event. Watch video from the event here, too.
The New Wave of Niche Journalism Creators
“As much as we get subscription and membership confused, we get audience and community confused […] the importance of actually building relationships, not just with your members, but building relationships with the people that you work with and making sure that the people who read your content or listen to your podcast or whatever else you’re creating can connect with one another.” Erin Mikail
“I try to remind myself, I’m a creative, smart person. These platforms need me too. I don’t like feeling beholden to them all the time, and I think that whenever we can put our own genius and our own smarts onto it, that’s really when the platforms shine. ” Darian Symoné Harvin
“The growth is actually the hardest part of all this […] I think the important thing is to just recognize that most people don’t see this meteoric growth. If you’re not seeing meteoric growth and it’s incremental, that’s normal.” Brian Morrissey
“You’re reaching people who are shelling money out of their wallet to support you directly and they want to fund your work, which is amazing. But you have to get out of this mindset necessarily of thinking about scale, more just about delivering value directly to your paying readers.” Cherie Hu
Leading as a Journalism Entrepreneur of Color
“It went from me thinking — I want to work for myself, I have ideas, I want to put my own things together — to me deciding, what is the purpose of this? Why do we exist? What are we trying to say in the world?” Juleyka Lantigua-Williams
“We live in a world that is really plural in so many ways, and because that plurality is really natural for all of us, then we’re going to encounter it and we’re going to center that into the work that we do.” Juleyka Lantigua-Williams
Podcast Entrepreneurship
“I think there is definitely room for all of you because we need this thing to keep evolving. We need people to keep talking about podcasts.” Martina Castro
“You’ve got to figure out, where’s your money coming from? An original podcast does not make money right away. You have to build an audience […] The main way to monetize a podcast today is ads, and ads are based on listeners. They’re sold per thousand listens. If you can get $25 for every thousand people who listen, you can have 25,000 listeners and only be making a couple hundred bucks. It’s tough.” Martina Castro
Rethinking Venture Capital and Philanthropy to Support Niche Media Entrepreneurs
“The challenge with investing in these things is that the outcome is so far in the future and so unclear that you can’t get credit for what you do along the way. […] The value that a local news publication has on a community also can be very unclear for long periods of time. You have to really believe that this community matters and that the newspaper makes it better.” David Grant
“It’s not just financial sustainability — it’s not just revenue, expenses and growing monthly recurring revenue. It’s also about things like operational resilience. Are you financially sustainable because your team of three is doing the work of eight? How does your organization think about things like burnout and succession planning and all of those HR things that journalism entrepreneurs are learning as they go?” Kara Meyberg Guzman
“This is a really hard industry to connect to if you are not from this space. The privilege and the elitism and the classism that comes with journalism makes it really, really hard. There is such a cultural change that’s needed to even allow for room for others that come from different backgrounds and experiences to come and thrive and to help.” Anna Nirmala
Elise Czajkowski is a writer/editor who regularly writes about the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s executive and professional education programs. Based in New York, she was previously a Tow Knight Fellow in Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Newmark J-School. She launched a non-profit called Sidewalk News, which uses outdoor advertising to distribute local news.
