The question is timely, given the raft of new entrepreneurial programs at journalism schools.

There has always been an entrepreneurial streak in journalism, typified in the freelance journalist who makes a living by pitching and selling their work to a range of clients.

Journalists, by necessity, have to be entrepreneurial in finding and chasing stories.

The shift today is in the product and process of entrepreneurial journalism.

I recall when I was in the Middle East for the BBC in the early 1990s as a “sponsored stringer.” The BBC guaranteed a steady monthly income, but I was able to freelance for other outlets so long as they were not in direct competition with the BBC and I put the corporation first.

During my four years in the region, I ended up freelancing for a range of broadcast and print outlets. Remember, this was before the web.

One of the secretst to successful freelancing is having something of value to offer. I was fortunate to be based in Tunis, which housed the PLO as it recognised Israel and started peace talks.

At the same time, there was a military coup, presidential assassination and an Islamic insurgency in neighbouring Algeria. There was plenty of news of interest to UK newspapers and magazines.

But there was another reason for my success as a freelance: scarcity. In this specific instance, I was one of the few journalists who was a native English speaker with a broadcast journalism background. This opened up US and Canadian broadcasters such as NPR and the CBC.

When I was in the Middle East, I sold my product, the story, to a media institution, which then distributed it to the audience. The process involved going through an editor.

The product and process were controlled by the media institution. One time, a British Sunday newspaper commissioned a 1,200 word profile of an aspiring female Algerian politician. My editor loved the piece. But come Sunday, for reasons of space, the final product was a large photo with a lengthy caption.

The physical constraints of the product, print, and the editorial process in London, impacted on how the story was published. And at the time, the paper didn’t have a web presence.

What makes entrepreneurial journalism different today is the ability to reach the audience directly, retaining control of the product and of the process.

An entrepreneurial journalist does not need to go through an intermediary like a big media institution to provide a product or service.

While the barriers to entry may have fallen away, there remains the need to reach audiences and secure their attention. And there still needs to be something of value in the offering.

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The study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news outlets in the US by the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism is in line with earlier academic studies.

The Pew study, in collaboration with the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, found that Twitter was mainly used to distribute news and boost traffic to a news outlet’s website.

Just over 90 per cent of the tweets analysed during a week provided a link to a news story on the organisation’s own website.

Twitter was used far less as a reporting tool or as a way to filter information. Just two per cent of tweets asked for information or for eye-witness accounts. A minute one per cent of tweets were retweets from outside a news outlet.

There was a slight variation when it came to the Twitter feeds of individual journalists, rather than institutional accounts.

A study of the accounts of 13 individual journalists found that three per cent of tweets asked for information and six per cent were retweets of material not sourced from their news outlet.

Pew concludes:

“These findings reveal limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.

This behavior resembles the early days of the web. Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain. Now, the idea is that being a service – of providing users with what they are looking for even if it comes from someone else – carries more weight.”

Admittedly, Pew only studied a small sample. But other research has also highlighted how news outlets have tended to use social media to try to reach a broader audience, rather than engaging in an exchange with the audience.

A study by Marcus Messner, Maureen Linke, and Asriel Eford (PDF) found that the official Twitter accounts of the top newspaper and TV outlets in the US functioned largely as an automated RSS feed of the latest news stories.

Another study found that many newsrooms automatically generated a tweet  (PDF) with a link when a story was published on the website.

The use of Twitter and other social networking tools to go beyond broadcast is still the exception in newsrooms. Yet there is potential for so much more.

In a chapter on Twitter for the new second edition of The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, I explore how newsrooms are adopting and adapting to social media, concluding:

Twitter is affecting how news organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. New journalistic genres are emerging as news outlets incorporate social media services into daily routines. A process of negotiation is taking place, as traditional ways of working bump up against social, cultural and technological practices that disrupt established journalistic norms.

The Pew study analysed one week of tweets on the main Twitter feed of 13 different news organisations, amounting to more than 3,600 tweets.

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The Stats Canada survey found that more than two-thirds of Internet users (68%), read or watch the news online. Keeping up with events is one of the top online activities, following e-mail (93%), browsing for goods or services (74%) and electronic banking (68%).

The figures also point to rapid uptake of social media in Canada, with 58% using social networking sites. The number jumped to 86% for younger net users under 35.

Women, too, were slightly more likely than men to use social networking sites (62% compared to 54%).

The prevalence of social networking is unsurprising as just under 17 million people in Canada are on Facebook alone, accounting for 64% of the online population.

More surprising is that Stats Canada found that only 19% of net users said they contributed content such as by blogging and posting images, or took part in discussion groups such as message boards.

The low number suggests a minority of Canadians are active participants in creating media online, even though much of what takes place on social media is posting photos or participating in a discussion.

Perhaps people do not consider what they do on Facebook as “contributing content”.  Yet contributing content is implicit in interactions on social networking sites, either through sharing a link, writing a short snippet or uploading an image.

Instead, net users might only think they are contributing content if they have made an explicit decision to write a blog post or join a messageboard.

It might be time to reassess how we measure who is creating content online, as well as where, how and why they are doing this.

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The UBC Graduate School of Journalism was a runner-up in the Online Video Journalism (small site category).

Here is the full list of winners:

Knight Award for Public Service
Barnegat Bay Under Stress – Asbury Park Press

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Large Site
BBC News

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Medium Site
The Globe and Mail

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Small Site
voiceofsandiego.org – Voice of San Diego

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Micro Site
NJ Spotlight

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English, Small Site
OWNI

General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English, Large Site
LA NACION

Breaking News, Large Site
Coverage of the uprisings in Egypt – Al Jazeera

Breaking News, Small Site
A Snow Storm Hits New York and WNYC Listeners Map the Cleanup – WNYC Radio

Specialty Site Journalism, Affiliated
NPR Music – NPR (Tie)

Pipeline – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/post-gazette.com (Tie)

Specialty Site Journalism, Independent
edweek.org – Education Week, Editorial Projects in Education

Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, Large Site
Breach of Faith – Los Angeles Times

Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, Small Site
Dialysis – ProPublica

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Large Site
Traumatic Brain Injury: Coming home a different person – The Washington Post

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Medium Site
Exile Without End: Palestinians in Lebanon – CBC News, Radio-Canada, ALT Digital Design Studio

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Small Site
Crisis Guide: Pakistan – Council on Foreign Relations / MediaStorm

Multimedia Feature Presentation, Student Site
Global Warning – Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Large Site
CNN Belief Blog – CNN Digital

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Medium Site
Ward Room – NBCChicago.com

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Small Site
OpenSecrets.org

Online Commentary/Blogging, Large Site
Arianna Huffington – The Huffington Post

Online Commentary/Blogging, Medium Site
No award

Online Commentary/Blogging, Small
No award

Outstanding Informational Graphic or Data Visualization, Professional
Tell-All Telephone – Zeit Online

Outstanding Informational Graphic or Data Visualization, Student
No award

Online Video Journalism, Large Site
Caught in the Crossfire: Victims of Gang Violence – Los Angeles Times

Online Video Journalism, Medium Site
Exile Without End: Palestinians in Lebanon – CBC News, Radio-Canada, ALT Digital Design Studio

Online Video Journalism, Small Site
Powering a Nation: Spilling Over – UNC News21

Online Video Journalism, Student
Haiti’s Lost Children – University of Miami (Tie)

Now What Argentina? – University of North Carolina & Universidad Pontifica de Argentina(Tie)

Community Collaboration
The Tiziano Project | 360 Kurdistan

The Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Journalism
Flipboard

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Speaking in parliament, Cameron said:

Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.

Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.

And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.

So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

As Christian Fuchs points out, it is common to attack the media and popular culture for causing or spreading violence. With the riots in England, the blame is falling on Blackberry, Twitter and Facebook.

Fuchs quotes Stanley Cohen, who wrote in his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics:

There is a long history of moral panics about the alleged harmful effects of exposure to popular media and cultural forms – comics and cartoons, popular theatre, cinema, rock music, video nasties, computer games, internet porn.

As Fuch rightly argues, blaming social media reduces societal problems to the level of technology that can be then solved by controlling the technology.

There more than a hint of technological determinism in Cameron’s words – an assumption that technology shapes society.

As a result, the UK government is considering curbs on social media and instant messaging.

There is the practical issue of policing these networks. Protestors in Egypt used social media to mobilise and amplify their cause. The response of the government was to shut off the Internet.

In any case, there is the question of who would decide whether a tweet is an incitement to violence. Civil rights campaigners argue that this should be left to the courts, not to private companies.

It is too easy to try to stir up a moral panic over social media.  In the words of Labour MP Tom Watson on Twitter, such an approach is “Luddite.”

What we are seeing is how people appropriate media technologies and shape their use.  Twitter and Facebook have been used to co-ordinate the clean-up in England.

It is sobering to recall Marshall McLuhan’s quote: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

(Index photo courtesy of Mastermaq)

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Her move to ITV News in September has raised questions over who “owns” the almost 60,000 people who follow @BBCLauraK.

The Guardian suggests that “rather than handing her old account login back to the BBC to start from scratch with a new ITV account, the sensible thing to do is to change the name of the account.”

But it looks like Kuenssberg will be starting from scratch, with the Twitter handle, @ITVLauraK.

Ironically, the announcement was made by Kuenssberg on her BBC Twitter account.

Social media creates an opportunity for journalists to interact on a personal level with audiences.

Even if an account is branded as a “BBC” journalist, it blurs the traditional barrier between the professional and personal as tweets tend to reflect the personality of the reporter.

It marks a further step in the shift from the institutional to the individual brand of the journalist, identified by the State of the Media report in 2009:

Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand.

Social media provides journalists with a way to connect and interact with audiences in a more personal and direct way than through traditional news products.

But there is an unresolved tension between the journalist and the institution, especially on Twitter, which as Jemima Kiss points out, is designed for individuals to communicate.

Media institutions may have to accept that they cannot own the Twitter accounts of their reporters.  The journalist may need to switch to a new account, as Kuenssberg will be doing, but they are likely to take their following with them.

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First up was Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG Multimedia, Norway. He started by stating that he tells his journalists to spend a minimum of 10% of time interacting and engaging with readers.

Three-quarters of Norwegians visited the site in February, with 87% coming to the homepage, compared to only 4% from Google.

VG’s approach has been to figure out how we can help the readers help each other.

Hansen highlighted how last year during the travel disruption caused by the Icelandic volcano, a developer created a quick and dirty site to help people help each other get home.

In return, readers sent in stories and pictures about their journey home.

VG also has a tool that lets a select group of readers correct typos.  5,000 readers applied to correct typos and 400 were selected to fix typos on the site. 17,000 typos were reported last year, said Hansen.

Another example cited by Hansen was the paper’s response to the disaster in Japan.  VG set up a paper with a live feed of Japanese TV, but also updates from journalists and from readers.

He also showed how during the swine flu, VG created a wiki site inviting users to let others know where they could get a flu shoot.

Hansen said the paper had progressed from a monologue to dialogue. But today, there is another viral layer which taps into social media.

He said VG wanted to be something in the middle between traditional journalism and social media.

Washington Post’s approach to Twitter

Amanda Zamora, social media and engagement editor, The Washington Post, described her job as taking the “earmuff off this sleeping giant.”

She talked about how reporters are using social platforms such as Twitter as a newsgathering tool.

“We’ve learnt a lot from Twitter,” she said, for example by using the hashtag to actively frame the conversation.

She outlined the approach as call, response, reward.

The sign of success is if you issue a call, you get a response, said Zamora, not the number of followers. People who take part are rewarded by bring that content back into the Washpost site.

The paper uses Google forms as a way for people to send in what they know on specific stories, for example on power outages in DC.

One of the ways the Post is experimenting is using Intersect, which can blend accounts from both journalists and readers. This is how, Zamora said, the paper is aiming to transform the social conversations we collect into a narrative.

New York Times and social media

Jennifer Preston spoke of her experience as the former social media editor from The New York Times.

She sees value in Twitter as a tool for reporting, but also for real-time publishing and curating.

But it can also involve users in the creative process, helping to engage with community, she said.

Preston shares how it was a very big step for the Times, which has many layers of editing, to put content from journalists and users in real-time.

One example she cited was Nicholas Kristof’s posts to Facebook covering the uprisings in the Middle East.

Preston showed some ways in which the Times was trying out new ways of engaging with readers. One example she showed was A Moment in Time, asking people to take a photo at a specific time and date.

When the Times did this last year, it was inundated with photos. But rather than wait for the paper to publish the photos, readers also shared their photos on Flickr.

Facebook, said Preston, provides an enormous opportunity to seed communities. She showed the Civil War Facebook page from the Times.

Lessons from TBD

Jim Brady rounded off the session by sharing his experiences at TBD.

He said that users need to be involved in journalism, not just allowed to upload pet photos. Engagement has to be a two-way street.

He said TBD used Twitter and Facebook to gather news, not just disseminate news. His staff also used Fourquare to find people in a specific location.

When it came to sending out news links, TBD encouraged staff to have a very conversational tone on Twitter.

By January 2011, TBD had 1.5 million unique visitors. “We were pretty confident the model was working editorially,” said Brady.

He urged people not to see TBD as a failure, saying it was on the right track before the owners abandoned the original vision behind the site.

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The newspaper sites were free for the first two years. But they realised there was a very small online advertising market so the group just did it. Part of this involved an active strategy to convert newspaper subscribers online.

The impact of the paywall was a 35% drop in traffic. But Meléndez said they stopped minor circulation declines.

Access to all of the the news sites is free for newspaper subscribers. The prince for an online subscription is 80% of a newspaper subscription, as a way of encouraging readers to take the newspaper.

Meléndez explained there is some free content, such as the main page and emailed links.

The group provides apps for free, at least for now, said Meléndez. It has an “aggressive” app strategy, with dozens of apps for different topics.

Meléndez said broadsheet circulation is holding steady and tabloids have grown by 5% over last 8 years. Advertising and classifieds have also grown.

The group has 300,000 newspaper subscribers for all papers. 50,000 are only online subscribers. In terms of traffic, the sites have six million unique visitors, with an average of eight pages per user.

Meléndez said they learnt that people do not read instructions. Online, people just expect to click. So use action verbs and clear instructions, with as few words as possible, he urged.

The reasons behind the success of paywalls is local content, argued Meléndez. And the sites have more local content than in the newspaper. “Local is very important for us,” he said.

But when it came to today, he said the situation with paywalls was more difficult than in 2002. People are used to free, there is more competition and newspaper metrics are “so bad.”

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We had several questions around this topic in the first-year undergraduate course at UBC in new media and journalism that I teach with my colleague Candis Callison.

In particular, students wanted to know about promising, emerging journalists in Canada who they could look to as role models.

Our TA, UBC j-student Fabiola Carletti, took it upon herself to get in touch with a bunch of new journalists and publish their advice online.

The site is a treasure trove of gems, from take every opportunity to being relentless to living an interesting life.

Please take a look at So, you want to be a journalist?, recommend it to students or let us know who we should add.

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I used to be based in Cairo in the early 1990s for the BBC. In countries like Egypt, part of the government’s power comes from controlling the media. What social media does is allow citizens to get around controls on the media, by sharing information and connecting around a common cause.

The government’s response has been to disconnect the internet as well as suspending mobile phone services. By doing this, it is trying to make it harder for people to organise, but also to find out what is happening in different parts of the capital and in other cities. It is an attempt to enforce its control of the media.

Compared to Iran, where the protests were largely coordinated by the opposition, in Egypt, there is no one opposition politician that has emerged as the leader of the protests. Instead what we are seeing is different groups coming together, frustrated with corruption and repression. Social media services such as Facebook are a way to spread information about protests and show solidarity with one another.

We all need information to make decisions. Social media provides a channel for Egyptians to share information, find out what is happening. It gives everything their own printing press or TV station. But social media didn’t cause the protests. These have tapped into long-running and deep-seated resentment at 30 years of autocratic rule, exacerbated by the economic crisis.

But social media services have been a catalyst, helping to spread information about the protests and providing a way to share details about what is happening where. We say the role of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing. In societies where the media is censored, social media can filled the void, with citizens themselves reporting on what is happening around them

But social media can also be used as a tool of repression. We saw this in Iran, where the authorities were monitoring what was said on Twitter and used the same tools to spread disinformation and identify protesters.

Seeing a 140 character tweet is not going to overthrow the Mubarak regime. But it can be a call to action, inspire others to take to the streets and realize that there are others like you who want to see political change.

(Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera English)

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