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.

Ann Grimes from the Graduate Program in Journalism, Stanford University starts by talking about a new capstone course that combines journalism, business and technology students.

Her twentysomething students are interested in doing their own start-ups. Her advice to budding entrepreneurs is to fail and fail fast, learn from failure, get feedback and revise your idea. But also don’t fall in love with your idea.

She has found that journalists are risk-averse and somehow the “good enough” approach of technologists is alien to the culture of journalism.

And someone is is behind one of the new journalist start-ups is Scott Lewis, CEO, Voice of San Diego.

A year ago, it was seen as an odd experiment. But now the idea of a non-profit news site has become more accepted and it has inspired more attempts at similar start-ups.

He describes the site as a public service, and wants donors and sponsors to think of Voice of San Diego as a service for the community.

Lewis says he is not pursuing page views, rather he is pursuing engagement with the city of San Diego

He explains how he started working there as a writer in 2005 before taking it over and realising just how hard to keep a business going.

He admits that he goes to bed worrying about the future of 13 people and wakes up with the same thought.

What he doesn’t want to do is lay anyone off, as this would be “a failure on my side.” His advice is to have a vision of where you want to go and don’t get hung up on the technology.

In his remarks, Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, modestly explains how his company came to be.

He says that he saw inefficient corporate structures plaguing more media companies and decided this was not how he saw his future. He didn’t want a faceless person in New York deciding his future.

Since launch from of his personal GigaOm blog, the company now has network of seven blogs with 21 people working, organises several conferences and has a business research side. The business aim is to reduce reliance on advertising.

His advice: “It looks much easier from the outside then from the inside.”

“But when the rewards come in, it is a fantastic feeling,” he says, “but 99% of your days are going to be bad.”

The competitive advantage of big media companies are traffic and their salesforce, says Om. But he sees no difference in the journalism, arguing that his writers may actually be closer to the story.

Om’s advice is not to think like a journalist, but to think like a businessperson, with business professionals in key positions in the company.

The bottom line, he says, is just do it. Stop thinking about doing, and start doing.

He explains that information is being atomised and this means that journalists have to figure out how to grab the attention of their consumers by working out how to best serve the audience.

From the Arizona State University news release:

As a longtime Silicon Valley-based journalist, Gillmor wrote a popular business and technology column for the San Jose Mercury News and launched a weblog in 1999, a site believed to have been the first mainstream journalism blog. In 2004 he published “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People,” a book on citizen journalism that has been published in six languages.

The Center for Citizen Media, aimed at enhancing citizen journalism, is affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where Gillmor has been lecturing in online journalism, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard University Law School, where he is a fellow. Gillmor will retain the affiliation with the Berkman Center, and bring his citizen-media work to ASU.

The news industry could do with more journalism schools integrating entrepreneurship into the curriculum.

Gillmor takes up the position on 1 January.