Why journalists have always had an entrepreneurial streak

Michael Rosenblum put the question to that month’s Carnival of Journalism: can a good journalist be a good capitalist? It landed in January 2012 alongside a wave of new entrepreneurial programmes at journalism schools, and the answer offered here was that the streak was never new. A freelance reporter who makes a living pitching and selling work to a range of clients has always been a small business, and finding and chasing a story is entrepreneurial by necessity. What changed was the product and the process, not the temperament.

The old arrangement had a name. A “sponsored stringer” — the model Alfred Hermida worked under as a BBC correspondent in the Middle East in the early 1990s — drew a guaranteed monthly income from one broadcaster while staying free to sell to outlets that were not in direct competition with it, with the corporation coming first. Over four years in the region that meant freelancing for a range of broadcast and print outlets, all of it before the web existed as a route to anybody.

Two things made it work, and neither was entrepreneurial flair. The first was having something of value to sell: the posting was Tunis, which housed the PLO as it recognised Israel and entered peace talks, while neighbouring Algeria went through a military coup, a presidential assassination and an Islamic insurgency. There was more news of interest to UK newspapers and magazines than one correspondent could file. The second was scarcity — being one of very few journalists in place who was a native English speaker with a broadcast background, which opened up US and Canadian broadcasters including NPR and the CBC.

What that arrangement did not include was any hold on the product or the route to the reader. The story was sold to an institution, which controlled both, and everything passed through an editor. A British Sunday newspaper once commissioned a 1,200-word profile of an aspiring Algerian politician; the editor liked it, and then, for reasons of space, it ran as a lengthy caption under a large photograph. The physical constraints of print and an editorial process in London decided what the piece finally was, and the paper had no website at the time, so there was nowhere else for it to go.

What entrepreneurial journalism added later was direct reach: a reporter can now hold on to both the product and the route to the reader without an intermediary, which is the part of the arrangement that was never available before, however entrepreneurial the reporter. The barrier that fell was entry. Securing attention did not fall with it, and neither did the requirement to have something worth attending to — the same condition that decided which stories sold from Tunis two decades earlier.