Entrepreneurial Skills for Journalists

Thanks to reader Debra Cash, I learned of an article on how some J-schools are trying to teach entrepreneurial skills, as that's what the future is going to require. But a class may not be enough, as Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark noted:

“I got the sense that [the students] have a grasp on the rapid change in the market and that’s helping them out,” Newmark said. “But they, like everyone else, are struggling to connect with the change and prepare themselves for the wild ride. They are clued-in but no one knows what’s going to happen. They’re in the awkward position in that the nature of the world is changing as they take the class.”

That is true - a class, or multiple classes, alone will not teach writers everything they need to know. That requires practice, falling down, and picking yourself up again. And here's an interesting comment about advertising:

“My view is that you need to start treating advertising as content,” he said. “It’s not just the thing that pays our paychecks and otherwise we want to flee from it. Once you realize that, then you think about how to preserve your credibility, and tell people, ‘yes we take advertising’ and show people that it doesn’t affect the editorial. It’s going to require more transparency, which frankly is a healthy thing. It’s not like this fiction that advertising was never there before. The public generally felt that it was affecting the editorial, so there’s an opportunity to explain this to people and distinguish ourselves from sites that don’t care [about a separation between ads and editorial].”