A reaction to Jarvis’ “The Future of News is Entrepreneurial”

About a year ago, I was sitting in a conference room at a hedge fund in the midwest.  Across the table from me was the President of a Media company, in the fund’s portfolio, which owns several small to medium sized local newspapers.  His company also owns a bunch of lifestyle magazines and does custom publishing.  I quickly learned that all aspects of the business are basically losing money except for the custom publishing operations which is bankrolling (kind of) the rest of the news business.

I was running Famplosion at the time.  We focus on aggregating local event information for the family demographic, and I was very eager to talk about a partnership.  I figured this guy had feet on the street selling ads up and down main street.  I didn’t.  He had diminishing ad inventory to sell.  I had growing inventory being an Internet based business.  Let’s make a deal…right?  Wrong.  Turns out, he didn’t see me as the potential partner waiting to be linked with at the hip.  Instead, I was more like a representative of the barbarian horde amassing outside the gates of Rome.

It was a weird meeting.

Fast forward.  A few months later, I’m on the phone with a senior executive who runs all Digital for all the newspapers of a major media company.  They have dozens of websites that correspond to the dozens of major market newspapers they publish nationwide.  This was a first call, and I was super eager to chat with this guy having angled my way into that call over the last couple weeks.  The first words out of my mouth were a very excited, “how are you?”  His response, “…well, we’re in the newspaper business, so I guess that says about it all.”  Hmm.  This guy, if anyone, was supposed to have a silver bullet.  Some brilliant idea that was going to save the newspaper business with innovative online business models.  But more importantly, he was supposed to save Journalism as the arbiter of Truth in our liberal democracy.

Yea, not so much.  He seemed too depressed for such idealistic misgivings.

The deal I wanted to pursue was…I got content, they need cheaper content…I’ll give it to them super cheap since it costs me hardly anything to aggregate, organize and distribute it.  They get to monetize it with their advertising clients and all that business stuff those media companies are supposed to be really good at.

Yea, no deal there either.

Fast forward to today.  I just ready Jeff Jarvis’ blog post from a few days ago titled, “The future of news is entrepreneurial.”  It’s an interesting piece about the notion that the major media companies should just give up and go home, and as the talented journalists walk out the door they should set up shop as entrepreneurs gathering up, making sense of and then reporting the news.  Innovative startups should spring up to provide business services to this burgeoning corps of talented (and more importantly trained) journalists.

I agree the major media companies should probably fold up the tents on their news businesses, and I agree that the next phase of journalism will be entrepreneurial.  But by entrepreneurial I don’t mean small business or sole proprietor.  I mean fits and starts and carnage and wasted money and failed dreams all leading to something we have no idea about right now.

I guess living here in the Silicon Valley, I get to see up close and personal the kind of devastation new industries require before no longer being “entrepreneurial,” and instead becoming institutions in our society.  This is normal around here.

And it’s fine for tech, I mean the world is not less for lacking massive innovation immediately.  We always get it eventually.

But when it comes to Journalism, namely that societal institution that hopefully keeps us all from completely believing the stupid stuff we’d choose to out of natural bias and predisposition, leaving that up to the entrepreneurial path kind of terrifies me.

Entrepreneurs are supposed to increase wealth.  Journalists are supposed to tell the Truth.  I might be a cynic, but I don’t see a natural market for the Truth.  I guess my case-in-point would be cable TV, um both sides, in case you were wondering.

So, if it’s true to say Journalism needs to find a new home because the Media Company model is flawed beyond repair, and that Journalists need to go out into the desert for a while and live the entrepreneurial life, then I think this is more terrifying than hopeful.  But it’s probably true.