Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Precarious State of Media Work

Abstract

Journalism’s current crisis, accelerated by the recent financial downturn, is the result of a num-ber of developments, including the rise of digital technologies, a decline in advertising revenue for print media, diminishing willingness to pay for content, the spread of diffuse online production and consumption, the proliferation of mobile devices, and widespread social media use. As media corporations strategize how to shore up profits most efficiently, journalists have borne the brunt of the crisis, facing mass layoffs, the shut-tering of print publications, and the emergence of digital-first media organizations that are trans-forming traditional news-making practices (Siles and Boczkowski 2012; Franklin 2012). Amid this flux, scholars, journalists, and commentators are debating the future of journalism and proposals for new production models. One proposal gaining traction is entrepreneurial journalism, in which enterprising individuals harness digital technolo-gies to succeed where big media have failed. This vision sees the very technologies used by corpora-tions to destabilize journalistic employment as solutions for a flailing industry. A “notoriously undefined ” term (Anderson 2014: 66), entrepreneurial journalism began appear-ing with greater prominence in English-languag