via American Journalism Review
Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur?
Yes and no, says Asher Epstein, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He co-teaches the Media Entrepreneurship class at Maryland with Leslie Walker. Epstein believes that there are certain traits that are advantageous for someone who wants to be an entrepreneur: being comfortable with uncertainty, internal discipline, steely belief in a mission. These are hard things to teach, he says. However, he says, there are some entrepreneurial skills that can be taught.
"Entrepreneurism is really about analyzing market opportunities and exploring gaps and developing solutions for problems that you identify," he says. "That's a skill set you can acquire--how you recognize opportunities to develop valuable solutions."
Medill's Gordon says that he thinks "entrepreneurs are, in general, more born than made." He contends that, historically, most people with the entrepreneur's "drive in their gut" weren't usually hankering to go to journalism school and that most journalists weren't pining to start their own businesses. However, he says there are some journalists who may have acted upon a latent entrepreneurial itch.
In 1996, Burt Herman began his journalism career as a reporter for the Associated Press. For the next 10 years he traveled the world as a foreign correspondent. Along the way, he was named bureau chief in Korea. When he returned to the United States in 2008 as a Knight Fellow at Stanford, his quiescent entrepreneurial spirit rose from its slumber and headed straight for Silicon Valley. Even though he already had his master's from Stanford in Russian and East European studies, he took additional graduate courses in computer science, design and business in an effort to learn how to bring innovation to journalism.
Herman's current enterprise is Storify, which allows anyone to curate real-time stories by cobbling together social media elements such as photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and commentary from Twitter. According to Storify's Web site, 21,000 stories have logged 13 million page views since the private beta began at the end of September 2010. In February, Storify received $2 million in venture capital, and in March, the site had its largest audience ever¯4.2 million pageviews. Herman believes that everyone, not just journalists, could benefit from accessing their entrepreneurial impulses, but agrees that "you do have to have some type of will inside you."
With this will, he says, you can make your own way in this golden era of opportunity.
"It is a pure meritocracy, and anybody can build a brand, build a site or an online presence with what they do," Herman says. "If they are really great at what they do, they can find an audience."
Jarvis concedes that he doesn't expect that everyone who graduates from the program at CUNY will start their own businesses, though to date it has given away more than $140,000 of grant money for students to incubate their enterprises¯$100,000 from the McCormick Foundation in 2009, and $40,000 from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.
"If you understand the dynamics of journalism today, and the pressures upon it," says Jarvis, "and if you understand more than anything else the opportunities, so that you can make good decisions..you're going to be smarter about what you do and be more valuable to your employer or when you start your business."
