The curriculum for both the Master of Entrepreneurial Journalism and Master of Modern Marketing degrees is essentially the same except how students focus their work-study efforts.
✦ What Do You Mean by ‘Entrepreneurial Journalism’?
✦ Most employers feel mass communication graduates are not getting enough hands-on experience
Our Immersion University database holds details on how to apply to any one of thousands of mass communication internships. Our online, multimedia “textbook,” Entrepreneurial Journalism, is a living document that we add to every week, and it includes text, audio, slide shows and video, interactive quizzes to help students check their own understanding, and practical, hands-on assignments to develop their skills. Universities are welcome to use this as a primary or supplementary textbook or resource in their own classrooms.
So, those who may want to buy our textbook and enroll into Immersion University for multimedia training are:
- Journalism graduates who don’t feel fully prepared for the real world and are trying to fine-tune their skills.
- Graduates from other fields who can’t find a job or simply decide they don’t want to work in their field of training.
- Or people who are already working but looking for a mid-career change. Some of those who author Ken Harvey has helped to become award-winning journalists had never taking a single journalism course but had good writing skills and lots of valuable life experience. Indeed, some had no college degree at all.
Using our multimedia training and then participating in our work-study program is an excellent way to achieve mastery of journalism principles and skills needed for journalistic success but also management and marketing skills that will ensure the opportunity to succeed in the challenging media industry.
The text portion of Entrepreneurial Journalism that related news writing and editing is relatively short. It was first written to prepare freelance writers who had never taken a journalism course before starting their journalism careers. These new reporters became very successful with very little formal training and a lot of feedback on their realistic and then real-world assignments. While working full time as a daily newspaper editor, Dr. Harvey also ran the journalism program for a local 2-year community college, teaching the basic journalism skills covered in this textbook. In five competitions against juniors, seniors and grad students from top university journalism programs and judged by professional journalists, his students won first place in general news writing three times, came in second once, and came in second and third the other time. Indeed, his student newspaper was named No. 1 in the region against all of those major universities. During that time, his students won many other awards, as well, and many of his students went right from that 2-year program into professional communication jobs. Since then, this approach has worked for many others, and it can work for you. If you develop the journalism skills and achieve practical management and marketing experience, there are still great opportunities in the communications industry.
Trimester 1: Learn the principles of journalistic reporting and writing; photo production and editing; journalistic video reporting; video, print, web, native, directory, and social media marketing; print design and production; web design and production; win-win negotiations and sales. Students will be given some real-life projects to complete during this intensive training. Part of this is to refine and expand the home site of the IEI Television Network. (See https://IEI-TV.net.) The IEI-TV website contains multimedia news, along with specially selected information, educational and inspirational videos, e-books, blogs, and other valuable content. This website becomes very important to you personally, as explained below. Note:
- Websites that have over 1,000 pages of interesting content overall enjoy 3,500% more traffic to their site than those with fewer than 50 pages, according to industry research. The IEI-TV home website will eventually contain more than 10,000 pages of interesting content — each with advertising potential, as well.
- Owners of an IEI-TV franchise will be able to share any of those pages on social media to attract web traffic and place advertising on each of those pages.
- Immersion University students will also help create national and international news content, including some that involve the simultaneous reporting of all students from across the country, edited into one comprehensive piece.
- The most powerful forms of advertising online, according to research, are video ads, native ads (that appear as organic content around them), and search ads. Native ads are predicted to make up 74% of all online display advertising in 2021. Over 90% of all corporate marketing directors say that video advertising is the No. 1 form of marketing. And a web page with a video included is 5,300% more likely to achieve a Page 1 listing on Google. Students will learn how to create all of these important forms of marketing.
- Meanwhile, search/directory advertising makes up nearly half of all online advertising. The IEI-TV Multimedia Business Directory that you will help create as part of your work-study program will gradually attract more and more visitors, especially as IEI-TV franchises develop their multimedia directories in more and more cities across the nation and interlink with one another. That will make it a national directory but with emphasis on the local businesses of each separate IEI-TV franchise. And links from the other franchises will enhance the search results for each franchise because “inbound links” are part of the Google algorithm that determines search placement.
- All of these cutting-edge advertising techniques and strategies will be mastered by Immersion University’s students.
Trimester 2: While continuing with their online coursework, students will receive their own franchise of the IEI Television Network. Students will participate in refining and expanding this multimedia educational and news site, using the software tools taught in Trimester 1. They will practice their reporting, writing, photography, and video skills with stories that they will then upload to their own IEI-TV website and share with the parent site and other franchise owners. They will also develop their local IEI Multimedia Directory of Businesses. Students will learn how to make a very soft sale and to the produce multimedia directory pages, including free listings for every business that requests one and a full-page multimedia native advertising page for those who are willing to pay for more.
Trimesters 3-5: Students will continue expanding their own knowledge, skills, and experience while taking four university courses per trimester and developing their own IEI-TV franchise. Their courses will enhance their knowledge and skills in online marketing, and their services to their local IEI-TV clients will expand to include additional payment for managing their clients’ social media and search marketing. Most local businesses have no expertise in social media and search marketing, and little time to master and apply such expertise. IEI-TV franchise owners can provide that service in conjunction with their local Multimedia Business Directory.
Trimester 6: Decision time for students who are approaching graduation. If during this two-year mastery program the students have built their IEI-TV Multimedia Business Directory, content page advertising, and social/search ad management to 100 clients paying an average of only $100 per month (and it could easily be double that amount), they are generating a revenue stream of $10,000 per month — an annualized amount of $120,000 per year. Some of that goes to the Immersion University for its training and support, and some goes back to the franchising company, IEI-TV Network, but their franchise could already be generating over $100,000 per year in profit. Pretty nice benefit from an educational institution. But their decision is:
- If they have achieved adequate success, as the potential suggests, they can decide to keep their franchise and focus their attention on continuing to develop it with Immersion University’s support during their final trimester?
- If they have achieved some success with their IEI-TV franchise but want to apply their knowledge, skills and experience some other way, they can do an internship with a potential employer and they can seek to sell their IEI-TV franchise. The franchise should be worth at least the equivalent of their net annualized revenue. If their net revenue is “only” $50,000, they should seek to sell their franchise for at least that amount.
- Or, if their results have been less satisfying, but they have passed their courses and are ready to pursue employment, they can sell the franchise back to the university with whatever improvements they have made for their original $1,000 payment and serve an internship with a company with which they might like to work permanently.
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