What Do You Mean by ‘Entrepreneurial Journalism’?

Perhaps you have never heard of ‘Entrepreneurial Journalism.’ That’s likely because there are not very many practicing it. If you are not part of a major corporation, you may have a hard time finding any opportunity. However, it’s not because they don’t exist; it is because you are not trained to even see those opportunities, let alone achieve them. Immersion University will prepare you to be a multimedia journalist, marketer, and media manager. We will help you set up your own online medium but at the same time teach you how to get a job that a communications executive doesn’t know that he has open. Your unique skills will allow you to establish a job where none exists because employers could never fill such a job with a qualified employee … until now.

What? How could that be? Corporations don’t know they have an opening because they themselves are failing, and they don’t know how to turn things around. And, if they had an idea of how to turn their fortunes around, there are very few people with the right combination of training and experience to help them. Despite receiving good consulting from Dr. Clayton Christensen, the creator of the “disruptive innovation” theories, none of America’s newspapers could bring themselves to implement the most important elements of his theories that led the top British universities to name him the top business mind in the world, four years running.

Immersion University President Ken Harvey understands the trap that has led to the demise of many corporations in many different fields, that led the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to walk away from millions of dollars in monthly revenue and close its doors forever, and that has the Philadelphia Inquirer on the verge of closing its doors. Ken teaches Dr. Christensen’s concepts as a university professor, adds his own insights as a successful newspaper editor/publisher, and explains them as part of his multimedia textbook/courses. The inability of traditional media to deal with the disruption caused by the internet is exactly what creates the current opportunities for Immersion University students.

Ken became a big-city newspaper editor right out of college. Perhaps instinctively he understood principles that others did not catch on to for another 25 years. For example, today the most successful kind of online advertising is called “native advertising.” That’s advertising that looks like the regular content around it. On Facebook, for example, native advertising is the “sponsored” posts within the timeline. However, while the prediction is that in 2021 native advertising will comprise 74% of all online “display” (non-search engine) advertising, most of the native advertising creators have no idea how to make those ads very effective. They are still stuck in the mindset of traditional display advertising with a headline, graphic and a little information. Unless the product is really good, that kind of advertising is being ignored by today’s consumers. The key to native advertising is to make it as much like the best, most interesting organic posts on Facebook, for example, with viral elements that will catch the target audience’s attention. That’s what Ken achieved for his newspaper, as it built the advertising campaign for a mayoral candidate who lingered in eighth place in a race for city mayor with only three weeks before the primary election that would reduce the field to just the top two candidates. Ken, then as a 24-year-old, created ads that looked like news stories. Indeed, they were based on news stories that had already been written by other newspapers about his client. The result? In three weeks his client zoomed to second place, and in the general election, won over 60% of the city precincts, although still mysteriously losing the election.

The general manager of the newspaper, however, did not understand the principles with which Ken had built the newspaper’s readership and advertising, so Ken left to buy his first newspaper while his former boss saw his advertising nosedive and had to sell that newspaper. Meanwhile, Ken used these principles and additional insights to quickly double the revenue and profits of his own publishing company, sell it for a nice profit after just two years, and return to his university for his master’s degree. After completing his coursework in one year, he became both editor and publisher of a group of four newspapers, which he ran while finishing four published academic journal articles and his thesis. His publications included the first studied example of “shocking good news” 20 years before it became the basis for online viral advertising.

Then Ken had an experience that influenced the rest of his career and the ultimate creation of his Entrepreneurial Journalism multimedia textbook. A larger chain of newspapers was interested in buying the four papers he ran on behalf of an absentee owner. Simultaneously, at age 30, he was offered a professorship at the New York State University, College at Buffalo. The partners in the larger newspaper chain took Ken to lunch. They told him, “Ken, the newspapers being sold by your employer are OK but not a great deal. You, however, are a great deal. We can find news publishers for our chain who have good journalism experience or good advertising experience, but we cannot find publishers with both. That’s what you have that we need. If you will stay, we will buy these four papers and make you a part-owner.” Ken turned them down in order to continue his long career as an entrepreneurial journalist and oft-published researcher on the rapidly changing communications industry. As such he has gained the knowledge of both why traditional media are dying and how they can be saved. With that knowledge and his mentoring, students in this work-study program can achieve great success journalistically and economically.