Ideas

The latest crop of women news entrepreneurs who received J-Lab support in June 2011 are showing remarkable ingenuity and initiative in raising revenues, developing partnerships and making presentations.

Here are some of my thoughts on what will happen in the world of journalism this year as well as my wishes for what I think should happen. Overall, I think “news entrepreneurship” will enter the lexicon in major ways. Entrepreneurial ideas will be informed by a new sense of urgency over the impending loss of original journalism generated by both new and old news entities.

J-Lab Project Manager, Ari Pinkus, attended this week’s Street Fight Summit 2011 in New York, learning that hyperlocal news is a complex and diverse field. Here’s her report.

There is no question that independent local news startups are spreading like wild fire around the country.  J-Lab has been updating its database and has about 1,200 listed to date, with more to be uploaded.

A good 120 people braved heavy rains to attend yesterday’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. They were richly rewarded. They saw new engagement ideas, data libraries, plus open-source and social media tools.

For all the criticism of the local blogosphere, a funny thing happens when you look at Small-J journalism from the inside out as we did in the new report, “Rules of the Road: Navigating the New Ethics of Local Journalism.”

The Sacramento Press news site got a new metrics dashboard, helping the COO get a better handle on his readers and contributors. As he learned, many of his assumptions about site use were wrong.

“The future of journalism will be a tale of smaller and smaller organizations making a bigger and bigger impact,” asserts Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger.com. I couldn’t agree more. They will rise and fall, collaborate and compete, succeed and fail — and be replaced by new startups.