While my colleague Dorian Benkoil has been writing about entrepreneurial journalism, I’ve been studying a slightly different universe, media entrepreneurs. In collaboration with Anne Hoag at Penn State, we have been seeking to learn whether media entrepreneurs are different than entrepreneurs in general. That is, does one go into the media business motivated by a different set of goals than other sorts of entrepreneurs, say, in restaurants or pharmaceuticals? And, more broadly, what is the state of media entrepreneurship today?
I first discussed this line of research in an entry a few years ago at my Who Owns the Media? Blog. More recently Anne and I have pursued this notions of media entrepreneurship and have made some encouraging findings about the vibrancy of bottom up media. This is, indeed, a phenomenon that was recognized in America's earlest days. In our most recent paper we note that
In the most recent line of our research we undertook extensive interviews with 14 entrepreneurs who started media businesses. Though not any sort of statistical sample, we did strive to locate a diverse group of subjects. About half were involved in traditional media—newspapers, book publishing, cable and film—while the others were in some type of online media venture.
Although the entrepreneurs we interviewed have come to their media ventures by many different routes and are at different stages in life, there are some striking similarities in their motivations and attitudes toward entrepreneurship as well as their process for discovery and exploitation. In brief, they are hard pressed to recognize any particular barriers, regulatory, technological, structural or otherwise. And while they are working to make their ventures profitable, their first thought about being “successful” is often a reference to having an “impact” or having influence in some sphere.
From my point of view the most noteworthy insight was that this impact appears in two distinct forms. Some view running a media enterprise as more than just an entrepreneurial venture. The media’s power to influence, for this group, is a prime motivator for becoming an entrepreneur. Others exploited their media ideas for reasons similar to those of entrepreneurs in general. We refer to the former group as “missionaries” and the latter the “merchants” -- a potentially significant organizing concept for media entrepreneurship.
For example, typical of the of the missionaries are the comments of one interviewee who said that merely running a business, “holds absolutely no appeal to me…When you say that, I think of payroll taxes, balancing a cash register. When you say media, I think creative, influence, reach.” She added that a media business was appealing because “you can help people in the masses. There are very few other ways to do that."
A minority of those we spoke to we determined were “merchants.” In general, they responded that running a business, not necessarily a media business, was the motivating factor. Merchants talked about success and rewards in terms that could apply generically to any enterprise:
“It’s rewarding from a self fulfillment stand point that, hey, here’s a concept that I took….We brought it to the marketplace and made it successful. That’s, you know, part of it. There’s a real sense of fulfillment now the fact that we have people working for us. People depend on us for their livings. We're supporting other families, paying taxes and being good citizens. … There’s a satisfaction that comes from that."
The research supports the notion that prospects for new media players—and hence voices—is strong. Or at least there are many entrepreneurs who perceive great opportunity. Combined with our data that shows rapid growth in the number of media businesses overall, it bodes well for diversity of formats and sources of media-supplied content. Perhaps most encouraging is that these entrepreneurs barely recognize the existence of barriers to entry to the media business.
I first discussed this line of research in an entry a few years ago at my Who Owns the Media? Blog. More recently Anne and I have pursued this notions of media entrepreneurship and have made some encouraging findings about the vibrancy of bottom up media. This is, indeed, a phenomenon that was recognized in America's earlest days. In our most recent paper we note that
We characterize media entrepreneurship as “the creation and ownership of a small enterprise or organization whose activity adds at least one voice or innovation to the media marketplace. In her initial work, Anne found that in measuring the incidence of media entrepreneurship in comparison to other U.S. industries, media on the whole were at least as entrepreneurial, and often enjoyed greater rates of entrepreneurship.
It was Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville who first observed in the 1830s the role of media entrepreneurship in the United States. In his second volume of Democracy in America, Toqueville identified the media entrepreneur (though not employing that term) as peculiar to American democracy in a passage titled, “On the Literature Industry.” He may well have been the first to recognize the inherent interdependencies among media, capitalism and democracy, noting that democracy creates a mass market for “literature” (Newspapers, books and a few magazines were then the only mass media) because citizens seek to be informed in order to participate in their democracy.
In the most recent line of our research we undertook extensive interviews with 14 entrepreneurs who started media businesses. Though not any sort of statistical sample, we did strive to locate a diverse group of subjects. About half were involved in traditional media—newspapers, book publishing, cable and film—while the others were in some type of online media venture.
Although the entrepreneurs we interviewed have come to their media ventures by many different routes and are at different stages in life, there are some striking similarities in their motivations and attitudes toward entrepreneurship as well as their process for discovery and exploitation. In brief, they are hard pressed to recognize any particular barriers, regulatory, technological, structural or otherwise. And while they are working to make their ventures profitable, their first thought about being “successful” is often a reference to having an “impact” or having influence in some sphere.
From my point of view the most noteworthy insight was that this impact appears in two distinct forms. Some view running a media enterprise as more than just an entrepreneurial venture. The media’s power to influence, for this group, is a prime motivator for becoming an entrepreneur. Others exploited their media ideas for reasons similar to those of entrepreneurs in general. We refer to the former group as “missionaries” and the latter the “merchants” -- a potentially significant organizing concept for media entrepreneurship.
For example, typical of the of the missionaries are the comments of one interviewee who said that merely running a business, “holds absolutely no appeal to me…When you say that, I think of payroll taxes, balancing a cash register. When you say media, I think creative, influence, reach.” She added that a media business was appealing because “you can help people in the masses. There are very few other ways to do that."
A minority of those we spoke to we determined were “merchants.” In general, they responded that running a business, not necessarily a media business, was the motivating factor. Merchants talked about success and rewards in terms that could apply generically to any enterprise:
“It’s rewarding from a self fulfillment stand point that, hey, here’s a concept that I took….We brought it to the marketplace and made it successful. That’s, you know, part of it. There’s a real sense of fulfillment now the fact that we have people working for us. People depend on us for their livings. We're supporting other families, paying taxes and being good citizens. … There’s a satisfaction that comes from that."
The research supports the notion that prospects for new media players—and hence voices—is strong. Or at least there are many entrepreneurs who perceive great opportunity. Combined with our data that shows rapid growth in the number of media businesses overall, it bodes well for diversity of formats and sources of media-supplied content. Perhaps most encouraging is that these entrepreneurs barely recognize the existence of barriers to entry to the media business.
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