Entrepreneurial journalism

This thesis presents the results of the market adjustment of journalists to the digitally, mediated news landscape. Digitalisation has led to budget cutbacks in journalism productions, dismissal of fulltime editorial staff, shortage in journalism jobs and free content. Fierce competition from the abundance of (freely accessible) content and freelance journalists has changed the work process, responsibilities and (public) roles of journalists and correspondingly the labour market. There is no automatic legitimacy anymore both for journalism organizations and the individual journalists. The adjustments to such a competitive market were explored through personal interviews with freelance journalists. The interview transcripts were analysed through open, axial and selective coding in an inductive grounded theory approach. The main findings include an explanation about why market adjustments were necessary in such ways and a description of what entrepreneurial journalism is in the field. The experiences, adjustments, the interpretations of entrepreneurial journalism and the expectations for the future of journalism are thoroughly discussed. The main outcome is that journalists should not only provide content, but also be involved in ensuring the probability of creating good journalism by taking action of the business side of journalism. The business involves the distribution/publishing, marketing, sales and budget management of editorial content and other events around it. This is what is considered to be entrepreneurial journalism. Reacting and adapting is not enough anymore, the journalist should take initiative and action for reaching an audience and making money with their journalism products by taking financial risks. However, Internet provides ample opportunities to lower the financial risks, which is why most entrepreneurial journalists find their successful business model for their journalism product online. Furthermore, journalism does not pay the bills anymore and therefore journalists have commercial jobs on the side that are non-journalism related. A discussion is whether or not the commercial side jobs in which journalism independency is not always kept intact are good or bad for journalism. Journalism is also considered to be a craft instead of a profession in which additional responsibilities and new roles have been added to the traditional job description: the role of the journalist is shifting from news provider to information specialist and entrepreneur with the main responsibility of reaching an audience in a profitable way. Moreover, journalists will have to be willing to learn new (entrepreneurial) competences, in order to survive financially as a journalist. Thus, even though it was traditionally not expected of journalists to be involved in business, the financial circumstances of traditional media (mainly) due to digitalisation have redefined this understanding. It has led to a new term that is used to stipulate what the future of journalism may look like: entrepreneurial journalism, which refers to the need for journalists to act in an economic sense.