>> Das Interview auf Deutsch

Jeff Jarvis is book author (his book Public Parts will be published in Germany as “Mehr Transparenz wagen!” on Oktober 12), blogger, podcaster und journalism professor. He is director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY). Journalism students in his entrepreneurial program specialize in how to found their own journalism start-ups. Jeff Jarvis has an astute interest in the relationships between journalists and the public and in new business models for news in a digital media world.

VOCER: What are the developing trends in entrepreneurial journalism?

Jeff Jarvis: I don't think we know yet. The first trend is still merely the idea that journalists can be entrepreneurs. Because for a long time you couldn't be. You had to be the person who was rich enough to own the press or had the capital to work with. And now it's possible for me to teach my students that they can start businesses of their own, because the capital requirements are so low. I think we're trying to understand new ways to do existing forms and models of news and content and then to rethink what we are. I've been arguing lately that we're not in the content business, we should see ourselves as in the relationship business.

Is content unimportant?

The content will still remain and still has value. But Facebook and Google understand how that content has value to generate signals about people so that you can serve them better and target advertising. And we have to get those skills now. That's very hard. I think when it comes to serving our advertisers the mere idea of just selling space or time isn't good enough. We have to help them with their goals online and with digital relationships. So we get away from the old media model that says more is always better - pageviews, pageviews, pageviews - and get to a more direct model of relationships and media.

Does entrepreneurial journalism have fashion trends? For a while it seemed that everybody wanted to start a hyperlocal site, then a data journalism project, and now Knight News challenge asked to submit projects that build upon existing platforms.

I think that vertically integrated industries get replaced by ecosystems made up of three layers: platforms, entrepreneurial investment and networks. And that one can play in various of those areas. Because the platforms exist it's possible to do the entrepreneurial efforts inexpensively but sometimes you need to get critical mass so you form networks. That's what Knight is saying: because these platforms exist you can now build atop of them. That's a safer way to go. Yes, you can also build a new platform, that's a scalable, very wonderful thing to do, but it's hard and expensive to build a Google or a Facebook. It's possible now to take advantage of what has come before and build new things. But we have to add value to what exists - the key lesson being that information will flow on its own without us. We then add value to that. Whether that's fact checking or distribution or curation or all these buzzwords we talk about. One way or the other we no longer have a hold on everything, and so we have to prove our value.

Which skills do students of the entrepreneurial journalism program at CUNY learn which they wouldn't learn in a more traditional journalism school?

It starts with this: When I came to journalism school I was taught to stay away from business. That was corrupting. So none of us learned the business of journalism. And that's really my not so secret agenda in teaching entrepreneurial journalism. First: It's simply to teach journalists their business, to make better decisions about it and be better protectors. Second: Students inevitably come in and pick stories they want to write about. They do the same thing when they pick businesses. They come in and say, I want to start a business. And my smart-ass line back to them is: No one gives a shit about what you want to do except perhaps your mother. That's not the point. You have to understand what the public needs and serve that. A passion or strong interest is not good enough. You need to learn to listen first to the public and figure out what's there. Another very broad skill: journalists tend to see problems and we teach them to see that whereever there's a problem, there's an opportunity. There's a chance to serve people and make money.

Do journalism students at CUNY learn how to make money?

Revenue is the hardest lesson for all of them. It's the hard business challenge obviously for all start-ups. Our students have to be able to sell their ideas or their companies to investors. That's really hard. There have been some really good businesses right now, but they are struggling to get investment from the start. Finally, my students have taught me that one skill they definitely need is project management which includes creating a good prototype and understanding management processes. Journalists are used to having made processes made up for them. They are going to have to think up new processes.

Are there changes that journalism education in general should embrace?

I think we have to change the way in which we teach tools, because we need to teach more tools, yet we don't want them to take over the education so that in the end its all about gadgets. We also need to be more efficient and less expensive in how we teach. We need to teach more practice. I also think that we need to be able break up our education into units other than just degrees and offer them to anyone anywhere according to their current needs. There are lots of professional journalists who are left behind now by the changes in the industry, who need to be retrained. We need to teach them. There are citizen journalists as we we called them for a while who are out there and need skills, we need to train them too.

Is there an international demand?

For our entrepreneurial program we have a surprising demand internationally from people who want to learn these skills all around the world, some in the EU, but especially in Africa. So we need to train them in a way that doesn't mean flying them to New York. They can't afford it or it's irrelevant to what their needs are. But this is important for their societies and our scociety as a whole. So have to figure that out.

Should journalists, especially start-ups, learn the art of collaboration?

Of course, yes. Journalists should learn to collaborate in all kinds of ways. Collaboration takes many forms. Curating the work of others - do what you do best and link to the rest. That's a form of collaboration. Crowdsourcing, distributing. Repost.us is a platform built upon the idea that you can distribute someone else's content while the creator still gets the business benefit of having the brand and the content, because the advertising and the analytics go with it, that's a form of collaboration. When you work in an ecosystem of platforms and entrepreneurial efforts and networks you have to learn to collaborate with those other elements and ecosystems and hope that they will collaborate well with you. Which is part of the issue with Twitter now - is Twitter still a good collaborator or not? We don't know. Collaboration isn't just about you being generous, it is about you being able to hope that others are generous too and enable you to work within their structures.

Should legacy media collaborate more with journalism schools?

Yes, for the benefiit of both. For the school, because we need more places to teach students through the practice of journalism. And for the legacy media, because they get the benefit of more effort and new perspectives. Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation here in the U.S. has talked about the teaching hospital model applied to journalism and there are a few examples of this either through an existing legacy organization or through an organisation the school starts.

What is a teaching hospital model in journalism?

A teaching hospital model is that after would-be-doctor's go through a certain amount of class time they have to be interns in a hospital and learn through practising there. They're working on real patients. So we need to do the same thing with our journalism students where they spend some time in the classroom to get their skills together, then they go out and they serve a real community. The only way they can do that is by working with and for a product that really does serve that community. I think journalism schools can work with legacy organisations to do new kinds of reporting the legacy organisation would not otherwise be able to afford.

CUNY collaborates with the NYT for The Local. What will happen with that site when the NYT pulls out by the end of the year?

We haven't decided yet. In essence they pulled out before. The Local started too ambitiously. They had a full-time staff on it that was never going to be sustainable even in their richest days. When they moved management to us they were still distributing. Because they had their name on it they required that it be New York Times like. That required a lot more effort and expense on our behalf. It was a great experiment and it taught us a lot, it involved our students with the New York Times in new ways. We now need to figure out what the next generation in this is. There's another new start-up in Brooklyn that I'm very excited about and I'm trying to help raise the funds.

What is the name of this project?

It is not out yet. We'll look at how to serve Brooklyn as a whole. Brooklyn, New York, if it were alone, would be the 6th largest city in America. It has more African-Americans than Atlanta. It is big in many, many ways and yet it is terribly underserved. And so well-respected journalist has a great idea for how to serve Brooklyn in new ways. If this gets funded and it exists it becomes a teaching hospital, in which our students can report and take part in strategic and technology and business discussions and learn the practice of new business. So I'm really hoping for that.