As is always the case at the end of semester, I am looking at how I can reshape my courses. I am currently considering my post graduate online course and I have had a thought: Why not have students develop their own news website. By this I don’t just mean create and website and whack up some stories – I mean let them run wild and perhaps create the business model of the future. Journalists as entrepreneurs – could this be the saviour of our industry?
Paul Bradshaw has just begun running a whole Masters program on exactly this and I found this interesting site, “Newspaper in a box”, a step-by-step guide to creating an independent news website from scratch. This idea fits with so much of the evidence suggesting that hyperlocal being the future. And hyperlocal is generally started by the small independents not the big players.
So if it’s being talked about, then how exactly do I do it? What skills do they need? And what should I expect from them?
