Doing good business and quality journalism? Entrepreneurial journalism and the debates on the future of news media

Abstract

As journalism finds itself in a process of accelerated transformations, Internet seems to be a place where both the reproduction of traditional models and a wide array of journalistic and business models experimentations happen at the same time. Here, at the intersection of changes in news models, job definitions and in career trajectories, the figure of the “entrepreneurial journalist” (BRIGGS, 2011) resurfaced and gradually gained in popularity over the last years in discourses celebrating innovation, flexibility and risk-taking. In this context, how can the figures of the journalist and the entrepreneur co-exist whereas commercial and journalistic activities have been historically strongly separated? How can business development be compatible with independent and objective news gathering when it is done by the same person? How do the notions of independent news writing and respect for the public interest – all strong elements of the journalistic ethics discourses – are negotiated by these actors? In this paper, we wish to explore these issues, first by contextualizing the rise of entrepreneurial journalism before presenting findings of an exploratory study about the ways the links between entrepreneurial and journalistic imperatives have been thought and presented in the existing journalistic literature in France and United States of America.