Journalist entrepreneur guidelines

For the last couple of years, one of the buzzwords in journalism is the "journalist entrepreneur." As a panelist said at a conference I attended a year ago, "The day that you come into the office at 8, pick up an assignment, interview people, turn in a story at 4, and go home, is gone." Today, the smart journalist is taking ownership of a story. A journalism blog, howardowens.com, offers "An outline for taking ownership of your stories" that pretty well explains what this new world is all about. He's writing primarily about online-only stories and includes some suggestions that I don't agree with (for example, notifying bloggers of your story does smack of public relations and will get you in spam files pretty quickly if you repeatedly send emails), but the outline is pretty sound.

Frankly, good reporters have been doing exactly this for years. When I was working as a journalist, I created an entirely new run that resulted in my writing a syndicated column, being called "the best reporter" of the area by the nation's most powerful business leader in that area, and publishing on it in more than 20 magazines in addition to my newspaper work. Frankly, I "owned" the beat, just as other great reporters have owned theirs.

Saturday I was at a party talking with a former journalist who was the first reporter on the scene of Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes (it was midnight on her day off, by the way). From the first, she dominated news coverage as his serial murders were uncovered. She wrote the best book on the subject (there have been several), parlayed her ownership of this story into jobs in other media, and today is the spokesperson for Milwaukee's Police Department. It's a great example of a journalist who recognized a story, and took ownership.