Here’s what you will learn:

The content for this presentation is new and based on a session I recently led for Dan Gillmor at Arizona State during a week-long bootcamp for journalism professors learning about teaching entrepreneurial endeavors. I think they were pleasantly surprised at how many of the traits of successful journo-entrepreneurs are similar to the traits that successful journalists would share.

I hope you can join us next Thursday.

On display were GeekWire and Xconomy, two startups I have written about before, which are thriving using different approaches to the seemingly same problem/opportunity. Xconomy is a local/national, operating with small staffs in a handful of cities covering technology with an emphasis on biotech, clean tech and other more “industrial” segments. GeekWire is only operating in Seattle with two journalists, one biz dev person and a handful of part-timers and freelancers. Its focus is driven by the journo-founders, Todd Bishop and John Cook, and their proven track record for covering  consumer technology topics that are important to Seattle: Microsoft, Amazon and the vibrant venture-funded and increasingly mobile startup companies that dot the landscape here. (Full disclosure: In my role at KING 5-TV, I brokered a content partnership with GeekWire.)

Frank Catalano, a digital consultant and former broadcast journalist, moderated, drawing salient observations from Curt Woodward, a writer for Xconomy, and Rebecca Lovell, Chief Business Officer for GeekWire. Among the best insights:

• 30% of GeekWire traffic is international. Traffic growth has been “stunning,” according to Lovell.
• The top two revenue sources at Xconomy are sponsorships/underwriting and events. It is not a CPM-based business model, which according to Woodward, allows journalists to feel they have to chase “clickbait.”
• Lovell, who has an MBA and is the former executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, said she worries about feeding John’s and Todd’s families and is constantly aware of the company’s burn rate. One piece of advice she offered other startups: “Hire slow and fire fast.”
• Both startups are thinking beyond content in searching for ways to serve their communities – and make money. Events are the top example, here. As Lovell tweeted later, “there’s a big difference between creating value and making $. focus on the 1st, the 2nd follows.”

Catalano  ended the session perfectly, drawing on an essay he wrote some 20 years ago, titled: “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Airwaves.”

Basically, thinking about the issues in 1992 and comparing them to the issues of 2012 … even though the form may change, there will always be people driven by curiosity who will want to know more about what’s going on, and have a passion for explaining it to others.

And people who want to receive that explanation, creating a market that can support innovative startups like Xconomy and GeekWire (among many others).

Resist starting: “Just get going.” It’s a piece of advice I’ve heard and personally doled out at conferences and training sessions for would-be entrepreneurs.  Heck, I probably said this to the audience in Portland just last week. It seems so simple that in order to create something, one must first get started on the creation process. Not so, according to Cal Newport, whose post on Lifehacker this weekend sparked an interesting conversation on Quora and forced many entrepreneurs to consider whether they started too soon (or not soon enough).

I think an instinct for getting started cripples your chance at long-term success. And I suggest that, on the contrary, you should develop rigorous thresholds that any pursuit must overcome before it can induce action.

Newport’s point is really that aspiring entrepreneurs should be careful to not start too soon, not that they shouldn’t ever start. His advice: “Spend lots of time learning about different pursuits, but put off action until an idea begins to haunt your daydreams and refuses to be dislodged from your aspirational psyche. Then, and only then, should you reluctantly take that first step, one of what’s sure to be many, many more before you get to where you want.”

Fail early, fail often: The notion of failure is often discussed in entrepreneurial circles and the acceptance of failure, even the pursuit of it, has become de rigeur. ““Failure is inevitable; 
it happens all the time 
in a complex economy,” says Tim Harford, author of Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

But just how comfortable should one be with the possibility of failure? During a discussion about entrepreneurial journalism a couple of weeks ago at Arizona State University, Dan Gillmor suggested that being too comfortable with failure might actually be a liability, not a strength. Citing a blog post by Dave Winer, Embracing failure is a good way to fail, Gillmor said that having a full-force faith in one’s idea is a powerful agent and one that should be cultivated.

Believing that your idea will succeed, no matter the odds, is certainly how many entrepreneurs have succeeded. But it’s also how many failed. I think what’s most important is to learn from failure, and try to “fail forward” if at all possible. Embracing failure is only necessary once you’ve actually failed since you’ll have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get on with your next idea. Just don’t start too soon.

Becky Dickerson is the editor and publisher of The Community Current in tiny St. John, Wash. We “met” when Dickerson spoke up in the first of two sessions I did about entrepreneurial journalism at the conference and offered a quick version of her story: She started a community newspaper 17 years ago and serves 1,000 homes with a 24-page tabloid that prints every six weeks. (She was kind enough to include a copy of the paper with her letter.)

The town had been without a newspaper for 20 years when Dickerson decided to go into the business of news armed with a journalism degree and an affection for the town of St. John, which she calls “amazing.” (Her husband Todd runs the family farm.) She started the business with a simple letter to businesses asking them to advertise and a credit card to charge her printing expenses.

I spend most of my time talking about shiny new digital startups and the transformation of news in the digital age. But the basic principles that decide whether those businesses work or not are the same that Dickerson used. She met a need in the market and has been rewarded with a career as editor and publisher. While I’ve never visited St. John, I have to believe the community is stronger and much better informed because of her efforts. I wish I had met her in time to include her story in my new book.

Congratulations, Becky. And thanks for the letter.

I need to thank many people for helping me turn this book into reality. Jane Harrigan, my editor, and Charisse Kiino, my publisher, helped drive this project and make it great. Jeff Jarvis wrote a fantastic introduction and Mike Orren  supplied and annotated the original business plan for Pegasus News. An invaluable resource.

The book is available at the CQPress website where, if you are a college professor, you can request a review copy. It is also available on Amazon.com (where the shipping is cheaper than buying from CQPress) and will be available on Kindle and other e-book forms soon.

I will be taking part in two sessions tomorrow: Ethics for Entrepreneurs, a panel discussion, at 10:45 a.m. and How to Build What’s Next for News, a solo presentation, at 2:30 p.m.

Fresh of another amazing experience at the Online News Association’s annual conference, it will interesting to compare the content and the experience of the two conferences. Several ONAers are doing the double and are here in New Orleans this week, including Andy Carvin, who will be kicking the day off with a super session tomorrow at 9 a.m.

I’m also happy that Jane Harrigan, the awesome editor of my new book, will be there, too. After reading about many of the people on the agenda through draft, first edit, second edit, and on and on, she’s excited to see some of them in real life.

And, after working with Jane on two books over the past few years, I’m excited to meet her for the first time IRL, too!

10:00 a.m. Welcome / Introductions
An overview of how local news startups are expanding
Jan Schaffer, J-Lab director

10:10 – 10:45 a.m. Long-Livers Live to Tell
Secrets of surviving more than 5 years.
Melissa Bailey, Managing Editor, NewHavenIndependent.org
Debbie Galant, Founder, BaristaNet.com

10:45 to 11 a..m. Break

11 – 11:45 a.m. Expanding to Nearby Communities
When do you expand to satellite site?
Cory Bergman, Founder, Next Door Media
David Boraks, Founder, DavidsonNews.net

11:45 – 12:15 p.m. Creating Formal Networks
Making smaller efforts have a larger impact
Debbie Galant, Authentically Local network
Ross Catrow, Publisher, RVANews.com and Richmond Ad Network
Mark Briggs, Director, Digital Media, KING 5, Author, Entrepreneurial Journalism

12:30 – 1:30 p.m. Luncheon Speaker
Is the Vermont Journalism Trust a national model?
William Schubart, Founder, Vermont Journalism Trust, parent of VtDigger.org

Schubart was founder and president of Philo Records recording company, and later Resolution, a media-manufacturing facility and e-commerce services partner for major media companies including the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, National Geographic, USNews, The History Channel, Bloomberg, The Nature Conservancy and Sesame Street. He is also a commentator for Vermont Public Radio.

1:30-2:15 p.m. New Twists in Collaboration
Topic collaboration: Erich Schwartzel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette business reporter, project leader of Pipeline
Public Media Collaboration: Chris Satullo, Executive Director, News and Civic Dialogue WHYY’s Newsworks.org

2:15 – 3:15 p.m. Emerging Revenue Stream
Developing revenues from training, events, consulting, syndication
Joe Bergantino, New England Center for Investigative Reporting – Syndicating       Content
Nicole Hollway, General Manager, St. Louis Beacon – “Spadvertising,” Events
Mark Miller, Editor, Texas Tribune – Events, Corporate Sponsorships

3:15  p.m. Break

3:30 –  4 p.m. Rules of the Road: Emerging Ethics for Entrepreneurial News Startups

Scott Rosenberg, founder, Media Bugs, Author of new J-Lab publication:      ”Rules of the Road: Navigating the New    Ethics of Local Journalism.”

The first bite comes from Jeff Jarvis, who wrote an awesome forward for the book. He did a great job of setting the stage, including the following passage:

The opportunities are indeed endless. That is why I am a cockeyed optimist about the future of news. There is more demand for and interest in news than ever. We have more ways to gather, analyze, and distribute news than we ever could have imagined before the Internet. We have new ways to listen to the public, so we can serve them better. We have new efficiencies to exploit.

But most important, we have entrepreneurs and journalists who have the courage to try to build the future of news. And now, thanks to this book, they have a plan.

Amen, brother.

Knapp, who I had the pleasure of working with at the Poynter Institute in Jan., has gone from freelance to Facebook to founder. It’s a compelling example of a news entrepreneur identifying a need and working hard to fill it. For example, the need to cover local elections with urgency that digital journalism allows – and demands. From the News Frontier piece:

Even though Knapp began posting just a few months ago, she’s already made a name for the site with a couple of scoops. She broke the story of a Republican challenger in the Princeton mayoral campaign. “It was literally like my second post,” she says. Knapp kept her edge through the primaries: “None of the other papers had the results right away.”

Another great piece of this story is Knapp’s involvement with the New Jersey Hyperlocal News Association which provides support and networking for the state’s local news startups. I can picture a day when most states have such an organization, culminating in the annual hyperlocal news association conference. (Not that anyone needs another conference to go to, of course.)

Read the entire Planet Princeton profile at the News Frontier site.

Today’s topic is The Daily Dot, a site that launched yesterday with an aim of covering the social communities on YouTube, Reddit and the rest as if they were your hometown and The Daily Dot was your hometown newspaper. It is an innovative concept and the founders certainly have the chops to pull it off. Forbes writer Tomio Geron notes it may be a bit of stretch, but “it is true that most of these communities have not been covered much at all–outside of maybe academia.”

The Daily Dot is planning beat coverage of online communities such as Etsy, Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube and even 4chan. The site will also attempt to cover Twitter, Facebook and Google like communities which I think will be more difficult, especially the latter two. As ReadWriteWeb senior writer Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, the site is using some interesting data mining techniques to assist in its coverage. So maybe they will find a way to efficiently discover signal among the noise.

The Austin-based startup has a staff of 25 (about half work virtually) and is funded by less than $600,000 in friends and family financing. It appears to be aiming for a traditional advertising revenue as its business model. CEO Nick White, a former VP with Sandusky Newspapers, told Kirkpatrick that the goal is to master “the art of social web community data analysis” and use it to “build a leading, profitable media organization.” The Dotcould then offer it as a service for other companies.

A diversified revenue model is highly recommended, for The Daily Dot or any other news startup. The online advertising market has simply become too crowded. Considering the popularity of the sites the Dot plans to cover, it appears to have found an audience-attracting topic area. Executing the vision day in and day out is the next challenge, for building a sustainable audience is no easy task, even if you have launch articles on Mashable and GigaOm.