Entrepreneurship on rails

“Maybe my efforts were imperfect in the end, but I ultimately learned a lot about publishing in the process, lessons I was able to take elsewhere.”

Recently I’ve been looking back at some of my earliest posts on ShortFormBlog, my first strike-out-on-my-own site. And reading back reminds me of all the sacrifices that I made to get it online.

I built it in part because I’d lost my job at the time at Link, a late, great weekday news product published by The Virginian-Pilot. One of the great things about Link was that it actively ignored long-form prose, instead going for chunked-up blurbs that were cut down from longer stories published by the wires and the Pilot. Many of the free daily newspapers that did stuff like it, like Red Eye and Express, had some of these elements, but Link essentially banished lengthy prose entirely — a bold move at the time.

Over time, I came to find it an important idea that more journalists needed to embrace. So when Link shut down during the 2008 recession, I was desperate to keep the threads of that idea alive somehow. That was what led me to create ShortFormBlog.

I fought really hard for this concept — and it led me to take a lot of risks. During the period I was laid off, I made the decision to buy a new laptop with my severance money after my old one started showing its age in unbearable ways — despite only having a strong hunch that I would likely get hired for my next job. (I did get hired; the blog, obviously, kept going.) I tried to bend platforms like Tumblr to my whims. I worked on weird experiments using tools like RebelMouse just to see if I could take this idea further.

And at least once, I put myself in great personal danger because I was afraid of losing my hard work. (And after it happened, I brushed the whole thing off with a cat meme!)

Maybe my efforts were imperfect in the end, but I ultimately learned a lot about publishing in the process, lessons I was able to take elsewhere. And I think that it gave me an entrepreneurial spirit that I try to keep with the work I do — even if, in the end, it’s just a side project.

Throughout 2020, with the pandemic leading to closures, shutdowns, and mass layoffs in journalism, a lot more people are out on their own, in a similar position to where I was at the start of 2009. They’re sticking their necks out in ways not dissimilar to the way I once did, with the added benefit of lots more resources to pull it off — tools like Patreon, Substack, and Gumroad. Now, it’s even possible to buy liability insurance for your work, in case your online work leads to legal trouble.

To me, it wasn’t just about promoting the big idea, but about keeping it alive. It was a lot harder back then when I turned the site online in a bagel shop on the first of January 2009. In much the same way as Pets.com had to build its own server rooms because the cloud didn’t exist, the infrastructure for supporting what I was doing wasn’t there at the time. That meant I was often stuck guessing.

That infrastructure is here now. And I hope the people who find themselves in a similar place at the start of 2021 use this moment to take advantage of those big journalistic ideas, complete with the battle scars that they’ll get along the way.

Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter.

Recently I’ve been looking back at some of my earliest posts on ShortFormBlog, my first strike-out-on-my-own site. And reading back reminds me of all the sacrifices that I made to get it online.

I built it in part because I’d lost my job at the time at Link, a late, great weekday news product published by The Virginian-Pilot. One of the great things about Link was that it actively ignored long-form prose, instead going for chunked-up blurbs that were cut down from longer stories published by the wires and the Pilot. Many of the free daily newspapers that did stuff like it, like Red Eye and Express, had some of these elements, but Link essentially banished lengthy prose entirely — a bold move at the time.

Over time, I came to find it an important idea that more journalists needed to embrace. So when Link shut down during the 2008 recession, I was desperate to keep the threads of that idea alive somehow. That was what led me to create ShortFormBlog.

I fought really hard for this concept — and it led me to take a lot of risks. During the period I was laid off, I made the decision to buy a new laptop with my severance money after my old one started showing its age in unbearable ways — despite only having a strong hunch that I would likely get hired for my next job. (I did get hired; the blog, obviously, kept going.) I tried to bend platforms like Tumblr to my whims. I worked on weird experiments using tools like RebelMouse just to see if I could take this idea further.

And at least once, I put myself in great personal danger because I was afraid of losing my hard work. (And after it happened, I brushed the whole thing off with a cat meme!)

Maybe my efforts were imperfect in the end, but I ultimately learned a lot about publishing in the process, lessons I was able to take elsewhere. And I think that it gave me an entrepreneurial spirit that I try to keep with the work I do — even if, in the end, it’s just a side project.

Throughout 2020, with the pandemic leading to closures, shutdowns, and mass layoffs in journalism, a lot more people are out on their own, in a similar position to where I was at the start of 2009. They’re sticking their necks out in ways not dissimilar to the way I once did, with the added benefit of lots more resources to pull it off — tools like Patreon, Substack, and Gumroad. Now, it’s even possible to buy liability insurance for your work, in case your online work leads to legal trouble.

To me, it wasn’t just about promoting the big idea, but about keeping it alive. It was a lot harder back then when I turned the site online in a bagel shop on the first of January 2009. In much the same way as Pets.com had to build its own server rooms because the cloud didn’t exist, the infrastructure for supporting what I was doing wasn’t there at the time. That meant I was often stuck guessing.

That infrastructure is here now. And I hope the people who find themselves in a similar place at the start of 2021 use this moment to take advantage of those big journalistic ideas, complete with the battle scars that they’ll get along the way.

Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter.

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

Nikki Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Cory Haik   Be essential

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

An Xiao Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers