Entrepreneurship is turning out to be a key skill for having a successful journalism career -- and indeed, for building the future of journalism. In the last few years, some U.S. journalism schools have begun adding courses and projects designed to impart the skills and mindset for entrepreneurship. What's working, and what still needs to be done? A recent scholarly article outlines some successes, obstacles, and opportunities.

Michelle Barrett Ferrier has strong roots in both community media entrepreneurship and academia. She's the Associate Dean of Innovation, Research and Creative Activity at the Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University -- and she's also the founder and publisher of Locally Grown News. Previously, she managed online community hubs for the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Ferrier's article, Media Entrepreneurship: Curriculum Development and Faculty Perceptions of What Students Should Know, appears in the September 2013 edition of Journalism and Mass Communication Educator (subscription required).

In addition to a literature review, Ferrier's research draws on discussions among 15 educators who gathered in January 2012 for the inaugural Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute -- a program that provides an experiential learning environment to teach educators how to prepare and teach a course in journalism entrepreneurship.

Here are a few highlights from Ferrier's research that may have particular relevance to grooming tomorrow's journalists for media entrepreneurship, including at the community level:

Opportunity: Connect with local entrepreneurs. Most journalism professors lack significant entrepreneurial experience of any kind. This presents a challenge for teaching entrepreneurship. Many of the professors Ferrier interviewed reached out to their local entrepreneurial community either by team-teaching the course with an entrepreneur or bringing speakers into the classroom.

"Some faculty created field trips to local startups and business meetups. In addition, several faculty created individual or class projects as student deliverables and brought in industry professionals to hear student project pitches," she noted. For example, one professor worked with a local entrepreneurial launchpad that partnered with the school to develop a syllabus and teach the class.

Another faculty member, based in the Bay Area, leveraged personal connections with the rich entrepreneurial scene in the San Francisco Bay area to develop a course. "An advantage I had, being from the Bay area, was access to people who will come in virtually or in person," this instructor told Ferrier. "For example, we held a Google Hangout with [Craiglist founder] Craig Newmark. He was kind of ideal -- he demonstrated that someone who doesn't start out as an entrepreneur can become one."

Challenge: It may not count toward tenure. Academic careers are shaped largely by tenure requirements -- which can run counter to effective teaching of media entrepreneurship.

One professor told Ferrier: "We should be doing more as faculty to teach workshops and engage in other outside activities with the entrepreneurship community. We love that -- but in the university structure none of that counts toward tenure. If you are making this your primary focus for the semester, you've got to balance it with what else is going to get you credit in your tenure file. That's probably my biggest constraint: wanting to throw myself into it wholeheartedly, knowing that some of the less soul-fulfilling expectations that are still important for gaining tenure will chip away at the time I can invest in this."

Similarly, Ferrier observed that some faculty "fear that the experiential products that they created with students -- such as hyperlocal online news sites, regional niche hubs, or apps that lived beyond one semester -- are not valued as part of promotion and tenure criteria."

Recommendations. Ferrier suggests three ways that administrators and faculty could create a better environment for teaching media entrepreneurship:

1. Provide sufficient time and resources to learn the entrepreneurial landscape. Developing a successful media entrepreneurship class requires journalism, technology and business resources. Much of this comes down to additional funding: for faculty travel to network with media entrepreneurs, to bring in speakers, and for team teaching. It also means allowing for time to develop local entrepreneurship networks and other resources.
2. Nurture and support faculty in their experimentation. This gets to obstacles created by tenure requirements. Ferrier noted: "Some faculty spoke of 'research forgiveness,' and that creative projects such as startups need to hold more value within the promotion and tenure process. Others were concerned about course evaluations and the consequences on tenure and promotion decisions of piloting new courses. Administrators have a role in supporting innovation within the academy and the faculty who are willing to engage in it."
3. Cultivate a culture of failure with students. When structured appropriately, students can learn from their failures. Schools can create environments where creativity and innovation are not relegated to one class, but perhaps infused throughout the curriculum.