In early 2012, just about a year ago, the Journalism Accelerator invited a half-dozen people with a range of unique roles in the news production mix, to identify the most crucial challenges facing publishers at that moment in time. No enormous surprise: Money was the top concern. More specifically, a collective sense emerged that publishers could benefit from a road map of the many small steps needed to increase and stabilize revenue across the industry.

As 2012 drew to a close, we once more turned to these insightful people, asking each to share what he or she learned over the course of this chapter in the evolving story of journalism. We also asked a number of other leaders across the industry to share what they learned in 2012.

Our "think group" included: David Boardman, executive editor of the Seattle Times; Anne Galloway, founder and editor of VTDigger.org; Kevin Davis, CEO of the Investigative News Network; Block by Block founder and Knight Community Information Challenge Circuit Rider Michele McLellan; policy expert-turned-local-publisher Steven Waldman; business coach Joe Michaud; and The Patterson Foundation's New Media Initiative Manager Janet Coats together identified a number of cultural, practical and information-based obstacles publishers faced at that point on the path to sustainability.

"We're not there yet," said Galloway, publisher VTDigger.org, the independent investigative news organization covering Vermont. But for her, 2012 was a year of gaining practical knowledge about raising revenue -- one of the specific publisher needs identified by our think group earlier in the year.

VTDigger broke a lot of ground as a business in 2012: Revenue almost doubled, staff increased by 30 percent, and sponsorships jumped. Galloway filed the non-profit's first 990 (tax forms) and held her first accounting review. She said she learned a number of specific skills in 2012:

• How to motivate salespeople. "It really is money," she said. "We had to restructure the compensation system." She also learned how to persuade reluctant board members to make a change.
• How to know what financial information she needs, and get it. "It's a bit tricky. The office manager knows the cash flow, and bookkeepers care about what happened in the past, not the future. My eye needs to be on both."
• How to identify a specific need, in her case, increasing philanthropy. "I'm not sure I know how to make the ask effectively. We're going to have to get more organized with donors."

Waldman also picked up a lot of practical publisher knowledge this year. He began 2012 leading policy discussions at major journalism schools around the country, spent much of the year trying to raise funds for a new Brooklyn community news organization, then started The Brooklyn Game when the Nets debuted as Brooklyn's pro basketball team this fall. The Game has given him first-hand experience in the local news business.

"It's very tough making a living on ads," he said. "The ad rates on the networks are just so low." And vetting new technology as a way to increase revenue has proved challenging. "Whether it's Twitter or Instagram, FourSquare, Groupon -- each promises to provide a new way for people to reach customers or readers. But so far none of them have provided a whole lot of help on the revenue side."

Business training, culture changing

For independent news publishers, training opportunities sharpened their focus in 2012. Block by Block held its final business training known as "Super Camp" after three years guiding community publishers through very basic business skills. Block by Block founder McLellan said small news publishers aren't losing passion for their work, but gaining survival skills.

"I'd say 2010 was all about their passion for news, and for their communities. In 2011, I think they were starting to get practical -- there was this recognition that you're doing God's work but that doesn't mean the money follows. 2012 has been a lot about actually becoming proficient, or trying to become proficient, at business," she said.

Block by Block, the Investigative News Network and KDMC started a new training program in the fall: "Community Journalism Executive Training." INN leader Davis said CJET helped publishers deepen and broaden their business understanding -- for example, he said, realizing it takes investment to earn revenue. "While there was a recognition at the beginning of 2012 that they needed revenue, there wasn't necessarily the skill set internally and the recognition of the cost of pursuing revenue," he said.

Business coach Michaud said 2012 saw non-profits shift their business thinking in profound ways. At the beginning of the year "non-profits were totally focused on grants. That was going to be their entire sustainability model," Michaud said. "By the time we got to CJET, there were people in the room whose thinking had evolved. Non-profit is a tax status, not a business model."

A major takeaway for trainers in 2012: Survival skills can be taught. "This is not some kind of arcane knowledge out in the crazy digital world that nobody has figured out," said Coats, The Patterson Foundation's New Media Initiative Manager, who helped guide Super Camp and CJET. "There are tried-and-true methods and skills. We've seen in the course of this year that it can make the difference for some publishers between making it and not making it."

Legacy learnings

Coats helps legacy newspapers and public media organizations while also breaking new ground to support startup publishers. She said 2012 confirmed for her that "the sustainability issue really is the same set of problems no matter your model or your size." But bigger news organizations take some different tactics. For example, pay walls swept legacy publishing in 2012.

Despite the flurry of virtual walls, Seattle Times Executive Editor Boardman said it's clear digital subscriptions are not a "magic bullet" offering a single source solution. But he said pay wall experiments did help demonstrate that some consumers will pay more for news.

"I think the biggest thing that's happened in 2012 is the emergence of a very clear direction for our industry in that regard. I think we all see that the successful and ultimate business model is going to rely far more heavily on the consumers of news and information paying a lot more for it. Along with that, we need to come up with effective advertising revenue and other streams of revenue, because that consumer pay is not going to entirely replace what we've lost in print advertising," he said.

Another major change in legacy operations: the emergence of a major market three-day-a-week publication replacing a daily. Boardman is not convinced that is a business model to follow.

"The three-day-a-week model has the stench of erosion and contraction and failure and surrender. I'm optimistic we can evolve to something that feels far more proactive and logical and progressive," Boardman said.

He saw partnerships emerge in 2012 as a better trend to follow, in part because readership, although much may be unpaid, is growing. "All sorts of companies want to take good advantage of the enormous audiences we can still provide for them. And they can offer us slices of their revenue. I think we all realize it's all about slices of revenue now. It's all about lots of different streams versus the big fire hose that print advertising represented for so long."

Coats agrees. "If there's something to watch over the next 18 months to two years, it's what happens around partnering. I think people are starting to realize that you really can't do it all on your own. True partnership relationships that are focused on: How do you leverage the strengths of one organization and the strengths of another organization to create something that is more than the sum of the parts?"

A missing piece

Starting a startup in 2012, Steven Waldman says he found a business model missing. For-profit investors just look at the bottom line, he learned, while non-profit donors consider temporary community needs. "I come away from [the] year thinking that there's a missing piece to the puzzle. That there needs to be financial institutions or funds or strategies that create low-profit but sustainable local media companies," he said. "There's only so long you can go on enthusiasm before money needs to kick in."

Consultant and coach Michaud sees revenue as just one still-elusive piece. He predicts that in 10 or 20 years publishers will look back on 2012 as a chaotic time. "The way I look at the chaos isn't, 'How are we going to pay for this,' but, 'What is the role of the journalist in the community?'"

On to 2013

Boardman agreed that the "ultimate goal" now, from both a journalistic and business perspective, is real engagement. And from new consumer commitments to subscriptions, to new newsroom practices, he sees it "really happening." Our "think group" shared a sense of optimism for the future of news, with evidence of specific new business skills among publishers, engagement awareness rising among legacy journalists, increasing audiences and emerging knowledge of how to structure success.

But as the industry continues to face rapid change, the gains of 2012 are layered with some uncertainty and concern. For example, Coats said she sees too little use of mobile among community news publishers. Kevin Davis said the real question in his mind is whether, when the turbulence settles, there will be enough news outlets to make a difference.

"If only the big players survive, I don't believe there is going to be enough. We need to make sure there are success stories at every level, that the business models support local and community-based journalism, not just national," he said.

What might be the big question in 2013? Michele McLellan laughs. "What am I going to find out I didn't know? Given the speed of continued change, there's likely to be plenty of new knowledge to go around."

Building off these lessons, and your own insights from the year now gone by, what do you want to learn in 2013? What specific things are you excited to try?

Emily Harris is editorial director of the Journalism Accelerator, a website designed to help journalism find more financial sustainability. She comes from public broadcasting; Harris reported for National Public Radio from Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq and Washington, D.C., and shared in NPR's 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Iraq. She has produced and reported for many radio and television programs, including Marketplace, NOW with Bill Moyers, Which Way, LA? and Fox News. She spent a year at Stanford as a Knight Journalism Fellow and helped launch and hosted the award-winning public affairs program Think Out Loud on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Journalism Accelerator.

The Journalism Accelerator is a forum connecting the field of news and information with outside areas of expertise to enrich the new media news ecology.

The Journalism Accelerator's Emily Harris talked with Mitchell about the business landscape minority journalists face, the particulars of this journalism business training program, and how to get involved in 2013. Here's an edited transcript of the interview.

q&a

How would you describe the program?

Doug Mitchell: I call it a version of a Google scrape. We go through the minority journalist associations, Asian, black, Hispanic, Native American, lesbian and gay , and look for journalists, whether current or former, who have started their own company or have the idea that they want to start their own company. We identify who they are, have them apply through a somewhat rigorous process, select them as fellows, and then we have a startup camp.

Last year, for example, we did a two-and-a-half day startup camp in Las Vegas, and out of that the participants, all 14 of them, pitched for grants of $10,000. There were three individual grants of $10,000. They had to get judged by investors and people who have successful startup companies, and there was a crowdsourced vote.

What do you look for in the fellows that you accept?

Mitchell: Well, first of all, we believe that we're solving a problem. If you look on the covers of almost all magazines, you rarely see people of color. We're looking for people to be CEOs, founders. People who have ideas, who want to start companies, but don't know how. We provide educational opportunities, support, community building, relationship building, and creating an ecosystem in which the people that want to do something and lead the company, are at least around other people who have done such.

Do people have to have a lot of experience or no experience at all? What works?

Mitchell: The first year, if you had no experience, that was fine. But we learned we can't do that. It's not money well spent. So we made it harder to get in the program, and found people who had actually started a company, were in the process of trying to grow their company, had relationships with people who were investors, etc., but still didn't quite really understand what it is they needed to be saying and who's out there they should be pitching to. The second year we raised the bar. Going into 2013, our fourth year, we're looking at three startup camps. One at NABJ, one at NAHA and the other at the Online News Association conference, We're going to charge a $30 pre-registration fee, and we're actually going to have participants build something in front of us -- hands on, actually creating something on the spot. Get them judged, get them set, and then we'll have people competing for money.

What are they going to build?

Mitchell: They can build their company. They could come up with an idea. Another part of what we're going to roll out in 2013 is a monthly webinar series. We'll start with the mentors that we've been working with pretty much since day one, a guy named Kaizer Campwala, who now works for Stitcher Radio. He's worked on the business side of a couple of startups. He'll talk about how to put a pitch deck together. Another guy runs digital news ventures through the Media Development Loan Fund. His name is Syed Karim. He came up to me at the Online News Conference in San Francisco and said, "I have money. I'm looking to invest." I figured if he has money he's looking to invest, we should be the conduit to helping him find those people who are looking for money. He'll do a webinar. And Harry Lin, who is the executive in residence at Idealab, will talk about entrepreneurship and such. By doing this from January into the summer, those who are truly interested in what we're doing will be the ones who want to pay the $30, build something in front of us, and compete for a seed grant. We need people who are committed to putting their own skin in the game. We provide an opportunity for them to get identified. The judges decide who moves to the next round, and then there's the competition for the money.

What's the fellowship part this year?

Mitchell: This is all sort of preliminary, but if the fellows are selected during the camp or toward the end of the camp, they'll also have a mentor. They'll get coaching through the process of competition for the seed grant money. The three fellows that were awarded $10,000 this past year have now moved into a business accelerator called the National Minority Angel Network. It's like handing a baton to the next runner in the relay. We found them, groomed them, got them awarded, got them set into a particular position in business development. Now they're handed over to the next person who's running the race, which is a higher level of business development and coaching. That's also part of what we're looking at doing this year; once people get identified and they're awarded seed grant money, we hand them to the National Minority Angel Network, and they move onto another part of the scale.

Does the startup have to have any relationship to journalism?

Mitchell: They're journalists, but they're not necessarily journalism startups. The requirement is that they are either a current or former journalist. Mostly they're members of the minority journalist associations. Some of them are pitching content; some of them are pitching technology. Ultimately, it always does relate to journalism. Because if you go into an ecosystem that is full of journalists, guess what you're going to get? But what we're looking for is scalable businesses. Most investors do not want to spend money on journalism. We all know this. They think it's an expensive hobby. And so they're not going to put any money into it because they won't get any return on their investment; they don't think so anyway. I've managed to convince a couple of people to have a process in which we develop people who maybe have an arm that is content and it's not for profit, and then they have a section that is maybe online education or it's an app. We're still trying to figure out how we get people to fund content.

What are the big, specific obstacles faced by the people you see?

Mitchell: We are not business people. You know, back in the siloed days, which were not that long ago, we were the journalists; we told the stories. However they paid for it is however those people paid for it. Now we have to think: How much does that really cost? Where do we spend our money? While the cost to entry has come down a lot, it still costs money to do something. So we all have to become better educated in how businesses work. We don't have to go all-in. But I think it's very important for journalists today going forward to have a real understanding of how you take an idea from conception to development to public. And second, the big problem is the percent of investment money that goes to people of color. Why are we not in the mix? Why are we not in the network? Do we need to develop our own networks? Where are the people of color who have access to capital, and do they know about the journalists trying to start companies? It's a large festering issue that we're trying to take a section of it and solve.

Do you do market assessments?

Mitchell: That's another problem -- everybody thinks their idea is the only idea that ever existed. But chances are somebody else is doing that too. Most people in this realm have never done any market assessment. They don't know who their competition is. They don't know who's out there. They don't know what other people are doing. We want to demystify the process to entrepreneurship.

What's the rough calendar for people who are interested?

Mitchell: The webinars are launching next month, January. We'll do a series of five, six webinars, as part of the runway to the first startup camp, which I think is the last week of July. Before that, we will use every opportunity to say we're going to be doing these projects, if you're members of the association or not, because we're going to sprinkle it around everywhere: Come to the conference, $30 registration fee, that way we know you're serious. And here's what we're going to offer, and we'll have some bullet points on coaching, mentoring, pitching, product development -- you'll do all that and more over a two-day period. And then, toward the end, you'll get an opportunity to pitch to judges to be part of a competition for $10,000.

What do you expect people to do with $10,000?

Mitchell: Most of them don't have $10. So $10,000 means they can probably use it to get a very nicely designed website. When they move to the next round of business development, that's not free. So they can use that to defray the costs of their next round. After $10,000 it moves to a six- and seven-figure competition. These people are different in some ways from the regular journalists who are trying to get a job in a newsroom. These are people who left, who are not going back. And they want to do their own thing. And especially people of color need to be supported in this area.

Emily Harris is editorial director of the Journalism Accelerator, a website designed to help journalism find more financial sustainability. She comes from public broadcasting; Harris reported for National Public Radio from Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq and Washington, D.C., and shared in NPR's 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Iraq. She has produced and reported for many radio and television programs, including Marketplace, NOW with Bill Moyers, Which Way, LA? and Fox News. She spent a year at Stanford as a Knight Journalism Fellow and helped launch and hosted the award-winning public affairs program Think Out Loud on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Journalism Accelerator.

The Journalism Accelerator is a forum connecting the field of news and information with outside areas of expertise to enrich the new media news ecology.

Organized in an easy-access index, the collection is designed to help journalists, publishers and others who are looking to find new, sustainable ways to do business. Since its inception 15 months ago, it has grown to more than 300 resources -- practical reporting tools, ideas for building community, advertising tips, databases, business models, industry background papers, training opportunities, experiments to watch, organizations to know and more.

Check out the infographic below, dissecting the way these resources are organized and how to find quickly what is important to you. (Click the image for a larger version.)

Want more? See the new JA guide to getting the most out of the overall collection.

Emily Harris is editorial director of the Journalism Accelerator, a website designed to help journalism find more financial sustainability. She comes from public broadcasting; Harris reported for National Public Radio from Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq and Washington, D.C., and shared in NPR's 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Iraq. She has produced and reported for many radio and television programs, including Marketplace, NOW with Bill Moyers, Which Way, LA? and Fox News. She spent a year at Stanford as a Knight Journalism Fellow and helped launch and hosted the award-winning public affairs program Think Out Loud on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

You can take advantage of what CJET participants learned -- takeaways, insights and tips have been compiled by the Journalism Accelerator, including downloadable templates and presentations.

All eyes on the exit strategy

"What, really, is your exit strategy?" Rusty Coats, who designed the CJET curriculum, asked at the first working session of the first training day. "If you have no exit strategy, you have no ability to define success. If you don't have your eye on where this is going, you don't know where you are."

Many publishers figured "exit strategy" meant calling it quits. Many had not considered how they might strategically end the business they had begun.

"Besides turning off the site?" replied Jesus Sanchez, who covers several Los Angeles neighborhoods on his site, The Eastsider LA.

"Yeah, we give up," said Trevor Aaronson, co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

"A disaster strategy. The cliff," said Brent Gardner Smith of Aspen Journalism.

"To me [exit strategy] means sort of like a DNR, do not resuscitate strategy." said 100 Reporters founder Diana Jean Schemo. "I came here seeking a survival strategy."

Survive, sustain, sell?

For some CJET participants, focusing on an exit strategy felt just plain wrong.

"I disagree profoundly that the notion of exit strategy is important," said Lance Knobel, one of three founders of the independent California news site Berkeleyside.

Knobel brings a background in economics, strategy and management, as well as journalism, to the local news organization. He said thinking about an exit strategy may be fine for venture capitalists, but he believes it's "exactly the wrong thing" to consider if you are an entrepreneur seeking to build a lasting institution. "I actually think is a big negative, a really dangerous thing," Knobel said. "Energies and concentration needs to be on how do we get this to a really durable sustainable state?"

Berkeleyside is successful by many counts. Unique monthly visitors periodically come in higher than the city's population; events sometimes beat even the organizers' expectations; and other media turn to Berkeleyside staff as experts on local issues. But Knobel said it's not yet clearly sustainable -- to the point the founders could depart and the site would carry on.

Neither is Yellowstone Gate, a site covering the national park and the five communities surrounding it. Founder and editor Ruffin Prevost wants to sell Yellowstone Gate eventually, but he agrees that focusing on his exit strategy now is not important in the short- or mid-term.

"It's important to focus on that somewhat, so you know it has to be something that has real-world value," Prevost said. "If you're not doing that, it means you're probably not returning value to your readers or your advertisers."

But two years after starting the site, thinking about an exit strategy doesn't sit comfortably with him. "If you focus too much on directly monetizing that, you lose sight of the whole idea of building some community service into the model."

Brandy Tuzon Boyd, who started The Natomas Buzz to cover her community in Sacramento, said spending time developing an exit strategy is not a priority. "My priority is taking my website from a passion project to a viable business," she said. "That's really the long-term goal for me at this point."

Change 'exit' to 'legacy'

CJET curriculum creator (and small-business owner) Rusty Coats said it is never premature to plan further than your current focus. He said this business norm may feel jarring to journalists, but thinking as far out as the end can help get you where you want to go.

"I don't know a single startup business outside the indie news space that doesn't articulate its exit strategy up front," Coats said. "That sets the path for growth and helps set benchmarks for success."

He said publishers can use a different word if they want. "Substitute the words "exit strategy" with "legacy" and you get to the same place," Coats said. "It doesn't mean being bought out as much as it means evolving."

CJET participants do know where they want their organizations to go. Suzanne McBride wants AustinTalks.org, based at Columbia College Chicago and covering a nearby neighborhood, to become a model for colleges creating news sites in underserved communities. Lance Knobel wants Berkeleyside to become an "enduring institution." Teresa Wippel would be thrilled to leave MyEdmondNews in the hands of her writer son. Mark Thomas wants to take CityLimits as far down the sustainability path as he can before the next director of the organization comes in. How far is far enough? "Where you can see two years ahead, and if they do the same things you'd been doing they'd be OK," Thomas said.

Exit as opportunity

Jason Alcorn was one of the few participants in CJET whose job focuses on financials more than editorial. He is director of development and community engagement for Investigate West, a non-profit that partners with other news organizations to sell or distribute its stories. Alcorn said internal conversations about the organization's future are always put in the context of market assessment. "How do we fit in?" he asked. "We're complementary to larger investigative news non-profits, like CIR or ProPublica. So in the same breath we see a business opportunity there; we see an exit strategy, potentially."

Alcorn said this is contingency thinking -- Investigate West's intent is to succeed as a standalone news outlet. But he acknowledges some things are out of the organization's control, and broad thinking embraces that.

Ned Berke, running Brooklyn neighborhood site Sheepshead Bites, said thinking about an exit strategy led him to imagine a few different futures. "One is sell the business; one is make sure it can survive without me; or third, turn it into something larger."

And Amy Senk, founder (and chief everything) of Corona del Mar Today, said considering possible exit strategies gave her ideas for ways out beyond just shutting down.

"I was thinking I would probably just stop doing it, and I don't know, maybe find a job," she said on the last day of the CJET training. "Now I'm thinking maybe I'd merge with another paper, or another site, or maybe I would have staff writers who I could direct and I could do more of a publisher role."

A personal exit strategy

No matter the future of their organizations, many CJET publishers don't want to spend the rest of their lives as deeply involved as they are now.

"What I think is important in exit strategy is succession," said Brian Wheeler, executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow. "I'm assuming the organization will keep going, but I need a plan to make sure someone else can come in and take it over someday."

Anne Galloway of VTDigger.org agrees. Although she said on the last day of CJET she "still" hadn't developed an exit strategy, she thinks about it in terms of the next generation. It's about "building a large enough staff and infrastructure that I could step away from the role of executive director," she said. "I'm really sort of training people up and trying to raise enough money, and build our brand enough to get there."

Engaged in a huge experiment

During the CJET session when Coats asked publishers about their exit strategies, one participant asked a particularly potent question.

"The assumption is," she said, "that if we do these things you're telling us to do, the charitable world and the world of commerce will embrace us." But it felt to her -- and many in the room -- that this is an untrod path -- that community and investigative publishers are actually "engaged in a huge experiment."

Coats could only agree. And again, saw opportunity. He told everyone in the room that how they build their businesses will lay the foundation for the future of local publishing -- investigative, community, regional, non- or for-profit. "This work," he said, "begins to inform the model ... of what is possible" in building new journalism businesses in a sustainable way.

Emily Harris is editorial director of the Journalism Accelerator, a website designed to help journalism find more financial sustainability. She comes from public broadcasting; Harris reported for National Public Radio from Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq and Washington, D.C., and shared in NPR's 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Iraq. She has produced and reported for many radio and television programs, including Marketplace, NOW with Bill Moyers, Which Way, LA? and Fox News. She spent a year at Stanford as a Knight Journalism Fellow and helped launch and hosted the award-winning public affairs program Think Out Loud on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Journalism Accelerator.