Lisa Williams: Thinking Like a Startup (Fund My Media Startup, Part 6)

Next speaker: Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.com: Startups for Journalists

Placeblogger now lists over 17K sites. Lisa Williams "Every day I look at our main feed it looks more and more like a wire service, only with more LOLcats."

Journalism will survive the death of its institutions. "Most of my family is in the hi tech biz. What's happening to journos now happened to them in the late 80s. That now seems silly. We now have fewer monolithic institutions, many many more small cos."

"When you're facing the iceberg, a kayak is a lot safer than the Titanic."

"I think news biz is becoming more like hi-tech biz. Our career norms are becomeing your career norms."

"Size does not nec = significance in journalism anymore."

"Our media is consolidated and local, happens in place. But most of our problems are distributed and global. Those problems are really hard to cover with the newsroom model. We have very low messaging capacity."

"The problem with trying to explain distributed problems with traditional story-focused journalism it that it's gotten easier for powers that be to refute with a guy at the podium saying "this is just an isolated incident."

tgdavidson tweeted: @lisawilliams: "Journalism is like a lot of antibiotics: The powerful get resistant to it." Point: non-trad journalism can do diff things.

Williams: Turn stories into signals. "If I can know the stock price of apple at any moment, why can't I know the same thing about issues that matter to me, like rate of foreclosures in our area, or access to healthcare?"

Lisa Williams on thinking like a startup: You don't know if your idea is good. Every idea you have, someone is already doing. Just do it anyway. Through the process of making it happen, you'll learn.

Ask yourself: What can you do without anyone else's permission or assistance?

Recommends learning to pitch. If you can't explain your idea in a clear, concise sentence, it's probably not really good.

Before there are companies, there are projects.

jbatsell tweets: RT @annatauzin LOVING @lisawilliams at Fund My Media. Think in terms of projects, not jobs. Our careers are not hierarchical anymore.

Lisa Williams: How startups make money: Many don't. Many venture-backed companies are built to be acquired. The idea is bigger co will have market distribution or other resources to make it pay.

You don't need a lot of money to do a startup. You could start with just a few thousand dollars. You don't need VC/grant money, that doesn't nec make you better.

If you get a grant, don't take that as proof that your idea is actually worthwhile.

Lisa mentions 3 successful businesses that started for less than $10K: BlogHer, TechCrunch, Television without pity

You don't need to do your project forever. Sustainability is for chumps. Lots of media projects should exist only as long as they're useful for you and the community you're serving.

jlab tweets: Commit to becoming self-sufficient. De-begify yourself. @lisawilliams is still energizing the audience at Fund My Media

Williams sells data, analysis to media buyers and ad firms. So the data from Placeblogger becomes a saleable product. She can't license the content because she doesn't own it, but the data has value.

Placeblogger is not there to be a portal. People don't spend a lot of time on our site. but the bloggers love us because we steer a ton of traffic to them

Lisa Williams expanded the amount of content the aggregate they display, teaser from sites. Has to be more than headlines because most people don't write really good headlines.

This is a transcript of my liveblog from Fund My Media Startup, a workshop by J-Lab presented Oct. 1, 2009 at the conference of the Online News Association in San Francisco.

I've made a separate blog post for each speaker's session in the daylong event. Index of sessions