index.md 7.0KB
title: The Lean Journalism Canvas
url: http://www.davanac.me/blogging_the_news/2015/03/lean-journalism-canvas-business-model.html
hash_url: 4bf794aab9
As journalist, we don’t often shoot or write as professionnal sellers. Actually, we’ve got a real problem with money, and not doing this job to be rich (famous, sometimes, but definitelly not rich). Given the last decade’s decline of our whole industry business models, we need to craft new ways to produce and deliver content. And it’s not an easy game, particularly when you’r playing the freelance way.
News as a Process
During the last 4 years, I’ve helped around 350 IHECS‘s journo students, in Belgium, to think and act as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs of their own career, with some digital litteracy, and more specifically, entrepreneurs of their own little pieces of work. Being able to embrace changes, setting up some strong conversationnal strategy and handling the whole process as much as possible, from the ideas (which are cheap) and early iterations, to the aftermath (selling it and backtracking it using comments and feedbacks).
By the time, pitching to your peers appeared to be a very good exercice before pitching to your Editors or boss. Because if you’r not able to sell a strong « Why » to your Friends, Familly, Followers and Fools, there’s now way that strangers will buy it. So you definitely must admit to you have to think and act as the best VRP of your own work, IRL and online.
From my point of view, being « Lean » is more a state of mind than a set of tools, or rules. So I let them digg and play, fail quick and craft dirty sketchs, trying to be the more useful as possible helping them to ask themselves good questions. And I’ve never seen good solutions who did not came exclusively from them.
Training students for jobs who don’t exist yet
So, I’m not considering myself as much as a teacher than a coach or a mentor, or a facilitator (whatever you call it, but in a socrative way). And living day-by-day with stratupers at NEST’up, the accelerator I’ve co-founded in 2012 in Wallonia (Belgium’s french speaking), has learned me that there is not such a great mindset that the one which consist to challenge every proposition value with the right product market fit. And, again, given the fact that our traditionnal business model are broken doens’t mean that there is no new paths to explore to make our journalism, at least, sustainable.
So I begon to use the Business Model Canvas, the Lean Canvas and the « New News Process » to help, me at first sight, and then them, crafting the best user experiences.
But there was a glitch, a missing piece, for journalists to take full advantage of those great tools. So I’ve build my own, confronted it with the field’s rules, and now opensource it. Because as the people formerly known as the audience has told us: We are What We Share.
F**ck it, Ship it !
At this time, using the Lean Journalism Canvas, my students have achieved to crowdfund 30 projects succesfully, for more than 56.000 euros, and still counting (projects are still on their way, aiming for around 25 more k’s euros). I’m quite proud of everyone of them, as much that I’m gratefull to the IHEC’s board and team for their trust and full support to let the students create and innovate this way.
(Check all their projects on KissKissBankBank, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter‘s lists),
This canvas is a proposition, not perfectly nor definitely crafted. It is a good v0.1 v0.2 but it doesn’t exactly fit yet with every kind of j-works, especially for those with short term delivery commitments. Work is still to be done to refine it, so don’t hesitate to test it with your own projects, hard and soft news, play with it with a gazillion of sticky post-it. Fork it and I would love to see it improved with your remarks, tips and tricks !
(thanx to Eric Scherer, Tristan Kromer, Ziad Maalouf, Marie-Catherine Beuth, Philippe Lemmens, Olivier Verbeke, Xavier Damman, Philippe Couve, Yann Guegan, amongst others, for their great feedback and early support.)
Feel free to download it on Slidshare
