News needs entrepreneurs. Where will they come from?

“What is the New York Times doing?”I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard that in various journalistic settings: inside newsrooms, in the hallways at conferences, in cross-newsroom chats. It makes some sense: the Times is the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, and its size and wealth give it the power to innovate and maneuver.On the other hand, I often found myself thinking: where is the imagination?Copying a larger newsroom with a different focus and set of resources available to it is not a strategy. Neither is incremental optimization. And they’re certainly not innovation.Unlike the Times, which has cemented its position through a smart portfolio of services like games, recipes, and product recommendations, news as an industry is dying. In the US we lose at least two newsrooms a week. Newsroom leaders can’t afford to be followers.Newsrooms need to change. The question is: how?Most newsrooms are a fraction of the size of the New York Times and can’t follow its strategy. (And…

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