Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Precarious State of Media Work

Amid the current “crisis” in the business and practice of journalism, entrepreneurial journalism has been offered as a solution. While the precise set of practices that constitute entrepreneurial journalism remain unclear, such discourse promotes a notion of the enterprising individual journalist forging a career for herself through practices of self-branding and self-employment and learning to be adaptable, flexible, and self-sufficient. This essay challenges the notion of entrepreneurial journalism, arguing that it emerges at a time of institutional crisis for journalism and uncertainty for journalists, intersecting with neoliberal enterprise culture and the spread of digital technologies to promote an ideology that masks the precarious nature of contemporary media work. The article considers the work of freelance journalists in historical context and argues that the discourse of entrepreneurial journalism closes the space required to envision alternative ways to organize the production of journalism and journalistic labor.