I ventured into Balham last night to take part in top multimedia journalist & entrepreneur Adam Westbrook‘s first Future of News Bootcamp. It was conceived as a spin off of the larger Future of News meet-ups (which I’ve failed to actually attend any of), but with a small group of people. The idea being the group can focus on solid business ideas rather than just point out all the ways old media is dying.
The topic was a challenging one even in old media settings: is there a practical business model that can be built up delivering humanitarian/human rights/international development news?
The magic whiteboard. Now any room can be a flipchart.
And surprisingly, it turned out there just might be.
In the spirit of internet openness, Adam’s written his notes up in a blog post at his website which is well worth checking out.
The bootcamps are an excellent idea and I met five other really interesting journalists all with very different backgrounds: Deborah, Donnacha, Kat, Rebecca and Phil. I strongly recommend you go to the next one.
(Although I wish you better journey home than mine was yesterday. After massively delayed trains thanks to signal faults at Victoria, I got to a final change at Hove station around midnight to find there was a small fire on the line causing more delays…)
