Eyes Wide Open for Niche Opportunity

Dr. Jeffrey Cornwall is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Belmont University. Dr. Cornwall's school serves the needs of young people who would prefer to learn how to run a business correctly the first time and who would rather own a business than be the employee of a corporation.

On Sept. 2, Dr. Cornwall posted an article concerning the good deeds which some people and organizations are doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He closed his article with this statement:

We are hearing so much about the bad acts of people in New Orleans. I hope that over time it is the good acts like these that we will remember from these difficult times.

Which brings me to the point of this article.

News outlets whose advertising revenues are tied directly to ratings focus their attention on "bad" news because traditionally such topics have generated higher ratings. However like the Hamburger and Hotdogs vs. Bratwurst illustration, the sandbox has become overcrowded with news outlets chasing the bad news stories.

And until recently that seemed to be the only way to generate sufficient revenue to be profitable. However, the new media outlets, such as podcasting and online news sources, provide opportunities for exploiting other avenues of revenue generation while at the same time providing a under-populated frontier with regards to good news.

For example: CPC ads, such as those placed by Google, do not base their placement on whether you have the highest ratings online. There is plenty of "long-tail" interest from readers who will enjoy such articles. When you combine this with the fact that Microsoft intends to make next year's IE function as an aggregator for both RSS and Atom (although MS intends to call them web feeds instead of using techie talk) and Search Engines are beginning to provide feed queries, the frontier for an entrepreneur who desires to build a news agency dedicated to reporting on the good side of human conduct appears to be wide open.

Success will depend upon both a solid business model and an ability to distinguish between quality journalism and fluff. I would recommend that anyone starting such a news agency begin by assembling a team which would include an editor who has skill sets both in grammar and in "separating the wheat from the chaff," a business manager who knows how to manage the chassis of a business, a marketing expert whose experience is current with today's online marketing reality and experienced journalists whose focus is on objective reporting and not on subjective story-telling.

I would further recommend that the team include a second editor whose focus would be on editing citizen journalist submissions and the followup submissions of those who were involved in one of the reported incidents. In addition to tightening up the content of rambling submissions, this second editor's job would include making certain that the followup stories did not cause what started out as a good news story to degenerate into a bad news story. ( This is not to suggest that clarifications may not sometimes be necessary but rather that peacocks sometimes like to insult others to make themselves look better. )

There may be some who are already exploring this frontier, but the field is not crowded and the buzz is not yet rising above the level of a whisper. Horace Greeley said "Go West" meaning find opportunity in unexplored and under-populated frontiers.