Now, as we move forward, we should be thinking about developing an entrepreneurial journalism “conveyor belt.” That’s the point I was making during our call, building on Jeff’s comment that likened students’ entrepreneurial ideas to “hot-house flowers” that need longer-term TLC to survive the release into the larger community.

The “conveyor belt” notion — borrowed from Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone (see Paul Tough’s marvelous book, “Whatever It Takes,” or the discussion of “conveyor belt” here: http://www.america.gov/st/democracy-english/2009/March/20090309111426ebyessedo9.594363e-02.html) — is to extend our teaching and idea development beyond the academic cycle. In other words, we should offer some kind of post-grad continuum of mentoring and support services, ranging from further capacity building/training to providing methodologies, including business and technical templates. This would help prop up nascent entrepreneurial journalists, especially as they try to launch projects of their own, but also as they introduce entrepreneurial projects into larger corporate media enterprises.

I can offer one possible venue for this — The Collaboratory (http://rjicollab.ning.com/) launched by me, Amy Gahran and Jane Stevens last year for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. The aim was first to bring together an assortment of entrepreneurial journalists, business and ad/marketing experts, technologists, information designers, etc. (we’ve got more than 430 members now). Then the idea was to go beyond discussions and have them actually collaborate on projects together — we’ve started a few, including a JurnosWiki resource guide (http://jurnos.wikispaces.com/), a “building blocks” manual for step-by-step launch of niche news sites, and exploration of a business assessment tool.

Another possible venue for this conveyor belt is “The Thousand Project” — a new endeavor I’m helping develop with The World Co./Lawrence (KS) Journal World. As part of a pilot launching local, highly networked niche news sites, the project will develop an extensive array of services for entrepreneurial journalists, including an extensive roadmap for startups (launch cookbooks, business templates, etc.), open-source tools, and workshop, mentoring and project analysis resources.

Whatever approach we might take on such a “conveyor belt,” I think it’s likely an essential ingredient in the eventual success of the entrepreneurial ventures our teaching plants the seeds for. I’ll look forward to talking more about this, and other initiatives on our next call.