This is a part of our series 'Digital Ideas For Media In India' series Entrepreneurial Journalism Media The way a law firm functions, on the basis of my limited understanding of it, is that each partner brings a set of clients and/or resources to the business. He gets a profit share. Now while that may be difficult to implement in a media business in India, with a private limited enterprise, how about a structure, where each journalist brings a certain vertical-specific editorial capability to the venture, and be a part-owner of the business? Take ten verticals, and one journalist to lead each vertical. Each is a private limited company, with a part of the stake (majority) held by a holding company, and the rest by the journalist. The holding company takes care of the business end of things - it runs product development, IT, sales, marketing, HR and Finance (as a firm to whom business has been outsourced), while the individual entities do content. Ownership gives the journalist, I hope, the entrepreneurial drive to build the content out, while the separation between business and editorial helps maintain distance, I assume, between business and editorial. The success, of course, depends entirely on the ability to build a set of strong content verticals, and the specialization in verticals allows media businesses to have more depth than a general publication. This idea isn't entirely mine - it has evolved during the course of conversations when I was looking for ideas on how to…
