Recently, the MalaysiaKini citizen journalist program kicked into expansion mode with a three-day “train the trainers” workshop in Kuala Lumpur. As part of the workshop, we held a two-hour introduction to “The Journalist as Entrepreneur”, a primer for building a personal revenue stream from the output of the citizen journalist.

Several examples of successful citizen journalist bloggers exist.  Focused commentators on some topic that have grown their blogs into complete media operations.  Talking Points Memo, Paid Content, TechCrunch all grew from the focus of their founders and a little blogging software.  If you want a reminder for where these sites started spend a little time on the WayBack Machine.

Pro-bloggers or citizen journalists can with focus and persistence build an audience and a revenue stream.  In Malaysia, one of top 100 websites according to Alexa is Paul Tan’s car review blog.  If Tan can build his business, why not the MalaysiaKini trained citizen journalists?

The purpose of the introductory training was to encourage the citizen journalist to take greater control over building their audience and revenue opportunity. The training had three key themes:

• Be an expert

• Build your online presence.  Promote yourself online. - Use the search engines to your advantage - Build a social media following – Twitter and Facebook
 - Work with other local bloggers to promote each other

• Try different revenue tools to develop revenue from your audience

Each of these themes reflects a fact of the web today.

Become an expert.  Whatever you choose to cover, become the expert in that topic.  Commit to a list of three or four things you feel passionately about and then cover them at least half the time.  Best if the topics you cover are related to a larger theme.  This creates a focus for the citizen journalist to either sell content on their expertise or to develop advertising that is targeted to that expertise.  In the case of MalaysiaKini-trained citizen journalists, “local” was one obvious area of expertise.

Build your online presence.  Blogs give the pro-blogger/citizen journalist the most tools to promote themselves online.  Developing blogrolls and link exchanges, building audiences through Facebook (Malaysia’s largest social network) or Twitter are all tools and techniques available to the citizen journalist as long as they have access to the tools.

But, as I developed the training materials and discussed the situation with the citizen journalists in the workshop, one important difference became evident between citizen journalists in more mature online markets and those in Malaysia and other parts of SouthEast Asia.  The revenue layer that a local pro-blogger can access is much less mature; consequently, the revenue opportunity is thinner.  One role for a consortium of citizen journalists like those trained by MalaysiaKini is to facilitate this revenue layer.  Create a group to develop and manage the revenue options available to the individual citizen journalist.  Subscribe to Google AdSense and share the revenue.   Coordinate with the other major ad networks to develop more ad options and finally approach the online commerce sites like Amazon, or eBay to develop affiliate relationships that can be shared across the citizen journalists.

Here is the Journalist as Entrepreneur training presentation. Please send me any feedback of comments.

The next step in this series, will be to expand on each of these themes and build out hands-on training programs.  More how to do it yourself, less why you should do this.