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Women in tech are held to tougher standards than men — and that has to change, investor Aileen Lee says

October 3, 2016 by Barry Cooper

Men can get a hand up just for being fun to hang out with while women must have a strong professional network to merit consideration.

Aileen Lee, founder of venture capital firm Cowboy Ventures, says men in the VC community still don't get it.

Aileen Lee, founder of venture capital firm Cowboy Ventures, says men in the VC community still don’t get it.

Four years ago, Aileen Lee left a great job at storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to start her own fund — Cowboy Ventures. As one of Silicon Valley’s few female venture capitalists she knows all too well about competing as a woman in a male-dominated industry.

“You’re sitting in a boardroom with a bunch of guys,” Lee said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “It’s a hot company that’s thinking about raising their series A or their series B. Usually what we do is we make a Google Doc with a list of target investors. And people will say, ‘I was just with Jimmy Brown last weekend, he’s such a good guy! We should put him on the list.’ And someone else will be like, ‘Oh, I love that dude. He’s such a great guy.’

“And then I’ll bring up a woman. And they’ll be like ‘Oh, does she invest in security?’ It’s a totally different set of questions.”

Her conversation Swisher is worth a listen. On the show she notes that men can get a hand up just for being fun to hang out with and not rocking the boat; women investors, on the other hand, must have specific domain expertise and a strong professional network to merit consideration. That’s a big deal in the VC space, where a recent study by CrunchBase showed that of the top 100 venture firms — across the globe — only seven percent of the VCs are women.

Those numbers are not going to change dramatically any time soon. But Lee’s comments on the podcast are helpful for women who are working in male-dominated industries. The show is also worth the time for hard-headed men who think the embrace diversity but really do not.

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: investing, startups, VC, venture capital, women

From Reporters to Business Owners: Hispanic Entrepreneurs On Joining the Startup Culture

March 22, 2015 by Guest Post

By CONSTANZA GALLARDO

image2

Photo by Constanza Gallardo.

Tania Luviano had been a TV news anchor for 10 years until she was laid off during the 2008 economic crisis. She sent resumes to several media companies but nobody was hiring.

Luviano found herself vlogging about her life as a mother and founded Latina Mom TV.

“You have to stick to what you know, find your niche and think outside the box,” says Luviano, who was among several journalist entrepreneurs at Hispanicize this week sharing success stories.

Journalists attending the annual media event that brings together marketers, journalists, filmmakers and more were encouraged to embrace the one-man show work routine in order to succeed in the evolving media world.

More Hispanic journalists are hanging out their own shingles, becoming their own boss. The second Annual State of Hispanic Journalists survey by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists was released at Hispanicize. The survey showed that 40 percent of hispanic correspondents today are freelancers, an increase from last year’s 33 percent. And 42 percent of correspondents have their own blog or business.

Luviano said her experience as a journalist helped run her new business. And as an entrepreneur, she thinks it’s important to know how much your business costs and what’s the best amount to charge for that work.

“I overcharge, but I always get the money,” says Flor de Maria Rivero, founder of Flor de Maria Fashion.

Rivero created a media kit that helps sell her brand and provides media companies an estimate of what her work is worth.

Lorraine Ladish has been a freelance writer her entire career, and is now the founder of Viva Fifty, a bilingual community that celebrates being 50 years old and over. She said entrepreneurs have to determine the minimum pay that they are willing to work for, and also be able to walk away from certain opportunities because they disagree with the amount being offered.

Having a network of people that want to help you can also factor into determining how much to charge.

“And guess what?” says Ladish. “Nobody has told me, ‘you are too expensive.’ ”

Bill Gato, CEO for Hispanicize Wire, said he thinks entrepreneurs should look for partners instead of trying to go it alone.

No one can be an expert at everything, Gato said. In his own experience, Gato said that he needed to partner with someone who better understood the business aspects of making and managing money. “It’s hard to do everything on your own,” he said.

Luviano, Rivero and Ladish disagreed. They said journalists can wear multiple hats in running their businesses, from single-handedly posting on social media, taking their own photographs and doing their own writing.

Regardless as to whether journalists have partners or go solo, media entrepreneurs say the best way to start is to connect with people and recognize the importance of leadership and self-value.

“Keep learning,” says Rivero. “Reinvent yourself and think of ways to present new things to people.”

 

 

Filed Under: BUSINESS, Entrepreneurship, Featured, PEOPLE Tagged With: #Hispz15, Bill Gato, Flor de Maria Rivero, Hispanicize, Hispanicize15, Hispanics, Lorraine Ladish, media entrepreneurship, startups, Tania Luviano

The Downside of Digital Projects

January 12, 2015 by Guest Post

When it comes to the business of writing in the digital age, clickbait, shuttered platforms and broken URLs are the least of our worries

Digital Downside

By JULIE SCHWIETERT COLLAZO 

For those of us who have at least one foot in the digital world–and most of us do–it’s worth talking about the downside and drawbacks of digital projects. Moreso, it’s worth talking about how to protect yourself and your work in the digital world.

I was already thinking about this before I met, earlier this week, with a colleague who is a digital content director for a major media brand. “My outlook is bleak,” she said, as we talked about clickbait articles that are sensationalized and not fact-checked and lamented how often digital “strategy” is determined by variables like number of social media followers rather than a writer’s or subject’s actual skills or interests. We talked about the never-ending to-do list of the media property she oversees, a site that could have way more views and engagement–the end-game of any website–but which is crippled by limited staff, micromanagement by people who pretend to know a lot about the digital space but have little actual fluency in digital media, and, she admits, her own flagging motivation.

The real reason I’ve been thinking about this subject though is because so much of my own digital work has been lost or is beyond my own control. Click on any of the links on my published works page and you’ll find that far too many of them generate 404 errors. As editors learn more about how user engagement works, they rewrite URLs or rename stories, and, poof!, my article is floating around in space. But maybe I can find it and fix the link (a time-consuming task even if it is discoverable) because the search function on the same website has disappeared completely (the elimination of search functions is one of the worst ideas ever, by the way).

Clickbait Headlines

Clickbait are stories that imply that if you click the link, you’ll be rewarded by something shocking, amazing, uplifting, or sexy. More often than not, the stories are total frauds that waste your time.

Then there’s the phasing out and shutting down of platforms. If you’re one of those folks who crows about digital’s advantage over the supposedly dying medium of print, check yourself: Have you been keeping tabs on how many online properties–even legit, big-name properties with big-time funding and old-school media brands behind them– have turned off the lights and pulled the plug? The New York Times regularly eliminates blogs it has invested time, money, and staffing in nurturing. So does The Washington Post, as my friend and colleague Tracie Powell reported recently for All Digitocracy. And my own former employer, Matador Network, recently decided to eliminate its community blogs, which were the platform many of its writers used to get started in the field. If writers didn’t back up their own work, it was scrubbed from the site and their servers. Fortunately, I’d anticipated that possibility and made print copies of all my past work a few years ago, but the investment of time was hours, as there was no native back-up system that writers could use.

Other downers? Digital editions of print magazines pull their archived issues after a certain period, decide to put them behind a paywall, or another publisher acquires them and they disappear from the Internet in a flurry of renaming and rebranding. Your work gets copied and pasted by someone who knows more about SEO than journalism, perhaps attributing your work to himself or herself or some invented “author,” and it gets more page views, praise, and pennies than your own piece did.

And those are just for starters.

Most recently, I’ve been confronted with a dilemma related to mobile apps. Back in 2010, I signed on to an app development project, the promise of which was that with a core group of talented writers, many of whom had bona fides from the print world, we’d be able to corner the travel app market, which was still young. For me at least, that promise wasn’t realized, and my app never made much more than $20 a month, a sum that never compensated for the time invested in the making and marketing I did for it.

Now the company that owned the platform upon which the app was built and maintained is defunct. When it folded, the ability for authors to access the back-end of their apps–the place where updating is done–disappeared while the business partners tried to figure out the answer to “What next?”. They still haven’t resolved the question, at least not for authors, who have been left hanging, along with their reputations. Our names are associated with guides that are outdated, yet we have no control over those guides. Several writers have pulled their apps from iTunes since they, like I, don’t want their names on out of date material they can’t correct. Others have said that the decision to scrub the considerable amount of work they did just makes them sick to their stomachs and they can’t bear to hit the delete button because… where does all that effort go? {Please, don’t answer that question.}

I don’t sit around lamenting or worrying excessively about any of these scenarios or situations; after all, the bumps and jostles are part and parcel of figuring out a media landscape that is changing constantly. I haven’t even taken care of certain tasks that may be within my control, such as ferreting out those broken links and finding the new ones that replace them, because frankly, that’s not the best use of my time. I need to be generating new, paying work.

That being said, I do think there are certain precautions and protections that we can take when exploring and experimenting with new digital opportunities. Here are a few that come to mind based on my own experiences:

1. Get a contract. Read it.
For new and emerging media especially, it’s important that you temper your enthusiasm about the platform by ensuring that you’re holding it to the same standards of professional treatment that you expect of traditional media. If you’re offered the opportunity, for example, to develop an app, make sure that you receive, review, and sign off on a contract first. One important clause of that contract should address what happens if the developer goes bottom up. Where does your content go? Can you control it? What kind of money are you entitled to?

monetization

If you’re a writer or journalist who wants to make a living from your work, don’t accept “exposure” in exchange for some pay-off.

2. Ask about the monetization plan.
So many Internet ventures are launched on a wing and a prayer rather than a solid foundation and, crucially, a monetization plan (much less a viable one). For most players online and in the digital space, it’s getting harder to make money online, not easier. If you’re a writer or journalist who wants to make a living from your work, don’t accept “exposure” in exchange for some pay-off, whether that’s actual cash or equity, down the road. It’s rare for that pay-off to come. There’s nothing wrong with asking about a project’s monetization plan. You may not need proprietary specifics, but you do need to feel comfortable that the people steering the ship have a clue about what they’re doing and that you’ll be compensated appropriately for your work.

3. Back up everything.
Don’t rely on editors or publishers to keep digital proof of publication for you. If your work is destined for an online or digital outlet, find a way to preserve it. Maybe that’s a PDF, maybe it’s a hard copy of your article, or maybe it’s a screenshot or a file uploaded to the cloud. Whatever system works best for you, use it.

4. Keep in close communication with editors and publishers.
Keep an eye on your outlets, especially regular ones. When you notice that a site or platform is stagnating, ask about it. If you’re seeing gaps or problems, so is the average user/reader and these may foreshadow the twilight of the project. You’ll want to make sure that you migrate your own content (especially if you haven’t followed through on the preceding tip) before the site goes dark and your work disappears.

Know your intellectual property rights.

Know your intellectual property rights.

5. Confront content scrapers, then move on.
Content scraping–the act of someone else cutting and pasting your work and trying to pass it off as his or her own– is becoming more and more common. When you notice that your work has been stolen, confront the person who did it. Mobilize your network of readers and friends to call out the offending party on social media. And then move on. Otherwise you’ll spend far too much of your time on a battle for which the odds are not in your favor.

What advice do you have to add? Please share your tips in the comments.

Julie Schwietert CollazoJulie Schwietert Collazo is a bilingual (English-Spanish) writer, editor, and translator whose work covers a wide range of topics and interests, from art to science and from food to Pope Francis. She lives in New York City with her children and her husband, photographer Francisco Collazo. She blogs at cuadernoinedito where this post originally appeared and is re-published here with permission from the author.

Filed Under: BUSINESS, Entrepreneurship, Featured, How To, JOURNALISM, Online Tagged With: business of writing, clickbait, content scrapers, freelancing, intellectual property, monetization, Protecting digital works, startups

Former Commercial Appeal Columnist to Launch Journalism Startup

September 18, 2014 by Tracie Powell

Columnist to apply her journalism skills to digital entrepreneurship

Wendi C. Thomas' next phase: Launching a new startup focused on racial and economic equity.

Wendi C. Thomas’ next phase: Launching a new startup focused on racial and economic equity.

Wendi C. Thomas said she will launch a not-for-profit digital media startup focused on economic and racial inequality.

Thomas resigned from The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn. this week, not last week as originally reported. For the past three months Thomas had been leading the paper’s courts and cops team. Before that she had been the newspaper’s first and only full-time African American and female columnist.

Thomas had worked for The Commercial Appeal for the past 11 years.

“This frees me up to pursue my passion,” Thomas said of her exit, adding that she preferred not to discuss the specific details of her departure. Thomas did say she had been unhappy with the reassignment from columnist to the cops and courts beat.

“This is the city where Martin Luther King was killed. A city that is 63 percent black. And it has the highest poverty rate of any other large metro area in the country,” said Thomas. “It would be great if the local newspaper had a beat covering social justice or race, but it doesn’t and unfortunately those issues aren’t among the newspaper’s priorities. So I’m going to make it happen.”

Thomas has been a reporter or editor at The Indianapolis Star, the Tennessean in Nashville, and at the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. She joined The Commercial Appeal as a columnist in August 2003.

Thomas wrote regularly about race and economic inequality in the city, even up to her last day on the job. Not everybody was happy with that. Conservative bloggers labeled her a racist and racially divisive; even some within The Commercial Appeal complained that Thomas wrote too often about race, she said. Before she was reassigned, she had just completed an in depth report on minority contracting in Memphis and uncovered that in a city that is majority black, less than one percent of municipal contracts go to black businesses. “That story raises valid questions. Those kinds of questions, and stories that raise these kinds of questions, upset the status quo. But I rather enjoy upsetting the status quo,” Thomas chuckled.

“Legacy news organizations don’t want to piss off local businesses,” she added. “As an independent journalist I believe I will have more of an opportunity to speak truth to power.”

Wendi Thomas QuoteThomas said she will need at least $150,000 to launch the startup, and has already started talking with funders. The money will go toward hiring journalists with data visualization expertise, writers and editors, she said.

Thomas’s high profile will certainly bring support to her startup efforts. But even with that she will have to target her message to angel investors, said Doug Mitchell, co-director of New U, which provides funding and training to digital entrepreneurs.

“She can get funding (I think) from a foundation,” continued Mitchell.  “She’ll have to target her pitch effectively, but I’ve read plenty of data recently that can support her thinking.  She’ll have to state why she should be the one to be funded, what it is she’s actually trying to do and ask for realistic money, not low-balling herself  Also, I suggest she embed inside the Angel investment community which tends to be more open-minded about a mission such as that.”

In addition to launching the startup, Thomas said she will update her news blog more frequently and co-teach a class in the spring on racial equity and economic equality at the University of Memphis. Starting next week, she will also begin writing a weekly column for Memphis Flyer, the city’s independent weekly, Thomas added.

While Thomas may not miss much about her job, or her place of employment, she said that she will miss several of the editors and journalists at The Commercial Appeal.

“There are a lot of editors and reporters doing God’s work over there,” she said. “News organizations’ priorities change, but for working journalists like myself, our priority to be storytellers and to speak truth to power hasn’t changed.”

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Featured, JOURNALISM, Online, PEOPLE Tagged With: economic inequity, poverty, race, racial inequality, startups, The Commercial Appeal, Tracie Powell, wendi c. thomas

Fixing the Diversity Problem at Digital Startups

April 10, 2014 by Tracie Powell

This week allDigitocracy Founder Tracie Powell spoke with Gabriel Arana, senior editor at The American Prospect, about the lack of diversity in journalism, particularly among digital media startups such as Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com and Ezra Klein’s Vox.com.

Video courtesy of BloggingHeads.TV.

Fixing the diversity in journalism problem

Gabriel Arana, senior editor at The American Prospect, interviews Tracie Powell about the lack of diversity at news startups.

Filed Under: BUSINESS, Featured, Hiring, Startups Tagged With: ezra klein, fivethirtyeight, hiring, nate silver, recruiting, startups, vox

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