As an aspiring freelance journalist, I have decided to follow the pathway of becoming an entrepreneur and creating an enterprise.
In order to come up with a suitable and sustainable idea, I created a mindmap (diagram below) which showcases my thought process to come up with my enterprise.
As a journalist with experience in writing and creating content, as well as running social media, I want to create an online news platform. I decided to create an online platform due to not having the design skills or experience in creating a print magazine, whereas I have knowledge of managing social media and writing for online magazines. Therefore, this idea falls under my own specialism and skills, which I can utilise to create a successful platform.
As well as this, my reasoning for an online platform rather than print is strengthened with the debate that print magazines are declining as our technology and generations become so online driven. News is available online straight away, on our mobile devices, internet, apps, as well as radio and television, and more people, especially young people, are using these platforms over buying a print magazine or newspaper. I will be discussing this in more depth in future blog posts when I conduct some market research on the print and online industry.
I also want to ensure that my target audience and idea is fulfilling a gap in the market so that my platform has unique content and is engaging. In order to do this, I need to make sure that my idea is not already being done, especially to target a specific audience or location. This is why I have looked at creating an online magazine targeting 16 to 25-year-olds, and providing content which will be interesting for this age range. This includes the topics listed in the mind map, such as music, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, events and local news in the area.
To develop this idea further, I then needed to decide what location I would look at writing a publication surrounding, as I live in Milton Keynes and study in Birmingham. Due to being in these two areas every week, I will be able to find content relating to these cities.
However, as Birmingham is a much bigger city, after looking at the current online platforms available, I found that Birmingham already has similar news outlets available, such as Style Birmingham. I have previously worked for Style Birmingham and the layout and content they create has inspired me to create a similar news outlet. After researching into the current platforms Milton Keynes have, I feel as if they don't have a platform targeting a younger age range and providing this type of content.
In my next few blog posts, I will be discussing this idea in more detail. Stay tuned!