Kent State Prof Offers First of its Kind 'eMedia' Business Course

Brian Dengler remembers almost the exact moment when he knew digital media would be the future of journalism.

It was 1995, and the World Wide Web was still in its infancy.

"Most of the Web pages looked like Google’s home page, but I realized it was, other than having very slow bandwidth … a way to get information on demand," he said. "I could get it when I had the time to go for it, and I didn’t have to be at a TV set exactly at six o’clock or wait for the morning paper to get some sort of breaking story."

Dengler, a veteran journalist and media law attorney, is teaching a new course at Kent State University's school of journalism that, among other topics, discusses the legal aspects of the "new model" digital journalism.

"This was more of a course to teach students to explore new ways to make money off of content, in that the old business model may not work and the new business model may be creating content that you can repackage in various ways and redistribute to different channels to make an income," he said.

"The model where you’re just hired to go in (and) cover city hall, go back and write and leave the money-making up to someone else, that’s dying rapidly," Dengler said. "You basically have to create a new ecosystem for your product. The purpose of the class was sort of geared toward being your own publisher, being your own brand."

The course was added to Kent State's master's degree program in e-media management. It complements one taught by Jeff Fruit, director of the school of journalism and mass communication at Kent State. Fruit teaches basic media management.

"We want to really align that whole program with what’s going on in the marketplace now," Fruit said. "We’ve been trying to move our entire program, undergraduate and graduate program, more into the entrepreneurial side of things, or at least get entrepreneurial programs into the mix. Because we think that’s where the career options are going to be."

So how do they do it?

As an attorney, Dengler has worked for such online companies as Demand Media, AOL, Examiner.com, Huffington Post and Patch.com — all online news providers. Dengler combines that experience with his lengthy career in journalism, which included stints at The Plain Dealer and WEWS.

In the class, he tackles such topics as how to create ownership rights for content and how to make money off those rights. Dengler also explains why and how journalists must create contracts for syndicating their content — whether it be video, still images or text — and how to acquire and repurpose content through syndication. In other words, they're taught the business contract fundamentals of dealing in digital content.

Dengler said the course is taught based on his personal legal experience and extensive research with journalism organizations including Poynter and the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard — with no textbook. It's a tough task in an industry that, these days, seems to be constantly evolving.

"It’s funny, at this moment there isn’t a textbook out there yet that says 'Here’s how the new model is going to work,'" Dengler said. "It’s hard to keep up. I’ve literally changed my lectures and course material on the fly."

Putting it into practice, the students in Dengler's class had to create a blog site to write about a niche topic and find two sources of income on it.

"Most of them said what I taught them was an eye opener," he said.

Fruit said they're trying to teach what they've always taught — strong writing and critical thinking with a liberal education — and apply it to today's market place.

"Learning the technical aspects isn’t what makes you valuable," Fruit said. “It’s getting into some of those deeper issues now. How do you do great storytelling in these different kinds of media environments. It’s really an evolving thing that we take a look at how we can adapt to what’s going on in the marketplace."