2 What’s an Intrapreneur? And How Do I Become One?
2 What’s an Intrapreneur? And How Do I Become One?
Interview with Ebony Reed
In this interview, Elizabeth Mays interviews intrapreneur Ebony Reed for a class on Business & Future of Journalism. Ebony Reed is director of innovation and the RJI Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and an associate professor at University of Missouri-Columbia. Previously she was director of business development for U.S. (local) markets at the Associated Press. Reach her on Twitter at @EbonyReed.
Q: Can you give our readers some ideas of the types of projects or initiatives or interesting things that you’ve done as an intrapreneur in news organizations?
ER: Sure. About three years ago I was working as a regional sales manager for the Associated Press, and we started to place more emphasis in the local markets on selling to nontraditional news customers, which were startups and also companies that aren’t even in the news business. That included some companies that were doing things with artificial intelligence and needed news to put the metadata that’s on it, maybe companies that wanted to use news for competitive intelligence, just a variety of use cases. And so my job at that time was to drive that new business and to look for those new markets and to grow that revenue, which grew about a million dollars year over year in that time that I was in that role. I worked with 24 sales representatives across the U.S. that were working in their local markets driving the initiatives that I was identifying.
Q: How did you get tapped as an entrepreneur to begin with? You have a series of intrapreneurial roles on your career path, but you didn’t walk into a newsroom as an intrapreneur, did you?
ER: Right. Part of it was luck. Part of it was fate. I was working for the Associated Press as a deputy bureau chief. That’s how I was recruited into the AP in June 2010 from the Detroit News.
I was 90 days into my job and the AP went through a re-organization and said, “Hello all of you bureau chiefs. We’re now changing your jobs, and you now have a complete focus on revenue and we’re removing you from being involved with the news report and the news operation. You’ll come into headquarters in October. You’ll get trained from the Harvard Business School, and that’ll be your new job.”
So I was asked at that time whether or not I wanted to continue down that path, or whether I wanted them to find me [another] place. I just sort of embraced the opportunity that had been placed in front of me and I just said, “You know what? I’ve got a master’s in media management, I have a father that was a longtime advertising executive on the buy side, I’ve got an uncle that is a VP of operations for one of the largest urban radio station chains in the U.S.,” and I just said, “I’m just going to go with this and see what happens.” And so to my surprise, I actually was pretty good at sales and then that opened the door to people listening to me about new products and services.
The other thing t