Today I’ll meet 17 students who hope to invent the future of news in just 9 days. Sound impossible? Maybe, but then considering how fast we've seen change come to the global journalism business--it's now powered by millions of citizen journalists through blogs, Facebook, and YouTube-- 9 days is almost an eternity! 

The Mobile News Incubator Fellowships are the brainchild of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the program is directed by Geneva Overholser. The purpose is to bring together the very best students from journalism, business, and engineering, surround them with faculty and industry mentors, and challenge them to invent the future of mobile news in just 9 days.  Why is this important? Well, I’ve written about what’s happening in the field of journalism before (“How Stroome is changing an industry and helping a revolution”) and it’s pretty clear to any journalism major that there aren’t a lot of jobs waiting for them when they graduate. It’s time to reinvent the industry! Mobile news solutions might be one way to do that.

• Don’t create a product without knowing if anyone has a pain
• Don’t just create a mobile app, build a business model to tell the world how you’ll create, deliver, and capture value
• Take time to generate alternative business models – attack them and see if they break
• Get out in the real world and test your guesses about your business model – business models are evolutionary, not static.