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Laurie Bennett is a lifelong journalist who sized up the shifting landscape of her profession years before most of her colleagues. In 1999 she left a job with Knight Ridder and moved into a farmhouse near, of all places, Podunk, N.Y.

Through some pretty difficult years, she used her background as a reporter and editor to begin building a database that would become ePodunk, a company that made available demographic and, later, key ancestry information on virtually every municipality in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. Eventually, through affiliate advertising, she began making more money than Gannett and Knight Ridder ever paid her.

Bennett sold ePodunk in 2007. She and other former mainstream media journalists are now building Muckety – a Web site that maps the business and social relationships among newsmakers as stories unfold across the nation. Think of a timely Who's Who with maps and context.

In many ways, Bennett is at the vanguard of where the market may be heading for many professional journalists: more independent, more entrepreneurial, no longer relying solely on the large family or corporate-owned institutions to support the kind of journalism that originally drew many into the profession.

From her new company offices in New York City, Bennett participated in a Q & A.

Chris Lavin: You have built your business success on shaping and marketing a searchable database of useful information. Is that the heart of the future or do you see other ways for writers, photographers and editors to serve an audience?

Laurie Bennett: This is my background, so I see tremendous potential for assembling deep data sets that enable users to do searches and assemble information that meets their needs. But the database is just one of many routes that journalists might pursue online.

I don't want to minimize the risks or the costs. Making money online is no small challenge, and it requires creativity to find business models that go beyond the traditional advertising- and subscription-driven approaches.

I think some journalists make the mistake of thinking they can launch a blog and make the same kind of money they made in the newsroom. Unless you come up with a way to offer additional content that users can't find elsewhere -- whether it's through a database such as (the ones) we compile, or photos, graphics, interactive features, opinion, sources, whatever -- you don't have a chance. There are too many bloggers already weighing in, on almost every conceivable topic.

Is the traditional division between "content'' and "production'' -- think reporter versus page designer -- still relevant, or have these roles merged?

Bennett: To be honest, the division is irrelevant to us. Muckety uses common blogging software -- WordPress -- as its publishing system. That means the writer can publish directly from anywhere, with a backup from someone else on staff. We search for copyright-free photos and videos as we do our research; we link to outside sources. Content and production are of a piece; we don't even think of "production," per se.

Design, however, continues to be crucial, and this is a special talent on the Web. John Decker, who designed our Web sites at the Detroit Free Press and later became multimedia editor for The New York Times on the Web, is a partner of Muckety and was a partner of ePodunk as well. His ability to design pages that are both user-friendly and favorable to search engine rankings is vital to our success.

The departmental divisions are also gone. We need people who have skills in Excel, MySQL and photo processing as well as writing. Our folks need to know how to write headlines that catch the reader's eye and still work for the search engines. And they need to understand HTML enough to figure out the problems that can pop up when they add links or photos or videos to their posts.

Do you think you could have launched your startups while working within the corporate structures of the mainstream media?

Bennett: The answer is no, but not because there weren't people within the organizations who were entrepreneurial. Heath Meriwether, my old boss at the Detroit Free Press, had to be one of the first major publishers in America to ask, "How can we get on the World Wide Web?"
 
So we might well have been given the freedom to try something like ePodunk or Muckety. But we wouldn't have been given the resources. In addition to the many hours we put in to launch our two Internet companies, we have needed outside technical expertise that does not come cheap. Finding the money for that within the ever-constricting newspaper budget would have been highly unlikely.
 
We also needed flexibility for things like hosting choices and licensing agreements. Too often, mainstream media have a one-size-fits-all approach. This makes sense for large chains that are trying to maximize efficiencies, but it can hamstring a startup.
 
What would have been required to launch either of our ventures within the organization would have been a top-down commitment to small startups within the company, launched at the local level as well as the corporate level, to test what worked and what didn't work.
 
In effect, this would have been a funded R&D/incubator division that leveraged the knowledge that news organizations have about content and audience without being encumbered by the old business models or operating procedures.
 
At the same time, it would also have been important to realistically assess revenues and expenditures of each venture to project potential over the short term and long term. In the early years of online publishing, smoke-and-mirror accounting masked the real costs and revenues of these operations.
 
Should we be preparing students for more entrepreneurial, less institutional roles as journalists?

Bennett: There's an inherent contradiction in the way traditional media have prevented journalists
from engaging in outside involvement. Working for a salary, while being prohibited from freelance ventures, creates a culture that discourages entrepreneurship. At the same time, the very process of coming up with story ideas and pitching them to the desk is essentially entrepreneurial.

I've been lucky enough to be away from the newsrooms in recent years as they've gone through wrenching personnel cuts. But from an outside view, it would seem that media owners are putting journalists in an impossible position. Keep your head down, and hope you're not fired, but don't launch any outside ventures because they're likely to violate so-called ethics rules. These rules were formulated originally to prevent conflicts of interest, but they now seem designed to protect the company from competition. And they leave journalists without a safety net.

When we launched ePodunk, we hoped for funding from Knight Ridder, our parent company at the Detroit Free Press. The company decided we were too small a venture, and invested instead in several big operations, including the online grocer Webvan, which went bankrupt. In the end, ePodunk outlasted Knight Ridder -- an outcome none of us would have predicted.

I was told that in turning down our funding proposal, a top Knight Ridder executive questioned why the company should help someone who was disloyal enough to leave. That, to me, is the reverse of what media companies should be thinking. Accounting firms recognized years ago that when their employees left to start new ventures, they were likely to bring customers back to their former employer.

Do you still see a wall of separation between the content and business sides of an organization as a key to success?

Bennett: Chris, you and I both worked for Gannett in Rochester. Do you remember the multiple-choice question that Gannett used to pose to new employees? It went something like:


As idealistic young journalists, we were appalled that the last answer was even on the test. And yet the newspaper we were hired by at the time, the Rochester Times-Union, no longer exists. My former employer in Detroit, Knight Ridder, no longer exists. If you don't make money, the other three options can't happen.

And yet if you don't publish great content, you won't make money. The traditional walls have to come down, I think. But protecting the news operation from the politics and self-interest of the owners is still vital. There will always be a tension between the two interests of the newspaper: staying solvent (and better) and staying relevant (and better).

Be a J-school dean for a second, Laurie, and outline some of the essential skills you think your graduates should have to thrive in the new journalism environment.

Bennett: The No. 1 trait I look for is problem solving. This is new territory for everyone. How good are you at finding solutions, rather than asking someone else for them?

Second is the ability to work with others. That may sound trite, but the demands of online publishing are so broad that no one skill set solves all problems.
 
Other, more specific skills:

• The ability to do quality, skeptical research, discerning unreliable sources from reliable ones, finding original documents, cross-checking for accuracy
• The ability to write clearly, quickly and engagingly
• Sensitivity to the online audience and what it's looking for
• Awareness of the ever-changing online landscape
• Knowledge of Excel, Photoshop and other applications commonly used online