In the age of new media, the University will welcome a new face to its faculty this Spring.
Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker.com and Trinity ’99, will be teaching a class as part of a new entrepreneurship program within the Markets and Management Studies certificate curriculum.
“This class is going to be half theory and half application,” Spiers said. “I want students to come out of the class with a fully-formed business plan for a new business.”
The class will be called “The Start-Up Clinic” and will be one of four courses offered under the new program, said its director, Gary Hull, a lecturing fellow in sociology. Hull, who also serves as director for the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace, brought Spiers to Duke.
“This class is going to be much more valuable than a standard management class,” he said. “Its focus is going to go from conception to actual execution over a period of time.”
The class will be capped at about 21 students who will be broken into teams of three to four to develop a business plan, Hull added.
Spiers is a successful media consultant, entrepreneur and writer who has launched numerous start-ups and websites, including Crushable.com and TheGloss.com. She also founded Breaking Media, the company responsible for sites such as Dealbreaker.com, AboveTheLaw.com and Fashionista.com. This year, Spiers was named one of Fast Company’s “Most Influential Women in Technology.”
Last Spring, Spiers gave a guest lecture to Hull’s class in the Entrepreneurial Challenges Focus cluster.
“The students loved her,” Hull said. “So when I started putting together an entrepreneurship program through MMS, the question became what four courses should we offer—that’s when I thought about asking Elizabeth if she wanted to teach a course.” Hull declined to name the other three courses.
Leading a classroom is not new to Spiers, though. Indeed, she teaches a course on new media for the School of Visual Arts in New York City as part of its Master of Fine Arts Program and also led a class for entrepreneurs this past summer.
“I really do enjoy teaching, so I’m always happy to have the opportunity to do it again, particularly at Duke,” she said. “I did my undergraduate work there, so I’m always going to have a big soft spot for it.”
The class is designed so that students will learn how to “boot-strap” a small business, Spiers said. She said she wants to teach students in the class how to deal with the challenges of starting and running a small business, specifically as they are young entrepreneurs without “track-record[s].”
“Generally you don’t know how to run a business until you’ve tried it,” she said. “Figuring out what you’re going to do and how to monetize it... I basically want to walk [students] through the steps so they have a starting point for doing something like that later.”
Spiers also emphasized the changing media environment and its implications for the business world.
“We’re getting a lot more sophisticated about how to monetize media—instead of a classic display ad, there are a lot more options,” she said. “This leads to more complex business models, which in my opinion create a lot of new opportunities for young entrepreneurs.”
Spiers’ media experience will be increasingly valuable for the Duke community, said James Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.
“I think more and more students are becoming interested in how to start new media ventures,” he said. “It’s wonderful that she’s going to be sharing her experiences with Duke students.”
Other faculty members expressed excitement about Spiers as well.
Last Spring, Spiers spoke to students in Sarah Cohen’s class, “News as a Moral Battleground.” Cohen, the Knight professor of the practice of journalism and public policy studies, said Spiers’ unique perspective and insight into job prospects in new media was particularly helpful to the students in her class.
It is not yet confirmed how students will register for the program, Hull noted. Although it will be similar in structure to the Focus program, Hull said he does not yet know whether students will be required to apply. Still, Hull is confident that the students who manage to make it into “The Start-Up Cinic” will be rewarded.
“[It’s] her smashing track record of success,” he said. “She’s very smart, she’s very sincere, she really cares and the [students] she’s going to be training will get it.”
A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that Spiers' summer class was at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. It was led independently.>
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