All the News That’s Fit To Be Funded
Corporate ownership of newspapers has been mostly a failure, with papers losing readers, trimming staff, and putting out increasingly inferior products. Wall Street’s narrow focus on quarterly earnings statements is completely at odds with what excellent journalism is: a long-term and often painstaking venture meant to report what is happening, and in so doing create a more just society.
That sounds rather like a nonprofit mission, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that foundations and other philanthropic funders are supporting coverage of substantive issues in ever growing amounts. As the American Journalism Review notes in its current issue:
Beleaguered journalists who once clung solely to the business model of paid advertising and circulation now recognize the urgency of developing new revenue sources for labor-intensive newsgathering. For some, foundations hold increasing promise as allies in meeting the public’s information needs — beyond superficial headlines and celebrity sexploits — so long as there are safeguards for editorial independence. …
New forms of nonprofit, grant-funded news operations are proliferating. The lineup includes the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (see “Funding for Foreign Forays”), Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, MinnPost.com (see Drop Cap) and at least two state-level health news sites (see “Healthy Initiatives”). The Washington Independent, freshly minted in January, joined the Center for Independent Media’s network of four related sites in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota. And there are many more in the mix.
Effective journalism is a change agent, and it often speaks truths that influential people would prefer not to hear. It’s no wonder the for-profit sector hasn’t figured out how to make it work. If foundations can reverse the industry’s sad trends of the last couple of decades, they will fulfill their missions of improving lives through their funding.
(Hat tip to Jessica Clark at American University’s Center for Social Media.) | 501(c)
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