Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/category/sustainability/)
Press self-censorship in Hong Kong has been deteriorating as businessmen behind media organisations increasingly use the press as their business tool rather than for public service. After seeing the public’s disillusionment and distrust of the media grow, investigative journalist Don Ng decided to kickstart FactWire, a back-to-basics news service that focuses on long-term investigations.
The Bell illustrates a growing trend in which Russian journalists and media managers are finding ways of building news organizations that are not financially dependent on rich businessmen vulnerable to Kremlin pressure.
Berlin-based daily Tageszeitung (Taz for short) is a reader-supported newspaper where a 500 euro membership doesn’t even get you a free subscription. Yet more than 17,000 people have joined the Taz news cooperative in Germany on exactly those terms.
Six independent media start-ups in Poland are trying to counter the growing politicization and the financial pressures that have ravaged quality journalism in the country. But can these start-ups build audiences and become sustainable in a challenging media market?
What started out in 2013 as a small donor-funded health journalism center situated inside a legacy newspaper in South Africa has transformed into a staff of 10, and 15 regular contributors across the continent. Today, Bhekisisa consistently produces impactful reports which help to influence policy and decision making, set agendas and define conversations.
Authoritarian governments have cleverly used the liberal norm of transparency in order to shut down liberal groups in their countries, according to a new report “Distract, Divide, Detach: Using Transparency and Accountability to Justify Regulation of Civil Society Organizations.”
A for-profit “local newspaper without the paper” in California raised nearly $600,000 via a “direct public offering,” or DPO. Here’s how it works, and how it might work for your media organization.
It has only been 26 years since the world’s first website and server went live. Since then, digital journalism has evolved quickly through the portal era, the search era, and the social era. At present, digital journalism has entered a new phase — the Stories as a Service (SaaS) era — where journalism is paid for by readers, for readers, which will likely result in quality journalism, trustworthiness, and the building of new communities.
At a time when many legacy publications and platforms are foundering financially, stakeholder-driven media are proving the business case for an advocacy-based, community audience paradigm. What drives it to work is if your organisation has a decent mission that matter to the target community and you deliver in a reliable and accessible manner. Mark Lee Hunter, Luk Van Wassenhove and Maria Besiou explore the success stories of SDMs and analyse the keys to their success.
The old news business model has been serving advertisers and investors at the expense of the most important people in the media equation — the public, the readers, the users. But now that digital media have broken up that arranged marriage of advertising and news content, publishers are rediscovering the importance of focusing on serving readers.
The media, civil society, and democracy are under unprecedented duress around the world. Protecting the independent media and the public sphere presents an “epic challenge,” but there is great opportunity for philanthropy to step up and help. Bruce Sievers and Patrice Schneider detail five avenues worth pursuing in funding news media and argue that charitable donors should significantly increase their investment in the media.
