Entrepreneurship coach Phillip Smith explains how publishers who seek to grow their membership can invest in paid lead acquisition tactics and predict the rate of return on their investment.
In Kenya, the NGOs Transparency International and Fojo Media Institute have paired up to train budding investigative journalists and offer them reporting grants. GIJN’s Rowan Philp reports.
Journalism has been mired in an economic crisis for years, prompting journalists to find new models of funding, and to experiment, innovate, and learn from one another. Some nonprofit organizations are raising funds through a range of commercial activities. GIJN’s latest Resource Center addition, written by Ross Settles from the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the Hong Kong University, is designed to help journalists navigate the complex field of commercial revenue.
Introduction: The Three Main Commercial Revenue Strategies
Nonprofit investigative journalism organizations are increasingly borrowing strategies from larger commercial publishers to supplement their grant funding and to extend their impact. While membership and subscription strategies are focused on your consumers, commercial revenue strategies mean making deals with other institutions. There are three broad categories of commercial revenue strategies, each defined by what is being sold. Advertising: Selling marketers and advertising agencies access to your audience. Syndication: Selling other publishers access to your reporting or other internal data/information.
Predictions are a tricky business, but there is one sure thing for 2020: local news publishers cannot depend on the old ways of doing business. Mark Glaser, a media consultant and advisor, shares five interesting business models that are cropping up, from the co-op ownership model to government subsidies and “information districts,” to state-level ecosystem support.
Revenue options for nonprofit newsrooms now include everything from story sales and membership to crowdfunding and even cryptocurrency tokens. But experts say fundraising – for better or worse – remains the foundational key to the survival and growth of nonprofits around the world, writes Rowan Philp for GIJN.
Nonprofit newsrooms are increasingly turning to syndication partnerships that expand their reach and collaborations that expand reporting capacity. The Shorenstein Center surveyed eight of these news organizations to find out how these types of partnerships work in practice and how they are evolving.
The Global Reporting Centre has launched an ambitious project investigating labor abuse, environmental impact and corruption in global commerce. Here’s the Centre’s Peter W Klein on how Hidden Costs will bring together award-winning journalists, scholars and major media organizations — including the New York Times, PBS Frontline, the Toronto Star, Smithsonian Channel, NBC News, DigitalGlobe and Google News Labs — to undertake investigative-reporting projects.
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?
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to welcome 10 new member organizations. Along with training centers in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Trinidad, our new members include a Cuban environmental reporting site, a Brazilian newsroom focused on human rights, a Mexican media lab, a Russian citizen investigative center, a Swiss startup magazine, a European reporting network and a Philippine investigative reporting center.