Malaysiakini gained a global reputation by remaining independent while publishing in a restrictive media atmosphere. After 22 years at the helm, co-founder Premesh Chandran speaks about creating a quadrilingual website that receives millions of unique pageviews a day, and about helping to change the media conversation in Malaysia.
There are no silver bullets, no hard-and-fast rules, no magic answers to running a membership-driven news organization. It takes a lot of effort, coordination and putting members at the core of everything. Media consultant Tim Griggs shares 10 essential ingredients for making it work.
In an era of digital media disruption, Africa Confidential has avoided the complicated revenue tools many news media have been forced to experiment with, like soft or metered paywalls, crowdfunding, programmatic ads, blockchain systems or slashed costs and access fees. Instead, the London-based political news group has defied global trends by not only retaining its old school subscription model, but actually increasing its annual cost to a sky-high 902 British pounds. Rowan Philp writes for GIJN on AC’s secret to success.
The increasing lack of credibility and growing political meddling in Romanian mainstream media in recent years has resulted in many journalists leaving these outlets and starting their own independent sites. Some of these initiatives support themselves by relying on crowdfunding. But is it viable in the long term?
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 30 to May 6 finds @theboysmithy talking to @MarkMonmonier about the influence a cartographer can exert over a naive map reader, @OCCRP’s data visualization platform to map complex crime networks and @PostGraphics’ mapping of diversity in America’s neighborhoods.
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.
