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.
Journalists across southern Africa face a variety of obstacles to investigative reporting — from funding struggles to state censorship to legal intimidation — but are still innovating and collaborating to persevere.
Senegal’s first publicly-funded, independent media site — La Maison des Reporters — was launched after a young journalist, Moussa Ngom, grew frustrated with his country’s mainstream news.
Meduza, one of Russia’s last remaining independent news sites, lost 30,000 donors after the government cut off subscriber payments from the country due to unflinching coverage of the war. In less than a week, two German reporters organized a crowdfunding campaign to replace those funds to try to save Meduza.
Launched in 2008 with an innovative but untested business model, Mediapart has become a pillar of France’s media landscape and given a new lease of life to investigative journalism in the country. GIJN’s French editor Marthe Rubio explores how the site made a name for itself and how it managed to achieve economic independence.
CORRECTIV boasts a €4 million annual budget, a staff of 60, and has become one of the world’s largest nonprofit centers for investigative journalism. As founder David Schraven had hoped, the outlet has delivered blockbuster investigations and trained aspiring journalists, as well as staged plays and exhibitions inspired by current affairs that serve to bridge the gap between art and news.
Investigative journalists face extraordinary challenges, with legal and physical threats, growing surveillance, online trolls, and a financial model that’s all but collapsed. Now add to that a global pandemic and a backlash against democracy and independent media, and you can see our field is under tremendous pressure.
In this second excerpt from a report on the state of sustainability of journalism, the author discusses the African press, how the coronavirus pandemic impacted reporting in the region, and the proposals to ensure the media not only survives, but thrives, in the future.
In this excerpt from Anya Schiffrin’s latest report on the state of sustainability of journalism, the author discusses how government funding can throw the profession a lifeline in an era where philanthropic efforts to support the press are struggling and Big Tech is increasingly seen as a competitor instead of a platform for news organizations.
DOSSIER, an Austrian outlet that is a member center of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, has been able to offset the financial challenges experienced by many media outlets in Austria — and combat a series of vexatious lawsuits — thanks to its membership program.
