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journalism

Small Independent News Outlets have Outsized Impact

November 13, 2017 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

By Jo Ellen Kaiser, The Media Consortium

Google, Facebook and Twitter were hauled in front of Congress last week to explain how Russian bots were able to spread fake news on their platforms.

The concern—and a very real one--is that these bots and fake news sites had a significant impact on the 2016 election.

Fighting fake news, however, is not the only or best way to ensure that our content ecosystem prioritizes real news. This week, a groundbreaking article in Science proves that a better way to secure a media system that works for democracy is to strengthen independent news outlets.

The five-year long study published this week in Science, directed by Harvard Professor Gary King, shows that even small independent news outlets can have a dramatic effect on the content of  national conversation.  King, along with his now former graduate students Ben Schneer and Ariel White, found that if just three outlets write about a particular major national policy topic – such as jobs, the environment or immigration – discussion of that topic across social media rose by as much as 62.7 percent of a day’s volume, distributed over the week.

Over 60 percent of the participating outlets were members of the Media Consortium, the organization I direct. The Media Consortium outlets that had the highest participation rates in the Science study were, in order: Truthout, In These Times, Bitch Media, The Progressive, Earth Island Journal, Feministing, Generation Progress, Ms. Magazine and Yes! magazine. The median outlet size was The Progressive, with about 50,000 subscribers.

Individually, none of them is a New York Times or CNN. In fact, too often, philanthropic foundations refuse to support these outlets because they are “too small” and “don’t have enough impact.” What this Science study proves is that when independent news outlets work together to co-publish stories on the same topic in the same week, they can have a mighty effect.

We expected independents would have a big impact on national conversations, for several reasons. First, independents have strong and loyal followers who are eager to talk about the content they read and view at their favorite outlets. When Bitch, Feministing and Truthout together publish stories on reproductive health, they have a social reach of over a million followers.

But independent media followers are not just thumbs-up people. They not only comment and repost on social, they donate to these organizations and attend events in real life. These are people who want to participate in national conversations about topics they care about, from immigration to climate change to school reform. So it makes sense that they would push those conversations on social.

Second, studies coming out over the past five years have demonstrated that collective efforts make a bigger impact than stand-alone efforts. When even small outlets join together, they can have an effect larger than any of them would individually. We’ve seen that recently with the publication of the Paradise Papers and other large-scale collaborations.

Our outlets implicitly understood those effects: The Media Consortium was founded in order to build a collaborative network. In fact, when the researchers started working with us to figure out what they could randomize, it was we who suggested the experiment be built upon randomized timing of collaborative publication.

Finally, we have faith in the American people. Yes, everyone likes a cute cat photo or a bit of salacious gossip. But people care at a very fundamental level about the schools their kids attend, about their own reproductive choices, about their communities, neighbors and friends. They hunger for stories that impact their everyday lives. And those are the stories they will talk about and share. In fact, they will increase their sharing of stories like these by 62.7 percent when the stories originate on outlets they trust.

Trust matters on platforms that too often provide space for fake news. Increasingly, people will look at what outlet is providing them with that news. While trust in corporate news has gone down over the past few years, trust in independent news is strong.

The meaning of the Science study is simple: If we want to foster robust conversations about national policy, we need to continue to support independent news outlets.

This groundbreaking work was supported in part by Voqal.

Filed Under: Research & Reporting Tagged With: Impact, indie press, journalism

Quick Interventions: Media Links of Note

July 7, 2017 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

The Medium Is The Metaphor: Lookit all these neat horticultural metaphors for managing information and trust in a digital economy! (Active Voice)

Church & State, Together Again: At the New York Times, business “realities” are eating away at the editorial firewall. (CJR)

Hatred & Ignorance On Demand: Is it just too easy to link this hateful incitement video from the NRA (YouTube) together in the same sentence as a story about recent swastika graffiti at my childhood elementary school (Patch), with an item about those people who thought NPR’s tweeting of the Declaration of Independence was anti-presidential propaganda (Washington Post)?

You Get The Media You Pay For: National Enquirer buys rights to Trump accuser story, then spikes it. (Wall Street Journal)

You Can Have My Free Press: A coal company is suing HBO’s John Oliver for defamation (Boston Globe), and “conservative” talk-show host Michael Savage calls for a government takeover of media (Media Matters).

When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Fingers: Real-estate parody site McMansion Hell returns despite Zillow threats. (Gizmodo)

No, Seriously, Come Fucking Take It: “To those who demand that Al Jazeera be shut down. We too have demands.” (Al Jazeera English)

Filed Under: Notes from the Field Tagged With: Aggregation, journalism

Neal Gorenflo: Why Don’t Journalists Start Co-Ops?

July 7, 2017 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

Conspicuously absent from the booming grassroots-sharing economy is the professional journalism sector. For some insight into this conundrum, I spoke to Neal Gorenflo, the executive director and co-founder of Shareable.net — a nonprofit solutions-news outlet covering innovations in resource sharing, new economies, and cities. Neal’s work also gets him in circulation as an adviser to mayors, communities, and civic organizations worldwide. He’s currently promoting the latest Shareable anthology, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Watershed Media: It’s been said that journalists come from too libertarian a business environment (commercial mass media) to work in co-ops or collectives. It’s true that besides the Associated Press, there aren’t any notable/consequential news co-ops out there. Do you have a sense of why this may be the case?

Neal Gorenflo: Associated Press is not just a symbolic representation of cooperatives in the news industry. It’s a pillar of the industry, so shouldn’t be dismissed so easily. It should be regarded as an example to be built upon. It could also be a platform to build out from both up and down the value chain. And for all I know, there are many other examples. For instance, there is Positive News in the UK which recently converted to a cooperative.

The most important thing I’ve learned about cooperatives since starting Shareable is that it’s a much larger and more diverse sector than 99 percent of people think. It’s a vast universe unto itself. Tragically, public ignorance of them is vaster.

And I would start with questions that explore strengths rather than weaknesses, like what conditions in the news business make it ripe time to form news cooperatives?

WM: In that case, let’s talk about platform co-ops. What sort of opportunity does a platform co-op approach represent for news media, and for individual working journalists, who are already enterprising, self-motivated and trained communicators?

NG: First, we need to define what is meant by the term platform cooperative. Imagine Vox was owned and governed by its writers through a cooperative structure where each writer-member had one share, one vote. That would be a platform cooperative.

As to their prospects in the news industry, I think they have potential. Cooperatives tend to thrive in well-understood industries, and there are many journalists seeking jobs. Also, digital publishing doesn’t require a lot of capital, so it’s likely that members’ initial investment would be enough to get started, at least in a modest way.

Cooperatives could also likely compete effectively. They typically operate at a lower cost than traditional businesses because they don’t have an expensive management and investor layer to pay. This allows them to pay workers competitively while maintaining a cost advantage. This could help them compete in an industry with falling revenues.

This said, there has to be awareness and the will to pursue this option. It takes a lot of patience and persistence to get cooperative enterprises off the ground. There’s the extra overhead of an unfamiliar ownership and governance structure to deal with in addition to core business challenges, but once you get over the hump, cooperatives can be a big advantage.

WM: You say that digital publishing is not capital intensive. How does that break down? What sorts of financing strategies could journalists turn to for capitalizing a new co-op?

NG: It’s worth revisiting the fact that digital publishing doesn’t require a big, expensive printing plant and distribution network like traditional newspapers. There are also free online publishing tools from free websites to open source audio and video production software packages. You can also speak to sources around the world for free using Skype or Google Hangouts. These, along with other online collaboration tools, makes it possible to run a news operation without a newsroom.

So a good bit of the basic infrastructure cost has gone to zero. This makes it possible to spend more on reporting and reporters. That lends itself to a worker- and/or a consumer-cooperative financing and governance model.

The financial barriers to entry are low enough that reporters and/or their readers can self-fund a news organization. A multi-stakeholder cooperative — where there workers, consumers, and investors own and govern the cooperative together — might be the way to go.

I made it sound easy, but there are also new challenges like mastering search engine marketing, social media, and competing against other attractive mediums like video and online gaming. It might be cheaper to start a news organization, but it might be harder to stay in business. The media landscape is much more dynamic than in the golden age of newspapers. You need to be nimble, have ready access to specialized talent, and be super responsive to readers if not bring them into the news production process.

WM: You mentioned the opportunity to involve readers in the news production process. We’re seeing lots of engagement-driven stuff like that out there — Hearken, for example, aims to turn audiences into forces that influence newsroom decisions. But we’re still focused on attention in that model — and thus shy of a consumer or buyer co-op, which requires not just attention for whatever’s currently trending, but also intention by audiences to support something they need that may not be trending. What is the next step for audience engagement and empowerment in the civic-media equation?

NG: Well, the full package of audience engagement might look something like this — reading, sharing content, contributing to the production process in a variety of ways, and then having a say and a share in the actual enterprise. So a system that lets readers climb that ladder of engagement in a self-directed way and change their pattern of engagement when needed seems worth trying if we value independent media. The good news is that all the parts of this model exist, but haven’t been put together in one place yet.

WM: It’s surprising that there isn’t more co-op activity around journalism and mass media. Do you have any prognostication about how these alternative models might gain more traction?

NG: While there may be other examples like Positive News, I don’t know them. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a cooperative trend in media. I just don’t see it yet. It’s worth exploring further.

One strategy that’s being pursued in other industries is co-op conversion. This is an option workers at failing factories have pursued all over the world for decades. Retiring business owners are also increasingly selling their businesses to their employees. This is a big trend as boomers retire. Who knows, co-op conversion could work more broadly in the news business too.

If we’re talking about media in general, then take a look at Stocksy, an online stock photo marketplace owned by its 900 contributing photographers. They have been operating for a few years, are doing around $10 million in annual revenue, and recently distributed surplus (the equivalent to profit) to members-photographers for the first time. Their site is gorgeous. It appears to be a well run business. It’s one of the best examples for other media businesses to explore.

As to the future, it’s eternally TBD. I believe journalists have the capacity to forge their own destiny. They are in many ways already. Platform cooperatives are one more tool in the toolbox. It’s up to them to use it.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: co-ops, entrepreneurship, journalism, sharing economy

Pivot to the Intention Economy

July 6, 2017 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

When it comes to civic media, the attention economy is not adequate to the task of serving the unmet information needs of neglected communities.

An intention economy can address this shortcoming in the following manner:

  • PROBLEM: Journalism in a mass-media ecosystem driven by attention and reactive fascinations will always trend toward distraction, spectacle and popular topics.
  • OPPORTUNITY: Mass media driven by specific interests rather than simple attention has at least the opportunity to build a habit of civic engagement around non-spectacular topics and issues.
  • MUTUALITY: In this equation the intention must be mutual, on the part of the media producer as well as on the part of the audience.
  • SUSTAINABILITY: Memberships, contributions, social-sharing and other forms of sustaining actions by audiences represent the apex of the intention economy.
  • DESIGN: Journalism’s practitioners advocates must design and implement systems that make it easy for those intentional economics to develop around public-interest news reporting in neglected communities.

On the demand side, civic-media advocate and Internet journalist Doc Searles explores the idea of the intention economy as a consumer-driven phenomenon, which opens up critical conceptual terrain for consumer or buyer’s co-ops for civic media.

What sort of intention can the production side — journalists and their advocates — bring to the table here?

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: attention economy, Engagement, entrepreneurship, intention economy, journalism, nonprofit, philanthropy, public media, trust

Molly de Aguiar: "Fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust"

July 27, 2015 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

A conversation about public media in the Garden State with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Molly de Aguiar

WATERSHED: Your organization is a longtime, mainline public-media funder — and a household fixture in North Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, via the public-broadcasting anchors WNET and WNYC. How has the emergence of the small news nonprofits shaken up a public-media landscape that’s traditionally been oriented around large, centralized public-media institutions?

DE AGUIAR: The Dodge Foundation has indeed made many grants to public media over the past 35 years or so, but we didn’t actually have a specific “media” or “journalism” focus until about five years ago.

We felt compelled to do more comprehensive grantmaking in support of local news here in New Jersey in light of the dramatic shifts in the media landscape and an ever more urgent sense that we need strong local journalism for our communities and for democracy to thrive.

New Jersey has a very challenging media landscape — local news has always been in short supply because much of the news we get comes from New York or Philadelphia. You referenced WNYC and WNET as staple public media stations in your north Jersey household — those are both based in New York.

In fact, the state of New Jersey eliminated its support for public media in 2011 and transferred the public radio and television licenses to WNYC and WNET in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia.

However, over the past several years, a network of locally-owned and operated community journalism sites has been emerging alongside the remaining legacy media. These sites are being helmed by diverse local stakeholders, from former newspaper journalists to concerned community members and citizen reporters.

And this ecosystem of sites — large and small, nonprofit and for-profit — presents an opportunity, we believe, to better serve communities by being more collaborative and connected to one another, and by meaningfully engaging the public around the news and information that communities identify as being most important to them.

It’s fascinating how ideas about networks, news commons and news ecosystems have taken root in New Jersey and not, for example, in the cutting-edge, entrepreneurial Bay Area. What are the conditions in the Garden State that have produced this focus on innovation in practice and organization, rather than on technology and killer apps?

Our efforts to support and strengthen the local news landscape in New Jersey have grown out of necessity — a sense of alarm for losing what few local sources of news and information we had as the digital age disrupted the business of journalism, but also a sense of excitement and opportunity for reimagining what a 21st century news ecosystem looks like and establishing New Jersey as a leader in local news innovation.

Full_Color_Dodge_Logo_for_Websites_and_OnlineWhen we launched our focus on journalism funding five years ago, I think we were lucky to have an incredible mix of smart, talented people like Debbie Galant and Jeff Jarvis, willing to lend their expertise to help guide this experiment.

And I don’t think this effort could have happened without philanthropic dollars to launch such an ambitious effort, including our partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

There are too few funders in the U.S. who see journalism as crucial to strengthening the fabric of our communities.

You mentioned technology and killer apps — those are tools, as you know, that are often helpful and sometimes not. But fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust among and between news organizations and communities.

We have done this by establishing the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, which provides an incredible array of support, services, learning opportunities, and a collaborative community for journalists in New Jersey.

We are also working hand in hand with a number of partner sites to better understand what sustainability looks like for a local news organization, which we believe includes a diversity of (earned and contributed) revenue sources as well as robust and meaningful community engagement.

All of this work takes a massive amount of time and patience — building relationships is very labor intensive. Technology and apps can certainly facilitate and improve the work, but people power and human connection will always be needed too.

In terms of impact funding, with its need for data, how does the foundation’s theory of change quantify and define that sense of urgency? Does the foundation’s fundamental work of “building relationships and trust” make it necessary to expand our understanding of the actual information needs of communities?  

Our metrics for success are multi-layered, so there’s not a simple answer to this question. We care about the individual health of the partner sites we work with: are they creating new, solid revenue streams? Are they expanding their audiences? Are the owners of these sites able to pay themselves? Do they have to work 80 hours a week just to make ends meet?

But also, is the ecosystem itself healthy and growing? And, are we successfully facilitating better, deeper relationships between local news organizations and their communities? Is that resulting in more community investment in local news?

Philanthropy requires a lot of patience. This work is just starting, and I don’t think we’ll have clear answers to most of these questions – at least not the macro level questions – for some time.

To your second question, understanding the actual information needs of any community is fundamental to the sustainability of local journalism whether in New Jersey or elsewhere — it needs to be relevant to people’s lives.

A transformative factor for small producers is low-friction backbone services. How do ideas of networks, ecologies and the commons open up possibilities for shared services in operations, technology, marketing, development?

Sharing and collaboration are the new currency in this digital media landscape, and that includes content as well as the back shop functions you pointed out.

The Center for Cooperative Media has done a great job facilitating content sharing among news organizations across the state through its Story Exchange. My Dodge colleague Josh Stearns is currently exploring shared back-shop functions with our six local partner sites.

We launched a shared website tech-support back shop, which our partners thought they wanted, but after some experimentation, they realized that what they really wanted graphic design support more than IT support. So we’re looking into that.

We’ve also set up some legal support with a partnership with Rutgers-Camden, and the Center has an OPRA Sherpa which will help news sites craft and submit OPRA requests as well as staff who can help make legal referrals.

We are exploring a number of other shared functions including ad networks, sales support, accounting and events coordinators.

This is a huge area of opportunity for the sites as well as for entrepreneurs looking to build businesses serving the NJ news ecosystem.

Another Knight grantee along with the Dodge Foundation is Radiotopia, which amounts to a very interesting investment in pure infrastructure and program development. How has the philanthropic landscape changed for journalism-infrastructure projects? Should the other service and membership organizations out there be paying attention?

This is an interesting question. The trend in philanthropy is not to fund infrastructure — not to give general operating support and capacity building grants. It’s often more attractive to fund discrete projects with clear goals, outcomes and a set timeline.

Funding infrastructure requires patience, and philanthropy often doesn’t have enough patience.

I’m grateful that one of the Dodge Foundation’s core values is to make general operating support grants, recognizing that nonprofit have to pay rent and salaries and all the other costs of doing business.

We severely handicap nonprofits when we refuse to give operating support. Dodge also provides a variety of capacity building workshops for our grantees on how to build and develop a nonprofit board and also how to improve your organization’s communications; these wrap-around services are really critical for nonprofits.

So, it was a logical move, when we launched our Media grantmaking program, to focus on the infrastructure needs of the New Jersey news ecosystem — given the need for infrastructure support as well as Dodge’s willingness to give that kind of support.

In order to best support the whole ecosystem in New Jersey, it was clear that we needed a centralized system/hub to offer that support, which is why our first grant was to establish the Center for Cooperative Media.

Service and membership organizations are also vital to providing support — although I think there are perhaps too many separate service and membership organizations, and that they should join forces to provide more robust services for the field.

I very much appreciated INN’s focus on sustainability for news organizations under Kevin Davis’ leadership, and I hope INN doesn’t move away from that.

It makes sense that service organizations could network or join forces in some manner, but on the flip side, the member organizations in the journalism field emerged to serve distinct needs, and especially the smaller, newer ones (such as INN) lack scale to derive revenue from members to develop high-impact programs across geographic regions.
 
I don’t know that I agree that member organizations emerge to serve distinct needs. There are lots of nonprofits out there that duplicate efforts because they’re unfamiliar with or unaware of what already exists in the field. Or believe that they can provide services better than others, so they start their own organization rather than trying to improve upon what exists. (This is true of all nonprofits — I’m not limiting my comments to just the journalism field or membership organizations).

Is the future of journalism-service organizations one of large centralized institutions or of networks of small, highly focused bureaus?

I doubt the future of journalism service organizations is either or — it’s both large and small, centralized and decentralized, but I would like to see more connections and collaboration between them. There are probably some mergers that would make sense too.

Public media has a long history of content commissioning, especially on the film and video side. Do you see any opportunities for commissioning to take on a more significant role for all the “new public media” coming up in the digital medium?

I’m going to punt on this question primarily because I’m not focused on content at all right now — although I get many many requests to support content for public media.

I will say this: if I transition to funding content, I would seek out work that better reflects the diversity in our communities than the requests I currently get.

The public-broadcasting divestment by the state of New Jersey in 2011 took place under Gov. Chris Christie, and the subsequent emergence of the community-media projects you describe seems like an almost organic response. What are the characteristics of the “information ecosystem” in New Jersey that is making (and will make) it possible for these community media organizations fill in the gaps?  

The divestment was perhaps a catalyst to what was already a shifting landscape, but the upheaval in the media sector — the democratization of publishing tools, newspaper industry layoffs, unemployed journalists, the major gaps in coverage — is what shaped the ecosystem we have in New Jersey.

I would recommend this blog post by Jeff Jarvis which is a very clear explanation of what we mean by the ecosystem concept and what it looks like in New Jersey and elsewhere.

Let’s close with a question of deepening concern — that of what I’m calling, for lack of a better phrase, “information inequity,” in which issues of social import and communities with acute information needs are more often than not overlooked by the systems we have built. What do we need to learn and understand in order to turn this around? What needs to change?

I’m glad you asked this question — it’s a big issue and one that I care about deeply. In fact, it’s probably what I care about the most.

The recent Pew research (“Local News in a Digital Age”) that studied Macon, Sioux City and Denver showed that while Hispanic residents in Denver and African-American residents in Macon follow local news at significantly higher rates than white residents in those cities and expressed a “greater sense of agency when it comes to improving their community,” there aren’t nearly enough news outlets and sources serving their needs.

Also, we partnered with the Democracy Fund to support research led by Rutgers looking at access to and availability of news and information in three cities in New Jersey — we’ll be releasing this research soon, but what we found about the disparities of access to news and information is both revealing and troubling.

We are currently trying to tackle this issue on several fronts in New Jersey (although there’s so much more I want to do):

On the journalism-education front, we support Dr. Todd Wolfson at Rutgers to help journalism students become better listeners and community members through community-based storytelling projects; this project also trains community members how to be media makers themselves, empowering them to tell their own stories.

Related, we fund Media Mobilizing Project on a just-launched project to work in several communities in New Jersey on citizen media/storytelling training, as well as The Citizens Campaign, which conducts comprehensive citizen journalism training.

We also support Free Press, in partnership with the Democracy Fund, to build relationships between local news organizations and their communities, which we believe will lead to greater participation and inclusion of diverse voices from our communities. The Knight Digital Media Center recently wrote a good piece summarizing that work.

We also have a new grant to New America Media to help build relationships with foreign language news outlets in New Jersey and nurture collaboration between them and the English language media.

I would also point out that ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting (both grantees) do tremendous work fighting for those who are the most overlooked and the most impacted by the systems we have built.

There’s so much work to do on this front. We need a bigger pipeline of journalists of color and more opportunities for them to take leadership roles in news organizations. We need more diverse news rooms at every level.

We also need to support and lift up community voices and have community-led (not just journalist-led) conversations.

There are many opportunities for philanthropy to support work that breaks down these entrenched systems we have built.

We welcome discussion and feedback on our work via the Local News Lab and also on Twitter:

  • Molly de Aguiar: @grdodgemedia
  • Josh Stearns: @jcstearns

Your readers might also want to sign up for Josh Stearns’ weekly newsletter The Local Fix which offers practical tips and advice, trends, and thoughtful conversation about local news.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: democracy, funding, journalism, philanthropy, public media

Soup kitchens of the information superhighway — journalism's inequity problem

May 17, 2015 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

One of the best things that has come out of the futurist vision for journalism has been the idea of the “information needs of communities” — a bland, technocratic but ruthless turn of phrase, full of demands and expectations.

Demands for information enfranchisement. Expectations of equal access, and of relevance.

Yet information inequity is persistent and widespread in the United States, and around the world.

Market-based models for news production can cover a lot of ground, can go deep with diverse communities — but they are full of economic imperatives that all too often keep the watchdogs of the public interest on short leashes.

Information inequity is the outcome of this. Communities and issues are neglected by an economic model that simply can’t deliver coverage of a spectrum of public-interest issues with the consistency and ambition that a democratic society demands.

There’s that word again. Demands.

One can be optimistic about journalism’s prospects, but without factoring in the demands of information enfranchisement and the problem of information inequity, that optimism for the future becomes Panglossian.

The best of all possible journalism futures may yet be ahead, but right about now our democracy would really benefit from some soup kitchens on the information superhighway.

More to the point, the emerging nonprofit news sector needs to focus on charitable purpose and public service in order to build the foundation for more robust public support of their information services and practice.

Yet they’ll need investment to do so. People who care about journalism’s role in our democracy need to invest in productive capacity for journalism producers working in and with neglected communities.

To fully address the issue, nonprofit journalism organizations and their advocates need a new set of tools for understanding, advocating for and advancing their mission, including:

  • A rigorous and replicable assessment model for identifying, measuring and prioritizing the information needs of communities — and likewise for the most needful communities, a key diversity issue.
  • Some quantifiable standard for what constitutes a meaningful public-interest outcome for journalistic enterprise. Otherwise, there’s no accountability around philanthropic and entrepreneurial priorities.

Building out this knowledge base can produce a solid foundation for reimagining — and investing in — public-interest journalism as a baseline community service rather than a competitor in a product- and attention-driven marketplace.

Information inequity is a complex problem that requires us to reassess our business models and focus on charitable purpose and public service.

More than a worthy challenge, successfully confronting the information inequity of our media economy is a point of breakthrough that opens up new prospects for journalism as a driver of civic enfranchisement — and new opportunities for building healthy new relationships between relevant, trustworthy news media and the communities they serve.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: diversity, equity, journalism, public interest

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