Non-profit

#MediaPlurality14: Douglas White – six lessons from Neighbourhood News so far

Reflecting on our Media Power and Plurality event last week, Douglas White from the Carnegie UK Trust, looks at policy initiatives to help new market entrants

One of the most interesting discussion points at the Media Plurality and Power event at City University on 2 May was around the interventions that are needed to help new players in the media market flourish.

Our Neighbourhood News project, outlined here by project evaluator Will Perrin, founder of Talk About Local, and described by Will at the conference, has produced six key lessons from its first six months of operation. These six lessons from the local news projects delivered by five ‘Carnegie Partners’ across the UK highlight the importance of local news organisations to their communities and how local news might be delivered in the future. We believe they are a good starting point for any funders and policymakers interested in supporting the provision and sustainability of local news:

  1. Local, grassroots news organisations can deliver a significant range of community news and information, in return for quite a low level of investment. For example, in just four months Your Harlow alone published 850 stories and 90 videos. This suggests that the local community news sector has the capacity to deliver projects that can deliver a high level of output in a short period of time, and can provide good value for money for both citizens and funders.
  2. Local news organisations are often successful at attracting volunteer time and pro bono input from professional journalists to supplement paid wages. Brixton Blog, for instance, has levered 112 volunteer hours (£1,557 at national average hourly rate) with £1,400 of paid labour.
  3. Local news can be used as a tool for community engagement, action and cohesion. To date, the Carnegie Partner projects have featured stories that matter to their communities, such as poor street lighting, library closures and the local impact of benefit cuts. And they have often done so in new and locally innovative ways. For example, the Digital Sentinel held a chat with local police and fire services on Twitter, asking a range of questions on topics from knife crime to noisy neighbours to the number of police officers on their streets.
  4. Grassroots community news organisations made up of freelancing and volunteer contributors are subject to competing demands on their time, such as employment, family and pre-existing commitments. These real-life time pressures can cause disruption in delivering consistent output, but they are pressures which funders must respect in order to improve long-term local news provision and deliver community benefits.
  5. Recruiting individuals with skills which supplement core journalism skills, such as advertising sales and IT know how, which help to sustain local news projects can be a challenge. These issues can impact on news production, and again, it is important for funders to take a long-term perspective and show understanding and tolerance to any delays incurred.
  6. Taking the time to ensure that the correct structure is in place is important for the success of local new organisations. This will allow local news organisations to balance competing demands and volume and quality of output on schedule, but can be an ongoing challenge. Getting this balance right is not always straightforward, and needs careful consideration.

These six lessons have formed the basis of six discussion questions posed by the Trust in our Neighbourhood News – The Time is Now policy summary [PDF]. We’d be delighted to hear from #MediaPlurality14 attendees on these questions and how we can challenge funders, policymakers and practitioners to support and deliver new and improved neighbourhood news.

Douglas White is the current Acting Head of Policy at the Carnegie UK Trust.

This article gives the views of the author/s, and does not necessarily represent the position of the Media Power and Plurality Project. We welcome further views and contributions to the media plurality policy debate: please contact us if you would like to contribute.

#Mediaplurality14: William Perrin – Six questions for hyperlocal media policy from Carnegie UK Trust

Ahead of our Media Power and Plurality event on 2 May, William Perrin, founder of Talk About Local, discusses new policy recommendations from Carnegie UK Trust

We have been working with five great but very different community news projects for Carnegie UK Trust – in Brixton London, Alston in Cumbria, Harlow in Essex, Port Talbot in Wales and Wester Hailes in Edinburgh. Carnegie is exploring how to bolster accountability and democracy in communities, in which news and information plays a vital part.  Talk About Local is helping Carnegie evaluate and support the Neighbourhood News projects – there is an interim report from Talk About Local and from Carnegie.  Each project receives relatively small sums – two payments of £5,000 – for creating new or expanding existing local news and information output.  The emphasis is very much on community news, information and accountability, rather than technology or business process innovation.  Even at this interim stage Carnegie have isolated some pertinent questions for UK local media policy:

1. Why do we see so little support for  local news projects by grant making  foundations, charities and grant  makers, who are interested in the wellbeing of communities and  individuals? What role could such  organisations play?

 2. Would the approach adopted in  Neighbourhood News – of spreading  risk by supporting a small number of  well-organised community media  projects with small pots of funding  and using an independent expert  advisory group to help select winners  – be attractive to other funders?

 3. Could government interventions in  the local news market, such as the  Community Radio Fund, be adapted or expanded to provide opportunities  for local news providers who operate  on other platforms, including web-based providers?

 4. In the debate on regulating media plurality, which is largely about managing market exit of  independent outlets, is there a role  for encouraging market entry by many small web-based providers?

5. What scope is there for amending the regulations relating to the advertising of statutory notices to ensure that the outlets awarded such contracts meet clear requirements in relation to population reach and  provision of at least some ‘public interest’ content, irrespective of the platform used?

 6. What is the best strategy for supporting start-up local news  projects? Can traditional community development structures play a role or is a new infrastructure required?  How can local news projects be  supported to learn from each other?

It would be great to hear from UK hyperlocal practitioners and anyone else in the comments.

Full details of the Media Power and Plurality conference at City University London on 2 May, jointly hosted by University of Westminster’s Media Power and Plurality AHRC project and the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City, can be found hereWilliam Perrin will take part in a panel asking ‘Local media plurality: is it all doom and gloom?’. This post originally appeared on the TalkAboutLocal blog.

This article gives the views of the author/s, and does not necessarily represent the position of the Media Power and Plurality Project. We welcome further views and contributions to the media plurality policy debate: please contact us if you would like to contribute.

Benedetta Brevini: Inform, not notify – the birth of participatory, ‘slow journalism’

In this guest post, first published on the Conversation, Dr Benedetta Brevini explores new models for journalism in the 21st century

The digital era has led to increasing challenges for western and traditional news media business models. Media outlets are facing steady declines in revenue, while the migration of advertising online has brought limited success in “monetising” digital’s audiences. To make things worse, internet ads have progressively decreased in value in recent years.

The issue of how to fund quality journalism that would hold the government to account is a pressing one. As newsrooms continue to cut back, there is a real reduction in reporting capacity with profound effects on quality, investigative and exploratory journalism.

And yet, the last year has seen a quite hectic, energising movement of “digital journopreneurs”. Personal-brand journalists, digital entrepreneurs and investigative journalists have decided to embrace the capabilities of web technologies to launch a new wave of journalism platforms.

The rise of ‘journoprenuers’

In March, statistician and journalist Nate Silver launched his ESPN-backed FiveThirtyEight.com, a data blog that, by banking on Silver’s impressive record, will bet everything on a data-focused approach.

Silver is part of a wider movement of celebrity journalists who are migrating from mainstream press to digital start-ups. Ezra Klein left the Washington Post earlier this year for an initiative launched in April and backed by Vox Media, which promised to “explain the news” in a new revolutionary way by employing “next-generation technologies”.

The list could go on: there is also Jessica Lessin’s The Information and Pierre Omidyar‘s First Look featuring Glenn Greenwald. In February, First Look launched digital magazine/investigative site The Intercept.

These exciting ventures led New York Times media commentator David Carr to declare the birth of a new start-up digital journalism bubble.

These projects have three elements in common. They have been launched or backed by “new media” celebrities, are mostly US-based and are funded either by philanthropists or by established technology companies.

Their success will obviously be dependent not just on their economic sustainability, but also on their ability to offer what the so-called “legacy media” outlets – which are maintaining their dominance in the online world – are not able to provide.

Not just an American trend

On the other side of the Atlantic, a London-based journalism start-up known as The Charta has just launched a campaign for funding via crowdfunding website Kickstarter.

The Charta invites its future audience to believe in two things. Firstly, that real journalism, as opposed to fast–churned storytelling, needs time for reflection, investigation and understanding. Secondly, that if we want quality journalism we simply have fund it and participate in shaping it.

The Charta has a clear goal: “to inform, not notify”. The platform was certainly inspired by the success of De Correspondent, a Dutch-language online journalism venture offering background, analysis and investigative reporting, which raised over one million euros through crowdfunding.

For its focus on long-term investigations and slow-paced news reporting, The Charta has already been acclaimed by the founder of the “slow” movement in journalism, Carl Honoré:

The best way to make sense of our fast world is to slow down the news. The Charta will do just that by taking the time to think, understand and explain. In a world ravaged by fast news that’s just what the doctor ordered.

The idea of committing not only to economically support a new journalism venture, but to participate in its development is reminiscent of the great Danish philosopher and educator Grundtvig, who believed that becoming a citizen was a matter of choice. One could choose to join or to remain outside a state but choosing to join the state meant accepting certain obligations.

Supporting The Charta reflects a belief that quality journalism needs resources, time and reflection, things that are often missing in contemporary fast-paced reporting. It also means that people are prepared to contribute to the direction of a platform that we see as a service to the public.

This could be called participatory, slow journalism. The Charta concept is ambitious and because it’s not launched by star journalists and not backed by famous philanthropists, it needs the support of “active citizens”.

To borrow the words that journalist Paul Bradshaw used to describe his crowdsourcing reporting project, Help Me Investigate:

Journalism is about more than just ‘telling a story’; it is about enlightening, empowering and making a positive difference. And the web offers enormous potential here – but users must be involved in the process and have ownership of the agenda.

In a digital world dominated by a few media conglomerates, initiatives like The Charta and those in the US should be welcomed and encouraged. And this time it is the people – not just a few, illuminated philanthropists – who can make a difference.

The ConversationThis article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Dr Benedetta Brevini is Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Sydney and Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Law Justice and Journalism at City University, London.

This article gives the views of the author/s, and does not necessarily represent the position of the Media Power and Plurality Project. We welcome further views and contributions to the media plurality policy debate: please contact us if you would like to contribute.

Upcoming event, 27 January – ProPublica’s Richard Tofel at University of Westminster

Richard Tofel, president of the New York based non-profit investigative organisation ProPublica will be addressing an audience at the University of Westminster tonight, 27 January at 18:30 [details here]. His question: How do you measure the impact of journalism in 2014?

According to organisers OneWorld:

This is a rare chance to see Tofel discuss how ProPublica, an independent non-profit newsroom funded by philanthropic funds, operates and how he measures the impact of ProPublica’s journalism. The event will include input from media and impact experts, followed by audience Q&A.

Richard Tofel’s talk will be based on his white paper: ‘Non-Profit Journalism: Issues Around Impact’ [PDF], which he also mentions in an interview with the Guardian:

In Tofel’s new world of philanthropic journalism – ProPublica receives about $12m a year from 3,000 donors – the demand for more sophisticated methods is becoming increasingly loud, in tune with a trend sweeping the whole philanthropic sector.

Full interview here.

The event ties in closely with one of the themes of our media plurality project: we have been have involved in discussions about the potential for charitable and non-profit journalism.

New platforms offer the potential for increasing plurality, but realistically require structural and financial support to be both viable and effective. We are looking at ways in which charity law might usefully be amended to offer some financial assistance to local and national initiatives. The Community Radio model, with financial assistance available according to strictly defined criteria relating to “social gain”, might provide a further useful model.