After our discussion last week of new forms of journalism funded by philanthropy, newsletter readers sent in several more examples, showing once again that the media landscape is shifting, but not necessarily eroding.
Here’s one… The Center for Public Integrity: Independent, investigative journalism funded by more than a dozen foundations. Check out, for example, their current investigation of dwindling federal funding and activity to clean up major sites of environmental contamination. Here is their Michigan summary of the Superfund program.
And, former Michigan newspaper reporter Dave Poulson raised several more…
“It is noteworthy that the majority of this year’s national Knight-Batten Awards for innovative journalism went to publications associated with non-profits. That includes such experiments as GreatLakesWiki.org here in Michigan, The Council on Foreign Relations’ crisis guides at CFR.org
and TechPresident.com. It is a trend noted with some surprise and perhaps consternation by Gannett Newspaper Division President Sue Clark-Johnson, who gave the Knight-Batten Symposium keynote address. Leaders in making government transparent are not traditional media companies but operations that include OpenCongress.org, FollowTheMoney.org and MAPLight.org. These are all supported by non-profit foundations. And far ahead of MinnPost.com in leveraging philanthropy into good journlaism is VoiceOfSanDiego.org. That’s not to say profitable media outlets can’t innovate when pushed against the wall. But it looks like experiments like these are not only leading the way, but may actually become the tools that mainstream media use to help survive.”
