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    • 2022
      • Challenges and perspectives for media support programs (Nov. '22)
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        • Investing in independent media to strengthen democracy
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      • Principles for effective mediadev (Jan. '22)
    • 2021
      • Theories of change & impact measurement (March '21)
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          • PRIMED - Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development
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        • Introduction (efficacy of MediaDev responses)
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On this page
  • BUSINESS MODELS
  • #IPIWoCo Recap: Can ‘impact investors’ protect independent media?
  • A new model of community journalism (September 2022)
  • 5 revenue generation lessons from the Future of News Media Technology Conference (September 2022)
  • A New Kind of Partnership: Journalists and Civil Society Organizations Are Teaming Up (July, 2022)
  • Latin America: Strengthening entrepreneurial journalism (July, 2022)
  • EXCLUSIVE Google paying more than 300 EU publishers for news, more to come (May, 2022)
  • How corporate takeovers are fundamentally changing podcasting (May, 2022)
  • Brazil: Fact-checking, a core skill of news media, emerges as a business strategy (May, 2022)
  • Media labs in Latin America: a trend among digital natives (May, 2022)
  • How to Democratize News for the Public Good (April 2022)
  • Social media poses 'existential threat' to traditional, trustworthy news: UNESCO (March 2022)
  • Saving Journalism, Part One: Finding the Right Funding (Jan. 18, 2022)
  • Business infrastructure, not business models (Dec. 2021)
  • Chris Elliott: ‘Journalism is under enormous pressure as we look to create a new commercial model to replace the old one’ (Nov. 9, 2021)
  • How Creative Ownership Structures Can Help Local News Publishers Stay Local (Oct. 6, 2021)
  • “The puzzle turned out to be more complicated than we thought”: After four years, the Membership Puzzle Project is winding down (Aug. 2021)
  • How to Save Independent Local Media (May 2021)
  • Before communities can invest in news, newsrooms must invest in communities (Nov. 13, 2018)
  • 54 newsrooms, 9 countries, and 9 core ideas: Here's what two researchers found in a yearlong quest for journalism innovation (July 11, 2018)
  • Is it time for an International Fund for Free and Independent Media? (July 3, 2018)
  • PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA
  • START UPS
  • How Vox Media's growth explains what happens when digital media companies combine (April, 2022)
  • How to reach 3.5M readers in a year? Here's Romania Insider's story (Nov. 24, 2021)
  • Australian tycoon to help small publishers strike deals with Google, Facebook (Nov. 22, 2021)
  • How Creative Ownership Structures Can Help Local News Publishers Stay Local (Oct. 6, 2021)
  • 'From start to success'- New handbook to support startups striving for media viability (Sept. 9, 2020)

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  1. RESOURCES
  2. Articles
  3. Sustainability & viability

Business models and start-ups

Articles about the effectiveness of donor and foundation-supported programmes to support the sustainability and viability of business models and start-ups.

PreviousSustainability & viabilityNextSupport for Ukrainian Media

Last updated 2 years ago

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The resources on this page are organised into the following sections:

BUSINESS MODELS

International Press Institute

A recap of the co-organised with the GFMD at the in September 2022.

Philanthropic organizations keen to support independent journalism have long used grant funding as a way to help news outlets keep the wolves from the door. But more and more, they’re looking to the world of “impact investment” for innovative ways to fund media as a public good.

National Trust for Local News

Twipe Digital Publishing - MATTTHEW LYNES

"Over 200 media figures descended upon London at Press Gazette’s latest conference. A key topic of discussion was around the future of revenue generation. We present 5 lessons on revenue generation to take back to your teams."

NiemanLab- SARAH STONBELY

"Since 2017, journalists from eight newsrooms in five African countries have partnered with Code for Africa (CfA), a network of civic democracy and data journalism labs, to create sensors.Africa, a project that puts air quality sensors at schools, churches, and media houses in major cities across Africa to monitor pollution. Their goal was to collate data on the toxicity of the air and use that information to drive local reporting on the topic.

The project marks the first time that journalists and citizens have had information on how widespread pollution is in countries like Kenya and Tanzania, as well as hyperlocal data on where it is worst."

Wan Ifra- LARRY KILMAN

"In today’s media environment, when jobs are scarce, more journalists have to strike out on their own, but lack business skills to create their own digital news enterprises.

Without those skills, even the best-intentioned reporters and storytellers will likely fail to build sustainable enterprises from which to share their work."

Reuters- FOO YUN CHEE

"News publishers, among Google's fiercest critics, have long urged governments to ensure online platforms pay fair remuneration for their content. Australia last year made such payments mandatory while Canada introduced similar legislation last month."

NiemanLab- JOHN SULLIVAN

"One of the recent shifts in podcasting has been the introduction of paywalls and exclusive content. It has since become a standard feature of the medium."

World Association of News Publishers

"Fact-checking is in the DNA of professional standards and some media companies, like Agência Lupa in Brazil, have built an entire business on it, providing fact-checking services for numerous clients, and also teaching citizens to better scrutinize their news."

Knight Center- JÚLIO LUBIANCO

"An interesting movement is beginning to emerge, albeit belatedly, in Latin America: the creation of innovation laboratories, or media labs, in news outlets of the region. Inspired by a global trend, the labs are spaces, real or virtual, of interdisciplinary innovation, in which the aim is to develop innovative thinking, accelerate the application of technology, seek solutions to problems and make journalistic impact."

NiemanLab- JULIA CAGÉ

"Since one of the essential conditions of a functional democracy is a free press, this essay will explain how journalism is damaged when it is treated as a commodity and will discuss how democratizing work can help save our news media."

United Nations

"The business model of the news media is ‘broken’ and with it, our fundamental right to information is at risk, a new UNESCO report examining global trends in freedom of expression warns."

Global Investigative Journalism Network- ANYA SCHIFFRIN, HANNAH CLIFFORD, THEODORA DAME ADJIN-TATTEY, RYAN LEE, MATTHEW REYSIO-CRUZ

"Government support could be useful and we describe later in this report which options are being tried. 'We’re seeing a shift in emphasis away from looking at business models and towards interest in media as a public good that is supported by governments or donors,' said one donor."

NiemanLab - PAUL CHEUNG

Vox Europe - GIAN-PAOLO ACCARDO

Former readers' editor at the Guardian Chris Elliott shares the main findings from the Ethical Journalism Network's 'Building Trust in Journalism initiative' which aims to address the challenges that the media are facing in Central Eastern Europe.

Knight Foundation - MARK GLASER

Nieman Labs - SARAH SCIRE

“The public research project analyzed membership projects worldwide. They found successful communities were fixated on learning what their members value.”

Project syndicate - MICHAEL MIRNY (IREX)

"Local media outlets exhausted by pandemic-induced financial stresses may fall under the control of oligarchs or repressive governments that strip them of their independence. Six steps can help to prevent this outcome and put smaller news organizations on a sound long-term footing."

The Membership Puzzle Project- HEATHER BRYANT

"Many news organizations are shifting their business models from advertising to audience revenue...The model only works if they can appeal to and serve more audiences -- including audiences that have been historically excluded from positive interactions and mutually beneficial relationships with newsrooms. Many newsrooms are under-practiced at building quality relationships with audiences, especially those that have been poorly served due to race, gender, education, or income."

NiemanLab- PER WESTERGAARD, SOREN SCHULTZ JORGENSEN

"Our angle on the current state of journalism is this: The crisis of journalism and legacy news media is structural, and not just a matter of technological challenges or broken business models.”

BBC Media Action- JAMES DEANE

PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA

START UPS

Poynter- DAVE CANTOR

Agreements where a media company acquires another media site, such as it happened with the New York Times' purchase of The Athletic and Vox Media's purchase of Group Nine "can help producers, journalists and creators focus on their craft, instead of worrying about the business side of things or expending time and energy hiring a marketing staff."

What's New in Publishing

Reuters- BYRON KAYE, RENJU JOSE

Knight Foundation - MARK GLASER

DW Akademie- LOUISA WRIGHT

"The last few months have been particularly tough for journalism — many media organizations have lost traditional revenue streams, newsrooms have made major cuts to staff, and in some cases media have had to close down entirely."

"With direction from the National Trust for Local News, , the public media organization serving North Texas, is stepping forward as a community anchor for the , the primary local newspaper for Denton County. Through this first-of-its-kind partnership, the century-old newspaper plans to become part of KERA, constructing a formidable ecosystem of local journalism."

"In recent weeks there is a need to bring fresh energy, creativity and intensity to efforts to support independent media. But these alone will not be enough. There is a fundamental problem of resources so I propose the creation of a new International Fund for Free and Independent Media focused in particular on resource poor societies and those societies where media freedom is under most pressure. The fund would support independent journalism, independent media institutions focused on serving the public interest, and other media and social efforts designed to underpin informed and fact based public debate."

"For online publishers, establishing different digital distribution channels, monetizing them, and building an engaged audience are equally as important as creating high-quality content in the first place. For Bucharest-based , the challenge is no different, and the English-language publisher has struggled to achieve the balance between readership engagement, growth and profitability."

"The Minderoo Foundation, owned by Andrew Forrest, chairman of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals Group , plans to help 18 small publishers by applying to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on their behalf so they can negotiate together without breaching competition laws."

KERA
Denton Record-Chronicle
5 revenue generation lessons from the Future of News Media Technology Conference (September 2022)
A New Kind of Partnership: Journalists and Civil Society Organizations Are Teaming Up (July, 2022)
Latin America: Strengthening entrepreneurial journalism (July, 2022)
EXCLUSIVE Google paying more than 300 EU publishers for news, more to come (May, 2022)
How corporate takeovers are fundamentally changing podcasting (May, 2022)
Brazil: Fact-checking, a core skill of news media, emerges as a business strategy (May, 2022)
Media labs in Latin America: a trend among digital natives (May, 2022)
How to Democratize News for the Public Good (April 2022)
Social media poses 'existential threat' to traditional, trustworthy news: UNESCO (March 2022)
Saving Journalism, Part One: Finding the Right Funding (Jan. 18, 2022)
Business infrastructure, not business models (Dec. 2021)
Chris Elliott: ‘Journalism is under enormous pressure as we look to create a new commercial model to replace the old one’ (Nov. 9, 2021)
How Creative Ownership Structures Can Help Local News Publishers Stay Local (Oct. 6, 2021)
“The puzzle turned out to be more complicated than we thought”: After four years, the Membership Puzzle Project is winding down (Aug. 2021)
How to Save Independent Local Media (May 2021)
Before communities can invest in news, newsrooms must invest in communities (Nov. 13, 2018)
54 newsrooms, 9 countries, and 9 core ideas: Here's what two researchers found in a yearlong quest for journalism innovation (July 11, 2018)
Is it time for an International Fund for Free and Independent Media? (July 3, 2018)
I have argued
How Vox Media's growth explains what happens when digital media companies combine (April, 2022)
How to reach 3.5M readers in a year? Here's Romania Insider's story (Nov. 24, 2021)
Romania Insider
Australian tycoon to help small publishers strike deals with Google, Facebook (Nov. 22, 2021)
(FMG.AX)
How Creative Ownership Structures Can Help Local News Publishers Stay Local (Oct. 6, 2021)
'From start to success'- New handbook to support startups striving for media viability (Sept. 9, 2020)
Business models
Public Service Media
Start ups
#IPIWoCo Recap: Can ‘impact investors’ protect independent media?
roundtable discussion
IPI 2022 World Congress
A new model of community journalism (September 2022)
LogoKeeping Local News in Local Hands
Logo5 revenue generation lessons from the Future of News Media Technology Conference - TwipeTwipe
LogoJournalists and Civil Society Are Teaming Up | Nieman ReportsNieman Reports
LogoLatin America: Strengthening entrepreneurial journalism - WAN-IFRAWAN-IFRA
LogoEXCLUSIVE Google paying more than 300 EU publishers for news, more to comeReuters
LogoHow corporate takeovers are fundamentally changing podcastingNieman Lab
LogoBrazil: Fact-checking, a core skill of news media, emerges as a business strategy - WAN-IFRAWAN-IFRA
LogoMedia labs in Latin America: a trend among digital natives - LatAm Journalism Review by the Knight CenterLatAm Journalism Review by the Knight Center
LogoHow to Democratize News for the Public Good | Nieman ReportsNieman Reports
LogoSocial media poses ‘existential threat’ to traditional, trustworthyUN News
LogoBusiness infrastructure, not business modelsNieman Lab
LogoChris Elliott: ‘Journalism is under enormous pressure as we look to create a new commercial model to replace the old one’ - VoxEuropVoxEurop
LogoHow Creative Ownership Structures Can Help Local News Publishers Stay LocalKnight Foundation
LogoHow Creative Ownership Structures Can Help Local News Publishers Stay LocalKnight Foundation
Logo“The puzzle turned out to be more complicated than we thought”: After four years, the Membership Puzzle Project is winding downNieman Lab
LogoHow to Save Independent Local Media by Michael MirnyProject Syndicate
LogoBefore communities can invest in news, newsrooms must invest in communities (1/2) — The Membership Puzzle ProjectThe Membership Puzzle Project
Logo54 newsrooms, 9 countries, and 9 core ideas: Here’s what two researchers found in a yearlong quest for journalism innovationNieman Lab
LogoHow Vox Media’s growth explains what happens when digital media companies combine - PoynterPoynter