Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends
2010; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 87; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2161-430X
Autores Tópico(s)Media Studies and Communication
Resumo* Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends. Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quirvn. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 185 pp. $32.95 pbk. The traditional business model for daily newspapers is virtually obsolete, observe Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn from their Anglophile perches, which begs the question of how much longer print journalism can survive. The 2007-2009 recession brought the first-ever three-year drop in U.S. advertising revenues, leading to the closure of venerable dailies including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle PostIntelligencer. A paid model for online content has proved the elusive Holy Grail of journalism in the digital age, leading to proposals of a number of alternatives to the for-profit model. Funding Journalism in the Digital Age provides both a guide to how the news media got into this mess and a handy compendium of the recent proposals to resuscitate journalism. Kaye, who teaches at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, and Quinn, of Deakin University in Australia, cast their net wide, exairuning innovative projects not just in the United States and Britain, but also in Norway, South Korea, and Singapore. Sponsorship and philanthropy are the subject of one chapter, which focuses on the example of ProPublica, the investigative reporting center founded in mid2008 and richly endowed by several foundations. The authors examine other nonprofit news organizations, such as Mother Jones magazine, as well as online-only startups like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost. They also analyze microfunding and micropayment models in detail, following from Walter Isaacson's 2009 exhortation in Time that online media outlets must start demanding per-story payment for articles. Other options include crowd-funding experiments like Spot.us and microsponsors, such as those who support MinnPost's journalism. Another chapter looks at collaboration between mainstream media and citizen journalists - pro-am partnerships like OhMyNews in Korea, where amateur journalists work with professional editors. It also looks at experiments with social networks, such as the Bakersfield Californian's Bakotopia.net, which launched in 2005. A chapter on family ownership and trusts looks at two-tiered stock ownership that has aUowed families like the Sulzbergers to maintain control of the New York Times, and the Grahams to hang onto the Washington Post. It also looks at trusts such as the CP Scott Trust, which publishes the Guardian, and the Tinius Trust that operates the Schibsted media group in Scandinavia. Another possible option for finding audiences that will pay for passion content is niche marketing. Yet another avenue is partnerships involving media outlets, collaborations such as PBS Frontline' s ongoing arrangement with the journalism school at Berkeley, GlobalPost's 2009 deal with CBS, PoUtico's partnership with Reuters, and the Ohio News Organization setup to cover Ohio poUtics by its eight largest dailies. …
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