"The INN Index is the most comprehensive study of the state of nonprofit news. Since 2018, the Institute for Nonprofit News has conducted this annual Index survey of its nonprofit news organization members to evaluate the staffing, business models, financials, and editorial focus of newsrooms in the
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growing movement of public service journalism." (About the index)
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"Ashoka is an organization that supports social entrepreneurs around the world and has the longest track record of doing so. It has identified and supported over 3,500 “Ashoka Fellows,” many of whom are in the media sector. Therefore, Ashoka sits on a treasure trove of data on transformative med
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ia innovations. We analyzed this data to understand how social entrepreneurs around the world are trying to improve the media landscape, assessed the most successful approaches, and identified gaps that social entrepreneurship has not yet filled. To do so, we selected a subset of Ashoka Fellows whose primary aim is to improve the media landscape and who are demonstrably making a substantial impact. We call them “Core Media Fellows” and selected them from an initial pool of 231 Fellows, after gathering extensive data and applying rigorous selection criteria to identify the final cohort. Each of these fifty social entrepreneurs seeks to harness the tectonic shifts under way in the global media landscape to more constructively serve societal interests. Among the group, we found stunning diversity. For example, Core Media Fellows hailed from twenty-two countries. But we also discerned broad similarities. Indeed, each of the fifty Fellows pursued one of five overarching goals: Improving the infrastructure and environment within which the media operates; Improving standards of reporting to strengthen the quality of journalism; Ensuring the media is a vehicle for civic engagement; Making the media a self-sustaining business; Increasing media literacy by providing the public with diverse and representative content. Our study of social entrepreneurs reveals important lessons—spanning strategies to represent marginalized voices to partnership models within and beyond the media industry—for how to transform the media. But it also uncovers areas of need, such as business model innovations, where too few social entrepreneurs have found the support to pilot approaches that ultimately could reverse the media’s declining fortunes." (Pages 1-2)
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"This widely accessible book by Magda Konieczna, an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University in the United States, provides a critical and broad examination of nonprofits in the American journalism landscape. Konieczna employs very rich and insightful case studies of three American non
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profits—the Center for Public Integrity, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and MinnPost—to show the terms of a new logic of journalism, the perils of news production outside legacy news media, and the upside of the journalistic reform projects at the periphery of traditional journalism." (Review by David Cheruiyot in International Journal of Communication, vol. 15, 2021,
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"Our study focuses on Sesame Street and sets out to examine how Sesame Workshop, as a ‘nonprofit’ organization targeting children, has been able to continuously transform and make itself relevant in a predominantly commercial children’s television landscape dominated by transnational ownership
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structures. The analysis includes an investigation of Sesame Workshop’s mission statements, organizational structure, annual fiscal reports, promotional material and other written sources from the 1970s to the 2010s. We focus on the Workshop’s own arguments and reasons for why their ‘non-profit’ status was, and still is, better at taking care of children’s interests than the for-profit companies. These understandings are held up against the, at times, very commercial logic guiding the workshop’s business model, and analysed within the economic and political context of children’s television in the United States and the Workshop’s key international target markets. Our theoretical framework draws upon insights from work on political economy and children’s media and comparative media systems." (Abstract)
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"The growing nonprofit news sector is showing some signs of economic health, and most leaders of those outlets express optimism about the future, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. But many of these organizations also face substantial challenges to their long-term financial well-be
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ing. The report finds that large, often one-time seed grants from foundations help many of these nonprofit news outlets get up and running. But as those grants expire, many organizations do not have the resources or expertise necessary for the business tasks needed to broaden the funding base. More than half of the nonprofit news organizations surveyed by the Pew Research Center in late 2012 (54%) identified business, marketing and fundraising as the area of greatest staffing need, compared with 39% who said the top need was for more editorial employees. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the nonprofits (62%) cited “finding the time to focus on the business side of the operation” as a major challenge—compared with 55% who cited “increasing competition for grant money.” Most nonprofit news organizations are small, with minimal staffs and modest budgets. Indeed, 78% of the survey respondents reported having five or fewer full-time paid staffers—including 26% with none." (Overview, page 1)
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