Non-profit Media Research Articles

‘You can’t buy a revolution, but you can support a paper fighting for one’: Journalism cooperatives’ organizational traits and journalistic missions

This article explores journalism cooperatives, a sub-field of journalism practice and a type of news organization that is becoming more popular as an organizational option in journalism internationally. While other non-traditional ways of funding and producing news – such as non-profit media or crowdfunding initiatives – receive growing attention from journalism researchers, cooperative enterprises remain largely neglected. This study develops an inventory of 29 such news outlets in Europe, North America, and South America. It presents a portrait of the cooperative field in journalism in terms of founding year, geographic location, linguistic tendencies, and cooperative sub-types. Second, based on an analysis of the official websites of seven of these cooperatives, the article describes the revenue sources, workforce, governance structures, and missions of such needs-rather than profit-driven news outlets. The study finds that their organizational traits oscillate between alternative media, non-profit media, and mainstream media attributes. However, in addition, journalism cooperatives possess a unique feature, namely internal democratic governance mechanisms, which have the potential to increase public trust in the news media. Moreover, for the seven cooperatives investigated here, this potential is enhanced further as they assign a key role to audiences as owners, managers, and funders of the organization (they are either reader-owned or co-owned by journalists and readers). I argue that the results of this exploratory study on journalism cooperatives, together with existing research on news non-profits, invite us to consider that the social economy might be a better default home for journalism than the capitalist marketplace.

Digital news media as a social resilience proxy: A computational political economy perspective

This article investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic was framed in public, private and non-profit media production. It conceptualises digital news as an indicator of social resilience and the interaction between social and biological/natural systems. We analysed news articles published in 2020/2021 on 21 Croatian websites using natural language processing. We collected 985,850 articles and manually coded samples to train different classifiers. The first classifier was developed to determine which articles relate to COVID-19. The second classifier was used for articles’ topic classification; the third classifier was used to classify articles into resilience classes. A limited discussion of transformative (long-term) resilience, especially in private media, contributed to the most significant content share. The debate focused on keeping the status quo through coping or returning to pre-pandemic conditions through adaptive mechanisms. The news media contributed to how public issues were framed and how science and scientific research were discussed.

‘Conversations with Men’

This research on the Gender Conversations with Men media project in Southern Africa investigates the significance of collaboration in promoting effective and sustainable media practices on gender issues using the partnership between STEPS and their partner organizations as a case study. STEPS, established in 2000, is a non-profit media organization based in South Africa that uses film and video as tools for social change. It has longstanding relationships with 9 partner organizations in 7 different Southern Africa countries. This case study offers a wholly Global South example of a collaborative, multi-country media advocacy program centered on gender issues. Additionally, the researchers are based in and/or from the region from which they both have practice-based participatory video backgrounds. The varied types and levels of collaboration found within the ‘web’ of project relationships was considered from the framework of co-creation to assess questions of power, equity and reciprocity. The nature of the collaboration was then considered in terms of assessing its relevance to indicators of project success and efficacy. Data was collected through document and media gathering and analysis - including Gender Conversations with Men program documentation, the STEPS films used in the first 2 phases of the program, and the participatory ‘change story’ videos created as part of the project. Research visits were conducted with onsite focus groups and semi-structured interviews with program coordinators and facilitators with 6 of the partner organizations in 4 countries. Of most relevance to this paper, the various collaborative relationships within the network were explored in these research interactions as well as change stories at facilitator and community participant level. This paper argues that the specific type of collaboration that took place within the Gender Conversations with Men project was co-creation and that this contributed significantly to the high levels of ownership of the process at local project level. The locally based partner organizations were able to develop and run programs they deemed most appropriate to their needs, which enabled highly engaged conversations at community-level screenings as well as authentic participatory video storytelling. The first-hand ‘change stories’ collected from the research suggest a high level of impact at facilitator (and community) level on attitude and behavior change specifically on young men through their participation in virtual interactive workshops, facilitation of (or participation in) community screenings and the making of the participatory ‘change story’ videos. This research highlights the critical role of interrogating pervasive claims of ‘collaboration’ to consider authentic co-creation as a more effective and sustainable way in which to address sensitive topics, such as gender issues, through media advocacy practices. Co-creation allows for diverse perspectives and expertise to come together based on principles of equity and reciprocity to foster engagement, motivation, and ownership among participants. The case study provides insights for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers interested in using collaborative approaches in their media interventions.

Content is key to non-profit digital media strategy

This research aims to determine the type of content offered by non-profit digital media, determining whether this content is different and characteristic. For this purpose, a binomial logistic regression analysis was carried out on a sample of digital medias included in the Latin American SembraMedia directory (509 media: 70% for-profit and 30% non-profit). This data from SembraMedia's digital media list showed that non-profit media is having a social impact. As such, it was relevant to address non-profit media as an organisational model compared to for-profit media. Variables such as journalistic genre, the techniques used the origin of the content, and the coverage or type of content were considered. The main conclusion is that non-profit digital media show significant differences in their contents when compared to for-profit ones. These differences are found in the content (environment) and in the journalistic techniques used (data journalism).

Factors Influencing Public Opinion in Mass Media News Coverage

Mass media play an extremely important role in the development process of democratic countries. Since the widespread dissemination of paper media and public media such as cable television and radio, more and more new media platforms have begun to appear in the daily lives of citizens as technology advances, excluding the traditional model of government-funded or non-profit media reporting news. This article will focus on the evolution of traditional public media news coverage and how they have gradually changed the public perception of public media in response to social events. The essay will then discuss some of the role’s media coverage has played in the political sphere and the reasons why the phenomenon of political polarization has arisen. In addition, the article includes a reference to how polarized views in real life are deviated from what one would expect. However, with the emergence of commercial media platforms, media coverage needs to be made more reliable through reasonable regulatory measures, and citizens need to understand that news coverage is always topical and limited, and that they need to rely moderately on online social media to avoid over-reliance on the same environmental circle and thus social disengagement.

Worlds Apart

The concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship have been ever more present in public discourse during the past 20–30 years, along with radically different views of the kind and level of socioeconomic or political change that these specific economic ventures (should) aim for. Although social enterprise discourse is often dominated by neoliberal perspectives, which present market-based activity as simply an efficient means of solving all kinds of more or less local and isolated social problems, more critically minded strands of research have been questioning this approach and calling for a broader and more critical perspective. This paper aims to see how these opposing discourses are represented in the Croatian news media, as a discursive sphere which is accessible to a broad public. The analysis focuses on online media in the period 2007–2019 and is based on a comparison between three media types: the online versions of a national daily newspaper and a regional daily newspaper, as well as an online-only progressive non-profit news site. A stark contrast is apparent between mainstream commercial media and alternative non-profit media, i.e. a dominance of neoliberal “enterprise discourse” in the former and more emphasis on a broader political and economic agenda calling for more fundamental, comprehensive and long-term change in the latter.

What role do social accountability actors play in resisting media capture in sub-Saharan Africa? Evidence from Ghana

Although media capture is a global issue, it is a particularly significant problem in sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana. Media capture occurs when media organisations become incapable of performing critical watchdog functions, such as fighting corruption and human rights violations, because of pressures from capital and power. This article addresses a fundamental question: In Ghana’s Fourth Republic, what role do social accountability actors play in resisting media capture by capital and power? I argue that social accountability actors perform three essential, interrelated roles: (1) defending media freedoms and independence, (2) activating and facilitating the media’s work and (3) legitimising and encouraging critical journalism. In doing so, they use a combination of strategies – from advocacy, denunciation and legal action to establishing and funding non-profit media outlets to do investigative journalism. This work extends the literature by examining the crucial role social accountability actors play in counteracting media capture so that critical journalism can do its job.

Organisational taxonomy alignment project use case

New York Public Radio (NYPR) is a nonprofit media organisation that owns numerous public radio stations and a live performance space in the New York area. Since 1924, WNYC has grown and evolved in response to changing radio technology and consumer behaviours, most recently introducing podcasts to its numerous audio experiences. In 2019, NYPR embarked on a metadata and taxonomy alignment project to support the end-to-end alignment of metadata tags across content types, brands and business functions. The project began by surveying relevant business units and performing audits of content and data across those teams to identify the most salient issues to be addressed and to prioritise actions through the rest of the project. This paper describes how user personas and ‘content journey maps’ were drawn up to identify the driving needs of the primary business units and the current state of content as it moved through its life cycle, including the players involved in the content’s life cycle, the systems it touches, the metadata applied and whether the content is archived. As this paper will show, the information from these exercises drove the creation of a multi-tiered taxonomy with top nodes classifying information around people, content, assets, entities and distribution.

Politics of race, gender, and visual representation in feminist media education

ABSTRACT This paper discusses technologies of power and technologies of self in relation to race and gender in youth digital media production. We query how girls of color use feminist filmmaking to tell the stories they want to tell, and ask where the political discourse shaping their media production is located throughout the process. Our analysis is based on research conducted from 2015 to 2017 exploring traditional and mobile digital video production practices in non-profit media education programs. We offer a view to the cultural politics of digital video production in educational settings and focus on two final productions – an exposé about girls’ empowerment and a horror genre inspired slasher film – each reproducing and subverting common themes of racial and gender-based oppression in and through digital media.

Revising Legacy Media Practices to Serve Hyperlocal Information Needs of Marginalized Populations

ABSTRACTThis study explores how two nonprofit media organizations–PublicSource and Philadelphia Community Access Media (PhillyCAM)–have transformed their legacy practices to better connect within and serve marginalized populations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, PA. As traditional newsrooms have been depleted by dire financial realities, new journalism outcroppings have heeded the Knight Commission’s Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (2009) report and, consequently, revised their approaches to community engagement. Adjacent to these reformed legacy newsrooms are community media organizations that operate a municipality’s public, educational, or government (PEG) access media production facilities. Although PEG access media’s legacy has no clear genealogical ties with traditional journalism, an increasing amount of PEG operations over the past ten years have started to intentionally test editorialized forms of community news reporting. The data collected and assessed in this study has indicated that news organizations like PublicSource have an explicit need to do more relational community engagement work that will enable it to fill hyperlocal information gaps and better serve marginalized populations. Community media organizations like PhillyCAM have extensive experience engaging diverse publics; however, as this study reveals, they could benefit from employing formalized news production methods that are guided by journalistic standards.

The relevance of public policies for the sustainability of community media: Lessons from Argentina

Since 2004 and for the first time in the history of broadcasting in the region, a dozen Latin American countries have acknowledged community radio and television stations as legal providers of audiovisual communication services. In Argentina, a law passed in 2009 not only awarded legal recognition to the sector, it also provided a promotion mechanism for community media. In this respect, it was one of the most ambitious ones in the region. The driving question is: How relevant are public policies for the sustainability of community media in Argentina? The argument is: even though the sector of community media has developed and persisted for decades in illegal conditions imposed by the state, the legalization and promotion policies carried out by the state from the perspective of human rights in a context of extreme media ownership concentration have been critical to the growth and sustainability of non-profit media.

‘Mobile Phones and the Internet, Mate’: (Social) Media, Art, and Revolution in Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins

In his novel about the Egyptian Revolution, The City Always Wins (2017), Omar Robert Hamilton shows that the alternative media possess mass engagement and global reach, while threatening power. However, over the course of his novel Hamilton traces the crushing of the ‘Twitter revolution’ and the rise of a disillusionment and despair among the revolutionaries. This downward trajectory is typified both in the appellative journey from Hamilton’s non-profit media collective Mosireen—‘those who insist’—to the novel’s similar group, portentously named Chaos; and in the text’s reverse-chronological structure of ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Today’, and ‘Yesterday’. The author uses Twitter as an archive of an alternative, resistant history of revolutionary struggle; he embeds Tweets in the fabric of this experimental novel; and social media posts interrupt and punctuate the narrative as in the real life of his millennial characters. In this article I explore the novel’s representations of (social) media and the impact these have both on everyday lives and modes of protest. Despite promising beginnings, the internet ultimately turns ‘toxic’ and is depicted as a Pandora’s box of dis- and misinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, and the manipulations of state media lackeys. A more lasting alternative to media may be ‘creative insurgency’. As such, I conclude this article by discussing what art can achieve that (citizen) journalism cannot, and how this applies to the novel’s portrayals of art, particularly music.

Media sustainability, ethics and democratization: Cases of Philippine media civil society organizations

Non-profit media civil society organizations (MCSOs) help contribute towards democratization and towards improving the conduct of journalism in the Philippines. These MCSOs operate with meagre resources while producing independent stories and implementing advocacies such as journalist protection, freedom of information, responsible media and civic journalism. While MCSOs operate through predictable revenue models, how do they sustain their work and walk ethical tightropes in fulfilling their non-profit and journalistic missions? This case study research presents approaches by four Philippine MCSOs on linking media sustainability, democratization and ethics.

New Media Income Sources and Digital Media in Turkey: Business Models, Issues and Suggestions

In Turkey, the commercial press is faced with problems both economically and politically. Besides, the decline in sales and advertising revenues due to the influence of internet has led journalists to turn to the new fields. Many journalists lost their job in the commercial media organizations, have turned to the new field of production that digital media makes possible, consequently new different media organizations have started to operate. The goal is to find new models for production, distribution and consumption of content that show public good characteristics. Crowdfunding is also a viable option for financing non-profit media. In addition to creating income, reducing the expenses of journalism is also among the applied models. A small editorial staff, web designer and citizen journalists can distribute the content over the internet. Since the public support has been used in favor of governmental preferences, the press has often been punished for criticizing the government. Not being able to get a share of the advertisements distributed by the Press Advertisement Agency as well as the official advertisements of the state institutions are some of the main fines. In this context, state support, which is applied for the outside of the main stream media in other countries, seems difficult in Turkey. There are also donations made by national and international foundations and non-governmental organizations and some other resources. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the sources and expansions of digital newspapers and news sites such as T24, Bianet, P24, Diken, and Medyascope. For this purpose, the ownership structures and income sources of these organizations and the business models they apply will be discussed.

‘Getting the seat of your pants dirty’: Space and place in ethnographic educational research

In this paper I consider the importance of space and place in ethnographic educational research. The paper draws on research that took place at Educational Video Center (EVC), a non-profit media education centre in New York City (NYC). In this paper I articulate EVC as a place imbued with meaning from the pedagogical practices that take place within and regarding it and argue for a consideration of spatiality in ethnographic educational research. I consider the role of the city landscape in order to identify how knowledge is emplaced and represented through digital, visual technology, and I conclude by outlining the criticality of spatializing our ethnographic practices.

Redefining Publics: Mosireen, State Crime and the Rise of a Digital Public Sphere

The article traces the rise of Mosireen, a non-profit media collective, within the parameters of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt's public sphere. It highlights how the Mosireen Collective strategically co-opted the infrastructure of the internet during critical periods of the Egyptian revolution as a tool of resistance to fight injustice, expose human rights violations and restore some semblance of accountability. Moreover, it explores Mosireen's innovative online/offline digital activism which enabled formerly marginalized publics to access new modes of information and challenge elite-driven discourses, thereby contributing to the “democratization” of the public sphere. The article further investigates Mosireen's emancipatory use of technology where the creation of an oppositional framework not only sustained “resistance from below” movements but also seemed to open up new potentialities for counter-hegemonic spaces and alternative discursive frameworks of society. The article provides a rich case study in how ideological struggles and questions of power are interpreted within the broader realm of Egyptian civil society with a particular focus on the power of visual production and its effect on the development of digital counter-publics. Finally, the limitations of the public sphere under neo-liberal capitalism are contextualized and critiqued within the context of the Mosireen Collective and broader digital resistance movements.

Funding the News: Foundations and Nonprofit Media

In Section 1 of our report, drawing on previously published research along with interviews conducted with more than 30 news nonprofit journalists, experts, and philanthropists, we review the growth of the nonprofit news sector leading up to the 2016 election, highlighting major trends and challenges. In Section 2, we analyze 32,422 journalism and media-related grants totaling $1.8 billion distributed by 6,568 foundations between 2010 and 2015, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available. We assess patterns in funding specific to the production and dissemination of nonprofit journalism, as well as affiliated activities such as grants to journalism museums and higher education, support for journalism research and technology development, and grants for journalist associations and professional development.

‘The communal’ in school and indigenous radio: Evidence from the North of Argentina

Abstract The Argentinian Law 26.522 on Audiovisual Communication Services (currently under reform) aimed at democratizing the media arena by recognizing multiple actors such as community broadcasters, school and indigenous media, among others. According to the legal classification, community broadcasters were regulated as private non-profit media, despite having specific objectives, programming, organizational logic and economic conditions. Conversely, school and indigenous media merged into the public sector, even if they may act as community media. The article compares results arising from two research projects carried out in Northern Argentina through in-depth interviews with key informants from two indigenous radio stations and two school radio stations. The theoretical framework mainly draws on literature about community, alternative and popular communication. Results show that communities participate in such media foundation or management and that media content deals with cultural and political issues related to their interests or needs. Indeed, emerging features allow considering such broadcasters as community media.

Public Radio at a Crossroads: Emerging Trends in U.S. Public Media

While useful in establishing U.S. public media, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is an imperfect instrument for moving public radio to a secure future. Policies governing public broadcasting are insufficient to address the economic, political, social, and technological changes upending media organizations, both commercial and non-commercial. The urgent need is for more flexible structural arrangements as public radio and public television stations merge, partner with non-profit media entities, and seek funding that builds on the strength of the local public radio network as well as responds to the demand for imaginative, on-demand content from national networks.

Report: Few editorial guidelines govern nonprofit media outlets

A new report by the American Press Institute finds there are very few written guidelines governing editorial independence of nonprofit media outlets. The API surveyed funders, nonprofit media outlets and commercial partners about the financing of nonprofit news and how it impacts reporting from those outlets. The results showed that there is little in the way of editorial “firewalls” that would limit a funder's influence on media coverage of specific topics of interest—a finding that could undermine the public's confidence in the independence of some nonprofit journalism.