Just another voice in the wind about the very real difficulties facing journalism right now. So many people have talked about a non-profit journalism sector, operating largely along the lines of public radio and public television, with telethon-like beg-fests that apparently turn up a fair amount of cash (much to the annoyance of anyone forced to listen to those interruptions).
Other "entrepreneurial journalism" ventures have also attempted to crowd-source editorial assignments, and support for those assignments, like the once-hopeful http://newassignment.net.
The inheritors of this mantle now fall to foundation-supported sites, or sites like Pro Publica (http://www.propublica.org/) or Global Post (http://www.globalpost.com/), sites that seem to want to create a new syndication model for longer form journalists along the lines of what the agencies like Black Star or Magnum did for photojournalists once upon a time, only without the high demand of a glossy magazine industry beast that needed feeding.
Then there's the sponsorship of the Knight Foundation, with the News Challenge for entrepreneurial journalism (http://www.newschallenge.org/).
There's just a lot in the wind these days about the public service or non-profit model for journalism. To tell you the truth, I'd prefer the government support more characteristic of the early days of journalism and the United States republic, when a free press was valued more than in name only, as carrying the point on small-d democracy and other Enlightenment values (even with the raucous practices of the penny press), through tax breaks and postage subsidies.
[Key quotation from the Geoffrey Cowan and David Westphal Annenberg study: "Thanks to the visionary leadership of George Washington and James Madison, mailing costs were heavily subsidized by the government for the first 180 years of our nation’s history – from the Postal Act of 1792 to the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. In 1970, the Postal Service subsidized 75 percent of the cost of periodical mailings. Today, the subsidy has fallen to just 11 percent. In today’s dollars, that’s a decline from nearly $2 billion in 1970 to $288 million today. Magazines that would still be profitable under the arrangement established by our founders are now closing at a precipitous rate."]
But more than that, if a site like Wikileaks can't keep it going, what does it say for the hopes for an audience/donation support model?
It's sort of like the New York Times saying, "Sorry, we can't publish the Pentagon Papers. Nobody wants to read that stuff enough to support it."
Wikileaks: whistleblowing, investigative journalism isn't cheap
Posted 02 February 2010 09:43am by Patricio Robles
Times are tough for the traditional news organizations. Their business models battered, many question the future viability of the investigative journalism these organizations have historically funded.
Some suggest that nimble internet-based upstarts, possibly staffed with citizen journalists and volunteers, are the future. With lower overhead, these new media upstarts may be able to step in and fill the void. Or so the thinking goes.
But it may not be that easy. Wikileaks, an anonymous award-winning whistleblower website that has hosted a number of prominent leaked documents since its founding in 2007, has been forced to shut down because of, you guessed it, a lack of money.
Text on the Wikileaks website currently reads "We protect the world—but will you protect us?" and the non-profit organization that runs Wikileaks, the Sunshine Press, is asking for donations. Its annual costs approach $200,000 and that's without staff being paid (that would bring the total to $600,000). So far, Sunshine Press has only raised $130,000 for 2010.
While the Wikileaks websites declares that it will be back online "soon", its parent's financial situation makes it clear: despite the fact that the documents it has obtained are of significant value to the public and have been the subject of front-page news, Wikileaks faces the same challenges as any other news organization.
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Obviously, Wikileaks is run by a non-profit. There's no robust moneymaking model. But even if Wikileaks was filled with obtrusive ads, for instance, a quick look at its traffic figures makes it pretty clear: there's no way Wikileaks could generate enough advertising revenue to be a self-sustaining enterprise. Which is in reality the same problem that most traditional news organizations are facing. No matter how hard they try, the value of what they offer to the public always costs more to provide than what it brings back in the form of money. Even though the intangible value of what's being offered is really, really high.
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