HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT JOURNALISM LAST WEEK TONIGHT
If a fraction of the people frightened by John Oliver’s assessment of the news biz backed community nonprofit media we’d be out of the shithouse
The media is a food chain which would fall apart without local newspapers. -John Oliver
My email inbox nearly melted Sunday night. By Monday morning, I’d received more DMs on Twitter about John Oliver’s assessment of the journalism business than I have on all other topics combined over the past month. The messages all sounded more or less like this note from a former colleague: Holy crap man! John Oliver is talking about community journalism in Boston and killing it. You need to get in touch with this guy right away.
You bet I do. Despite some relative successes in our first year, it’s a constant struggle to find donors for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ). And here is one of America’s foremost comedic polemicists going viral with a brilliant look at the exact problems we are addressing — namely, the erosion of community reporting in Boston — but without telling people how they can help. I can appreciate a solid Boston Globe dig, and laughed heartily at Oliver’s Spotlight spoof, but afterwards I felt like I was stranded in a desert watching search planes fly right past me.
Of course it would be awesome to connect with Oliver. What’s more important, however, is that BINJ reaches more of the millions of people who were moved by his take on the media. I have heard nonprofit experts say that less than 1 percent of philanthropy goes to journalism, and most of that is for investigative funds at universities or PBS and NPR, very little of which is community-based. Hopefully this recent Last Week Tonight monologue helps boost those numbers, particularly in hyper-local spaces. Like Oliver says, “Sooner or later we are either going to have to pay for journalism, or we are all going to pay for it.”
THREE WAYS YOU CAN DONATE TO BINJ …
Or you can mail a check to:
Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism
P.O. Box 51583, Boston, MA 02205
