Journalism Funders Forum Ideas Day boards

The “missing” revenue problem, community-driven journalism, and data journalism in small newsrooms

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

🔔 Pleased to announce our first +500 confirmed #ijf18 speakers. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!

• 11 questions the news business is trying to answer in 2018. West Coast news chaos, a new leader at WordPress, the decline of digital display — and is The Washington Post really profitable?
• “Did God give us that (advertising) revenue? No.” says CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis. “It wasn’t our money, it was our customers’ money, and Facebook and Google came along and offered them a better deal.” The problem, says Jarvis, is that “we didn’t change our business models. We insist on maintaining the mass-media business model, and that’s more of a problem than social media.”
  🔔 Jeff Jarvis and Mathew Ingram will be #ijf18 speakers
• Facebook’s Campbell Brown at Recode’s Code Media conference: “Your traffic’s always gonna go up and down.” Also, she said: “I also want to clear up this idea that, like — my job is not to go recruit people from news organizations to put their stuff on Facebook. My job isn’t to convince them to stay on Facebook. If someone feels that being on Facebook is not good for your business, you shouldn’t be on Facebook. Let’s be clear about that. This is not about us trying to make everybody happy. My job is not to make publishers happy. My job is to ensure that there is quality news on Facebook and that the publishers who want to be on Facebook and want to do quality news on Facebook have a business model that works. That’s very different. So if anyone feels that this isn’t the right platform for them, then they should not be on Facebook. I don’t see us as the answer to the problem.”
• How WikiTribune plans to change the journalism business as we know it. “We’re going to produce evidence-based quality journalism and that will qualify us to be a source for Wikipedia,” says Orit Kopel, WikiTribune’s co-founder and vice president for business development. “It’s not the Wiki way to tell people to direct to us, it’s not going to happen! It’s a community driven encyclopedia and we are a community driven news site.”
  🔔 WikiTribune’s Orit Kopel and Peter Bale will be #ijf18 speakers
• How to build revenue by connecting with your audience. “No one ever became a member of a journalism site offering news that feels like a commodity.” Here’s CJR’s Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement.
  🔔 Emily Goligoski will be a #ijf18 speaker
• How can we improve the collaboration between journalists and donors? The European Journalism Centre has collected ten challenges — with ideas for potential solutions.
  🔔 Adam Thomas will be a #ijf18 speaker
• Why small newsrooms do the best data journalism. “Turns out you don’t need a big newsroom to do award-winning data journalism.” Bettina Figl, research fellow at The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, published a paper about data journalism and small newsrooms. She also talks with Check Your Facts podcast about how she managed to get into Oxford University and what she found out researching several newsrooms.
  🔔 Bettina Figl will be a #ijf18 speaker

• Best practices for reporting through social media during a mass shooting. “With each new mass shooting or terrorist attack, the norms of reporting and publishing information about them seem to shift in dramatic ways.”
• The heartbreak and frustration of covering one mass shooting after another. “The hardest part is forcing myself not to get used to this. I see the pattern. I’ve described it. I know what people will say, what the response is. This is the second time I’ve heard the Broward County sheriff speak in front of the media about a tragic mass shooting. This is the third time I’ve heard Governor Rick Scott describe a tragic mass shooting. And I haven’t been a reporter very long. So I force myself to constantly confront these realities.”
• Two Reuters journalists face 14 years in Burmese prison after exposing massacre of Rohingya Muslims. In a shocking new exposé, Reuters reports Burmese soldiers and members of an informal militia executed 10 Rohingya Muslim captives. At least two of the men were hacked to death. The others were shot. Here is their report.
  🔔 We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18, with Aela Callan, Sam Dubberley, Tirana Hassan and Hannah McKay:

• The problem of sexual harassment and its pervasiveness in our industry is not just anecdotal. A joint study by the International Women’s Media Foundation and the International News Safety Institute found that the most commonly reported perpetrators of “intimidation, threats, and abuse” were bosses. “There’s no closing our eyes. There’s no turning away. There’s no more tolerance. There’s no acceptance. This must end. It must end now.”
  🔔 We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18, with Jasmine Andersson, Megha Mohan, Louise Ridley and Hannah Storm:

• Covering populist leaders: 10 research-based tips for journalists. A new paper by Claes H. de Vreese, a professor of political communication at The Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam, discusses populist movements and the media’s role in them.
• Why selective exposure to like-minded congenial political news is less prevalent than you think. “A deep dive into the academic literature tells us that the “echo chambers” narrative captures, at most, the experience of a minority of the public. Indeed, this claim itself has ironically been amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect.” This article is part of a white paper series on media and democracy commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
• When an online news outlet goes out of business, its archives can disappear as well. “In the 21st century, more and more information is ‘born digital’ and will stay that way, prone to decay or disappearance as servers, software, Web technologies, and computer languages break down.” This is the new battle over journalism’s digital legacy.