Data Created Through Investigative Journalism Could Become its Biggest Source of Revenue

“Finances separate life from death in an independent media organization,” said Fabiola Torres, Co-Founder and journalist for the independent media Ojo Público in Peru, during an interview last month. She couldn’t have been more right.

I know we are not telling you —fellow media worker— anything new: our work as journalists, editors, directors or anyone working for an independent media, depends on the financial aspect.

I also know that there is no magic recipe that can cover the costs of producing quality journalism.

The secret formula is not in the philanthropic foundations that have financed a revival of independent journalism in Latin America and the rest of the world during the last 10 years. There are very few that invest in our region and those that do invest in journalism seem only to be interested in the “new” thing.

Nor in a paywall because in reality, how many people are willing to pay to access digital information? Or in a membership model —is it healthy to depend on a small group of users willing to pay, say an average of 20% of the total audience of a digital media? How long will they support journalism before they suffer from “subscriber’s fatigue”? Or in the sale of ads with all its variants — yes, even native advertisements— or in events — no matter how creative and innovative they are.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule and some successful cases, but the vast majority are newsrooms that flourish in areas with dynamic and stable economies — examples of Texas Tribune in the United States or Correctiv in Germany just to name — very different from our Latin American region where we go from crisis to crisis (economic, political, social or democratic crisis, depending on the country) and the concept of stability is a dream more than a reality.

A possible recipe is, perhaps, to have a bit of everything, and the correct measures will depend on the type of business model that each independent media organization has.

I must say right away that in this blog we will not present the magic recipe to solve the financial problems of Latin American journalism, but to share with you what I have found so far thanks to the support of colleagues from the region and from the Tow-Knight Center at CUNY.

Our main motivation is to achieve a business model that has financial independence from foundations and philanthropists — who are very generous and still need to invest in independent journalism, please! — to ensure the creation of a center for investigative reporting for Latin America, focused on the production of cross-border investigations, a project in which I am currently working.

In order for the center to produce quality and cross-border investigations and to be sustainable over time, we must be financially self-sufficient. One idea is to develop an entrepreneurial arm within the same center whose objective is to generate income to be reinvested in the production of more journalism.

These are some possible income channels in which to experiment:

• Sale of products derived from data. Investigations based on data — there are thousands of datasets on public procurement, companies, properties, elections of State representatives, public spending, laws, weather, emissions and imports and exports available in public portals all across the region, many of them in a downloadable format — can be analyzed, organized and sold as attractive reports to compliance institutions such as regional banks, cooperation agencies, NGOs and private investigators or law firms.
• Sale of services, specifically intensive training known as Data BootCamps. We can follow the example of DataLeads in India, which for four years has been training public ministries and companies related to health and education, to solve, through the use of public data, real problems in their region. The center can offer government agencies, international cooperation entities or industry associations, to organize data-gathering camps in different regions and countries. In these we will bring together journalists, data specialists, designers and other professionals (engineers, public employees of a sector, anti-corruption activists, etc) to learn how to use data in their analysis. These boot camps will be offered as paid services and should leave a margin of profit, as they do for DataLeads in India.
• Learn to negotiate the intellectual property that journalists have over their published investigations, so that they can be transformed into films, television series, documentaries or books, so that the income derived from the percentages of earnings, reach their pockets directly and by lifetime. Until now, journalists who published books based on their work have sold the copyright at very low prices compared to the earnings received by the producers or publishers. This model would be novel for Latin America although it already has good results in the United States from which we can learn.

If these ideas, which are still being studied, are successful, they could be useful to any media organization that works with data and publishes quality and impactful investigations, even if the organization works as a non-profit, since the income will be reinvested exclusively in the operating expenses of the entity.

The center for investigative reporting of Latin America will seek to experiment with this business model so that the finances of digital media are taking up what Fabiola Torres so wisely said: closer to life than to death.