Philanthro-journalism : Reporters without orders | The Economist

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  • Philanthro-journalism: Reporters without orders | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/node/21556568/print

    Philanthro-journalism
    Reporters without orders
    Can journalism funded by private generosity compensate for the decline of the commercial kind?
    Jun 9th 2012 | from the print edition

    Readers and advertisers have switched to the internet. Profit margins have shrunk or vanished. Papers are dying and journalists being sacked. Costly foreign and investigative reporting has been particularly squeezed, as has local news. One increasingly popular—if limited—response to these travails is the sort of “philanthro-journalism” long practised elsewhere by the likes of Caucasian Knot.

    Thanks to its charitable traditions, this trend is most visible in America. A few philanthropically financed operations have been around for decades, but recently they have been joined by many more. Jan Schaffer of J-Lab, a journalism think-tank at American University in Washington, DC, estimates that American foundations have donated at least $250m to non-profit journalism ventures since 2005.

    Many of these, such as the Texas Tribune, cover state politics. The highest-profile is arguably ProPublica, an investigative-reporting unit set up in 2008 with help from the Sandler Foundation. It has already won two Pulitzer prizes. Its managing editor Stephen Engelberg argues that, since investigative journalism is now too expensive to be sustained by commercial business models, it ought to be considered a public good.

    The trend is spreading to other countries, including Australia and Britain, where regulators and politicians have fretted about the decline of old-fashioned media without doing much about it. Money from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation is funding the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), based at City University in London. Iain Overton, its editor, reckons that many traditional outlets lack the forensic skills, as well as the cash, to crunch data and hold the powerful to account.

    #Philanthropie #Médias