Guiding media innovators toward solutions, around the world
GK has survived and thrived with a model of in-depth story-telling Isabela Ponce and José María León met on Twitter more than a decade ago when it was still “a nice place where you could meet people,” Isabela recalls. From that meeting, they began to exchange ideas and collaborate. What emerged from this partnership in […]
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Few believed a subscription-only website of investigative journalism could survive Why write about “reasons for optimism” when so much is going wrong in our politics, economy, and environment? Optimism gives us confidence we can make things better. As I like to say, it’s another day of opportunity. Conventional wisdom predicted failure for the French startup […]
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Many endure threats, cyberattacks, even physical violence in 3 global regions What follows is an edited chapter of the study Inflection Point International of SembraMedia about 201 digital native media in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. This chapter deals with Media Freedom and Journalist Safety. Read the full report here–also in Spanish and Portuguese. It […]
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Spain’s infoLibre increases subscribers, staff, audience during Covid crisis The name of one of Spain’s notable survival stories in public-service journalism–infoLibre–contains the essence of its guiding principle. It literally means “free information”–that is, free of undue influence from political and business interests. In his annual public letter, Jesús Maraña, editorial director, attributed the publication’s financial […]
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Mediapart’s digital subscription model succeeded slowly, then spectacularly The French digital news startup Mediapart’s five founders—well known journalists from the venerable publications Le Monde and Libération— defied conventional wisdom of the time when they launched the investigative journalism site in 2008. The media industry graveyard was already littered with examples of failed subscription models for […]
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Transparency is key to strengthening trust in media People tell each other stories all the time to make sense of the world. At the moment, various storytellers are competing for our attention. Their motives vary wildly: to surprise, distract, entertain, confuse, create envy, win votes, inspire hatred, make money, and, in some cases, to perform […]
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Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said just before signing the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” News publishers have taken this idea to heart with a trend toward collaborating as a means of survival when so many economic forces are working against them. […]
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