Guiding media innovators toward solutions, around the world
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. […]
Read More »Tina Kaiser. Photo by Gisela Gürtler News organizations have been losing credibility for years, and the reasons are many. Too often, we journalists have been arrogant and said, in effect, Trust us, we know what we’re doing. But today, journalism is under attack, and we have to explain why people should trust us. Versión en […]
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Between fines and recovered funds, journalists get results Lately a couple of us here at the University of Navarra have been looking for models of high-quality journalism that are sustainable. As it turns out, many of the best news organizations that are thriving are doing investigative journalism. Readers like this type of journalism, which holds […]
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BOGOTA, Colombia — Independent news media in Latin America often lack the financial resources to act as a counterweight to the political powers and multinational businesses in the region. But these media, many of them digital natives, have found that by banding together they can multiply their scarce resources and magnify their impact beyond their […]
Read More »Kinsey Wilson. Photo by Mary Kang/Knight Center AUSTIN, Texas — One of the dirty little secrets in digital media is that the big numbers of page views and unique users touted by publishers are misleading at best. They overstate a publication’s audience size and impact. Most visitors to a publisher’s content are fly-bys: They stay […]
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