Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails

by Magda Konieczna

Overview

The last decade has witnessed a dramatic decline in the presence and influence of legacy news organizations. This decline has led to tremendous growth in news startups, which have attempted to fill the gap left by their legacy counterparts by producing the quality public service journalism upon which the health of U.S. democracy depends. If legacy news organizations, with their existing infrastructure, are failing, can these startups do any better? This question lies at the heart of Journalism Without Profit.

Magda Konieczna explores three prominent news nonprofits: the Center for Public Integrity, one of the oldest and largest of its kind; the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a university-based watchdog news organization that relies on others to publish its work; and MinnPost, an online news website. Through in-depth study of the practices of each newsroom, Konieczna isolates one common behavior that will contribute to their success: the way these organizations collaborate and share stories. Though this emergent behavior differentiates news nonprofits from the mainstream journalism from which they arose, it also ties the two forms of journalism together, as news nonprofits attempt to share stories with mainstream publications. In other words, the very behavior that may enable these organizations to do better than their mainstream counterparts also limits their ability to evolve much beyond them.

In one of the first major books to focus on nonprofit journalism, Konieczna investigates the major questions that will open the field up to further study. Where did nonprofit news come from, and where is it going? Who funds it, and why? Ultimately, Konieczna offers a new way to think about the seismic changes in journalism that are defining the 21st-century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190641900
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/20/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Magda Konieczna is an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia. She first became interested in the sustainability of journalism when she was the city hall reporter at the Guelph Mercury, a newspaper outside of Toronto. Her research on the business of journalism has appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, and Digital Journalism.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. 'Afflict the Comfortable': Journalism's Public Service Role
2. The Economics of Public Service Journalism
3. The Growing Field of Nonprofit Journalism
4. Who Holds the Purse Strings
5. Sharing the News
6. 'Old School Journalism by Old School Rules': Implications of News Sharing
Epilogue: A Look Ahead
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Is non-profit journalism here to stay? This book explains the financial and the cultural challenges of the future of journalism and demystifies one of the most important possible solutions."—Nikki Usher, PhD, associate professor at The George Washington University and author of Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code

"In the early 21st century, most journalism is struggling to make money. Rather than simply lamenting this fact, Magda Konieczna looks at one of the most unexpected and innovative responses to the journalism crisis: the rise of not-for-profit news. Journalism Without Profit is a timely and empirically rich overview of a variety of new journalistic actors, as well as a subtle theoretical interrogation of the relationship between commercialism and public service."—C.W. Anderson, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

From the Publisher