PBS: End of the Old Boys Network?

Los Angeles station KCET's announcement on Friday that it is canceling all PBS programs is a dramatic, all-stakes-on-the-table gamble. KCET is gambling that, without hefty payments to PBS and substituting a new lineup of independent and international programs for the PBS network feed, it will be a smaller but sustainable public service broadcaster. For its part, PBS is gambling that KCET cannot possibly go through with its plan and will have no alternative but to pay the substantial dues required to keep PBS programs on the station…….

Nonprofits see a revenue model: universities

The headlines from last month's meeting of investigative reporting profits focused on one thing – their formation of a network to support investigative reporting and provide a showcase for the groups' work. The new organization, for now called the Investigative News Network, could be a big deal, and the 10 members of its steering committee went right to work getting it up and running. But another big theme rumbled through the meeting outside New York City at the Rockefeller estate, and that was the nonprofits' mad dash for new revenue models. "My personal passion is sustainability," said MinnPost CEO Joel……

New investigative group’s twin missions: journalism and sustainability

How hot is the world of nonprofit investigative reporting these days? Hot enough to make Jon Sawyer, who runs an international reporting shop, full of envy at this week's gathering on investigative reporting outside New York City. "We'd like to see the same energy in international reporting that we see on the investigative side," said Sawyer, director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. As was true at the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference, this week's meeting of investigative reporting nonprofits generated an unmistakable energy field. Which is an amazing thing, given how desperate the plight of investigative……

Nonprofits launch Investigative News Network

A group of investigative reporting nonprofits has endorsed formation of a new umbrella organization aimed at sustaining the burgeoning investigative nonprofit movement and bringing new prominence to its journalism. A resolution, "Pocantico Declaration: Creating a Nonprofit Investigative News Network," was approved Wednesday by a diverse group of nonprofit leaders – established organizations like the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as newcomers like Texas Watchdog and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. The group's mission will be to "aid and abet, in every conceivable way, individually and collectively, the work and public reach……

Investigative network likely to emerge today

Before they head for home Wednesday, about three dozen participants at an investigative reporting summit in New York are likely to launch planning for new organization uniting the growing number of nonprofits producing investigative journalism. The new network, dubbed for now the "Investigative News Network," would be another significant step in the rise of nonprofit investigative journalism in recent years. Chuck Lewis, the godfather of so much in investigative journalism, called the initiative "truly historic." At a conference outside Tarrytown, N.Y., Lewis laid out a possible scenario Tuesday for how the network might take shape. Secure a planning grant that……

From a press scholar, a rousing vote for the journalist

New media thinker Jay Rosen has been using the work of press scholar Daniel C. Hallin to explain how the Internet has eroded journalists' traditional power to define what issues are legitimate for proper debate. Hallin wrote that journalists tend to place public issues into three categories: a sphere of consensus, a sphere of legitimate controversy and a sphere of deviance. In a post on his blog, Press Think, Rosen argued that the press has done a lousy, unthinking job of deciding what goes into each category, and that through the Internet American citizens might assume this role for themselves…….