Venture Philanthropy, Local News, and the Murky Promise of Innovation

For-profit digital news startups backed by large investors, venture capital, and technology entrepreneurs have taken on an increasingly significant role in the journalism industry. This article examines 10 startups by focusing on the manifestos these new organizations offer when they introduce themselves to the public. These manifestos are an example of metajournalistic discourse, or interpretive discourse about journalism, that publicly define how journalism is changing—or is not. In identifying and touting the superiority of their technological innovations, the manifestos simultaneously affirm and critique existing journalistic practices while rethinking longstanding boundaries between journalism and technology.

This article is an empirical investigation of 18 venture-backed news startups from around the United States and Europe. The central concern here is to examine yet another new entrant to the journalism ecosystem by asking how venture-backed news startups both depart from and replicate traditional journalism. These news startups aim to solve what they see as problems with journalism in novel ways, yet their concerns mirror larger historical critiques of journalism. In this respect, news startups leave the fundamental doxa of the field mostly intact. However, their distinct technological and cultural innovations—the creation of algorithms and other news personalization efforts, the development of scalable technology such as platforms, and the elevation of technological innovation and technologists as equal to journalists—do prompt consideration about how the underlying habitus of journalists, or their sense of the “feel of the game,” may well be challenged.

Amid the digital disruption for journalism, the U.S.-based Knight Foundation has made a highly publicized effort to shape the nature of news innovation. This growing influence raises questions about what it’s trying to accomplish, for mass communication and society. This qualitative case study shows how and why the Knight Foundation has sought to change journalism by renegotiating its boundaries. Namely, by downplaying its own historical emphasis on professionalism, the foundation has embraced openness to outside influence—e.g., the wisdom of the crowd, citizen participation, and a broader definition of “news.” These rhetorical adaptations have paralleled material changes in the foundation’s funding process, typified by the Knight News Challenge innovation contest. In recent times, the foundation has undergone a further evolution from “journalism” to “information.” By highlighting its boundary-spanning interest in promoting “information” for communities, the Knight Foundation has been able to expand its capital and influence as an agent of change among fields and funders beyond journalism.

Media and communication, 2024

Developing successful innovations in journalism, whether to improve the quality and reach of news or to strengthen business models, remains an elusive problem. The challenge is an existential concern for many news enterprises, particularly for smaller news outlets with limited resources. By and large, media innovation has been driven by never-ending pivots in the search for a killer solution, rather than by long-term strategic thinking. This article argues for a fresh approach to innovation built around the "jobs to be done" (JTBD) hypothesis developed by the late Clayton Christensen and typically used in business studies of innovation. However, attempts to bring the JTBD framework into the news industry have never taken hold, while scholars, too, have largely overlooked the framework in their study of journalism innovation. We argue that the JTBD approach can foster local journalism that is more responsive and relevant to the needs of local communities. It reorients journalism by focusing on identifying and addressing the underserved needs of communities, as understood by the communities themselves. It suggests that a bottom-up approach to appreciating the "jobs" that community members want done offers a model that supports both the editorial and business imperatives of local news organizations.

The digitization of media has undermined much of the social authority and economic viability on which U.S. journalism relied during the 20th century. This disruption has also opened a central tension for the profession: how to reconcile the need for occupational control against growing opportunities for citizen participation. How that tension is navigated will affect the ultimate shape of the profession and its place in society. This dissertation examines how the leading nonprofit actor in journalism, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has sought to help journalism innovate out of its professional crisis. This case study engages a series of mixed methods—including interviews, textual analysis, and secondary data analysis—to generate a holistic portrayal of how the Knight Foundation has attempted to transform itself and the journalism field in recent years, particularly through its signature Knight News Challenge innovation contest. From a sociology of professions perspective, I found that the Knight Foundation altered the rhetorical and actual boundaries of journalism jurisdiction. Knight moved away from “journalism” and toward “information” as a way of seeking the wisdom of the crowd to solve journalism’s problems. This opening up of journalism’s boundaries created crucial space in which innovators, from inside and outside journalism, could step in and bring change to the field. In particular, these changes have allowed the concept of citizen participation, which resides at the periphery of mainstream newswork, to become embraced as an ethical norm and a founding doctrine of journalism innovation. The result of these efforts has been the emergence of a new rendering of journalism—one that straddles the professional-participatory tension by attempting to “ferry the values” of professional ideals even while embracing new practices more suited to a digital environment. Ultimately, this case study matters for what it suggests about professions in turbulent times. Influential institutions can bring change to their professional fields by acting as boundary-spanning agents—stepping outside the traditional confines of their field, altering the rhetorical and structural borders of professional jurisdiction to invite external contribution and correction, and altogether creating the space and providing the capital for innovation to flourish.

This essay suggests ‘Innovation Journalism’ as a useful theme through which to explore the interplay of journalism in innovation ecosystems. This involves investigating how journalism plays a part in connecting innovation with public interests and how innovation processes and innovation ecosystems interact with public attention, with news media as an actor. It may also be of interest to study in which ways journalists cover innovation processes and innovation ecosystems, the incentives that drive innovation journalism and how news organizations may be organized to perform the task. We outline examples of research project topics to illustrate how this approach can inform studies of innovation, studies of journalism as practice, and possible scopes for the research theme. Going forward, we propose to identify earlier relevant scholarly research and relevant researchers that can be attributed to this emerging research theme in Innovation Journalism.

Journalism Studies, 2019

ABSTRACT Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journalism”. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This argument is based on 74 interviews with the most active foundations funding international non-profit news and the journalists they support. In general, we found that these foundations did not try to directly influence the content of the journalism they funded. However, their involvement did make a difference. It created requirements and incentives for journalists to do new, non-editorial tasks, as well as longer-form, off-agenda, “impactful” news coverage in specific thematic areas. As a result, foundations are ultimately changing the role and contribution of journalism in society. We argue that these changes are the result of various forms of “boundary work”, or performative struggles over the nature of journalism. This contrasts with most previous literature, which has focused on the effects of foundation funding on journalistic autonomy.

2017

The proliferation of entrepreneurial journalism initiatives over the past decade has been inherently disruptive to the media industry. For organizations and their employees, the launch of new journalistic enterprises extends the already-significant encroachments onto jurisdictional turf in a digital environment. For individual journalists, the shift to an explicitly businessoriented mind set challenges deeply rooted notions about professional norms and appropriate activities. This chapter explores both sets of challenges. For professional journalists, the hits just keep on coming. The economic hit. The time hit. The resource hit. But a growing number of journalists have begun hitting back. Of their own volition or because they are pushed, these journalists are leaving traditional newsrooms and either joining a news start-up or launching their own. Over the past decade, new journalistic enterprises have proliferated in myriad shapes and sizes. The diversity and fluidity of these experiments make them impossible to count at any given point in time or space, and nearly as difficult to define. They range from investigative journalism consortia to hyperlocal websites to niche offerings of all sorts; some of the more wellestablished, such as BuzzFeed, have successfully attracted mass audiences. In contrast to "intrapreneurialism," the creative initiatives that push existing organizations in new directions (Baruah and Ward 2015; Boyles 2016), the term "entrepreneurial journalism" is best understood as designating stand-alone enterprises that have a journalistic mission yet are dissociated from

2018

Drawing on insights from field theory, this study examines journalists’ textual and discursive construction of entrepreneurial journalism from 2000 to 2014. The goal is to understand how such discursive practices contribute to the articulation and legitimation of entrepreneurial journalism as a form of cultural capital as the field’s economic imperatives change. The findings suggest that “entrepreneurial journalism” is a condensational term: It is defined broadly and loosely but generally in a positive way. Despite the potential for disruption to long-standing journalistic doxa, particularly normative stances related to the separation of editorial and commercial interests, many of the examined articles seem to reflect a belief that entrepreneurialism is not only acceptable but even vital for survival in a digital age.

Journalism Studies , 2019

Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journalism”. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This argument is based on 74 interviews with the most active foundations funding international non-profit news and the journalists they support. In general, we found that these foundations did not try to directly influence the content of the journalism they funded. However, their involvement did make a difference. It created requirements and incentives for journalists to do new, non-editorial tasks, as well as longer-form, off-agenda, “impactful” news coverage in specific thematic areas. As a result, foundations are ultimately changing the role and contribution of journalism in society. We argue that these changes are the result of various forms of “boundary work”, or performative struggles over the nature of journalism. This contrasts with most previous literature, which has focused on the effects of foundation funding on journalistic autonomy.