Escaping the news desert: Nonprofit news and open-system journalism organizations

From Digital Culture & Society

Ferrucci, P., & Alaimo, K. I. (2019). Escaping the news desert: Nonprofit news and open-system journalism organizations. Journalism, 146488491988643. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884919886437

https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919886437

Context

This article provides insight on the impact of financial donations and contributions in the news industry and provides potential ways in which news processes can be improved by using open-system methods and non-profit incentives. It goes in-depth about small communities and how they are unable to access many local news outlets, and expresses concern over the effect of large news monopolies on local journalism and describes the importance of local journalism when compared to global news institutions. The article describes the effect of non-profit journalism and how it benefits news outlets and citizens in many areas where they are unable to access local news. This article is relevant to the topic of profit motive considerations in news as it discusses the flaws and benefits both for-profit and non-profit news models, and evaluates the quality of journalism in both business models. The article's goal is to provide a way for employees at news organizations to understand how to create a sustainable business model through a non-profit and open-system model.

Overview

The article was conducted in 2019 by the University of Colorado Boulder and uses in-depth interviews, as well as participant observations and qualitative research to create conclusions. Three journalists at the Sopris Sun were evaluated for 21 hours, and 17 interviews averaging 29 minutes were used for this research. The interviewer used multiple open-ended questions to gather more detailed responses. Afterwards, the evaluations went through a three-step process which includes writing memos and taking notes, uncovering patterns by closely reading and analyzing the lines of notes, then a final evaluation of the findings with the themes being considered through the evaluation, at which point a draft of the findings is created.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The strengths of this study are that it goes in-depth about the ways non-profit news organizations benefit readers with regard to the accuracy and frequency of journalism. A weakness of this study is the short period in which journalists were evaluated for, and the small sample size of the journalists being interviewed/evaluated in this study. It would benefit by having more news organizations being evaluated, as well as evaluating them for a longer period of time. Another strength of this study is the in-depth interviews that were conducted, which allows for more information to be provided to the study reader and to provide a wide variety of opinions on the issue. Furthermore, this article is slightly weak due to the fact that it was posted in 2019 which makes it outdated by a few years, therefore some information may be less relevant to the current state of news organizations; the study would benefit by performing another study that is more current and with more news organizations being evaluated. Additionally, this study would be made stronger if it were recreated in a Canadian atmosphere by evaluating and analyzing articles from Canadian non-profits and for-profit news organizations, and considering the potential impacts of Crown corporations such as CBC news and their quality of news with regard to accuracy and relevance.

Assessment

In general, this is a strong study that shows the benefits and flaws of for-profit and non-profit news organizations, while advocating for more advancements in the industry and showing ways in which this can be done effectively. This study could be improved by having a larger sample size with more interviews being conducted and more journalists at varying news organizations being evaluated. I believe the target audience that would benefit from this study are upcoming journalists or those who wish to study journalism in the future, as well as those who are skeptical of considering journalistic accuracy. Overall, this study makes a strong case for non-profit journalism while also assessing the potential flaws in non-profit journalism, but discusses how business owners can make non-profit news organizations into a sustainable business model.

- Tyler Swartz - Ts18fq 10:30, 6 December 2023 (EST)