I was recently at a meeting where collaboration among Wikipedia, Consumer Reports, PBS, NPR, and other nonprofit media organizations was discussed. Someone mentioned these reports from a few years ago, and I did not know of them. I want to excerpt the parts of them which mention Consumer Reports or Wikipedia. Eventually I might incorporate this information into Wikipedia.
Information Needs of Communities is a July 2011 report published by the Federal Communications Commission and written by Steven Waldman with support from “the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities”. It is influenced by and based in part on Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive, a white paper produced by the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute and written by Barabara Cochran.
I quote from the summary at the beginning of Information Needs:
Yet, in part because of the digital revolution, serious problems have arisen, as well. Most significant among them: in many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting. This is likely to lead to the kinds of problems that are, not surprisingly, associated with a lack of accountability—more government waste, more local corruption, less effective schools, and other serious community problems. The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism—going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy—is in some cases at risk at the local level.
Elsewhere the report mentions –
Some nonprofit media receive government subsidies; most do not. Some are one-person operations; others are sizeable institutions, such as Wikipedia, the Associated Press, Consumer Reports, NPR, National Geographic, and AARP. In this section, we look at the state of the current nonprofit media sector, which we view as a crucial element in the media landscape.
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Local media companies will face their own obstacles in charging for content and creating bundles that could cross-subsidize expensive journalism: While there has been some limited success for national media companies charging—the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports —the track record for local media is discouraging. Editor & Publisher declared, “2010 was supposed to be the year of the Paywall for newspapers. But consumers overwhelmingly repudiated the efforts of the few publishers who dared to demand payment for access to the news, leaving newspaper content about as widely and freely available on the Web at year’s end as it has been for the past one-and-a-half decades.”
Those attempting to make it on a free, ad-supported model will face all of the aforementioned forces suppressing Internet advertising rates—plus a new one: on the Internet, one does not have to be a local content creator to be a venue for local advertising. National Internet companies can attract local advertisers with their ability to geo graphically target messaging to local consumers, regardless of whether the content (or context) is locally oriented.
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Meanwhile, the advent of free, simple-to-use blogging software was making it possible for every American to be a publisher, reporter, and pundit. By May 2011, one of the most popular blogging platforms, WordPress, was hosting 20 million blogs. Though only a few bloggers have audiences large enough to place them among the top 100 websites, their contribution to news and commentary online has been revolutionary. The “long tail” came into view: instead of information being provided primarily by a few large players, the ecosystem now could support millions of smaller players each serving a small but targeted audience. The democratization of content creation caught on quickly. Wikipedia and other “wikis” enabled readers to collaborate in the creation of content; YouTube allowed a full range of users—from creative geniuses to proud parents to freaks— to “broadcast” their own videos; and Facebook gained national dominance as an all-purpose platform for self-expression and communication. Millions of people became not only consumers of information but creators, curators, and distributors. Remarkably, WordPress, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook offered these publishing tools to users for free.
It is hard to overstate the significance of these changes. In just a few years, the cost of publishing went from being relatively expensive to almost free—at least in terms of the publishing technology. The digital world continues to change by the minute. Smartphone applications, tablet apps, e-Readers, and other new services now make it easy to access news and information on-the-go, using the Internet as a pipeline but bypassing the need for a web browser to display it. As consumers increasingly gravitate to applications and services that make use of the Internet through more closed systems, such as smartphones, some even question the viability of business plans built on the current search-based, website-centric Internet.
The crop of news and information players who gained prominence on the web 2.0 landscape—bloggers, citizen journalists, and Internet entrepreneurs—was initially mocked by traditional media leaders as being inferior, worthless, and even dangerous. Famously, Jonathan Klein, then-president of CNN, declared, “Bloggers have no checks and balances. [It’s] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.”
Hardly. It is important to appreciate the extraordinary positive effects the new media—including those contributing while in pajamas—has had, not only in the spread of freedom around the world, but specifically in the provision of news, reporting, and civically important information.
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That raises a different question: Is it possible that that nonprofit sector growth will never be significant enough to have a notable impact? Within the nonprofit media world, there are giants and pipsqueaks, too. While public broadcasting is a mere speck compared to commercial media, nonprofit websites are collectively a mere speck compared to public broadcasting. On the other hand, looking at the “nonprofit” sector more expansively, it is clearly possible for substantial institutions to take root. In addition to the Associated Press, AARP, Wikipedia and NPR, major nonprofit media organizations
include: National Geographic, C-SPAN, Consumer Reports, WordPress, and the St. Petersburg Times.Moreover, it is hard to overstate the importance of the noncommercial element in the development and flowering of the Internet, itself the product of government-funded research and development. The most vibrant media distribution networks—social media—are for-profit entities fueled by private citizens voluntarily sharing material with their friends, without desire for monetary gain. Any website making use of reader reviews or volunteer messageboard moderators is employing the unpaid voluntary contributions of readers to help make commercial business models sing. Wikipedia and other communal information ponds rely on millions of hours of volunteer labor.
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Dr. Jeannette Sutton, senior research scientist in the Trauma Health and Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has concluded: “Social media is very organized. It just isn’t organized through a central point.” Government authorities have traditionally expressed concern about the reliability of reports from non-official sources, but Sutton argues that social media tends to be self-correcting: “Those who participate on sites like Wikipedia or are invested in a particular conversation have some sort of stake in making sure the information is correct. So they put out information to correct misinformation.”
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A wide range of media organizations that found ways to fit in the 501(c)(3) category, including the Associated Press, Mother Jones, The National Review Foundation, Wikipedia, The Washington Monthly, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, NPR, and American Spectator. Their tax exempt status has enabled them to remain mission focused and attract tax deductible donations from individuals and foundations.
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The nonprofit media sector includes: journalism schools that field reporters, concerned citizens who start a nonprofit website, community Low Power FM stations, anyone contributing to a Wikipedia page, state-based C-SPANs, software developers who write open source code in nonprofit settings, public access channels, newspapers run by foundations, religious broadcasters, citizens tweeting news from the scene of a disaster and public broadcasting. Some of these media providers get government funding but most do not. Government money should not, and need not, be the main driver of the growth, but the nonprofit sector will, in many cases, need to play a greater role in filling remaining media gaps.
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While many nonprofits are small, community-based operations, others are large and some have developed into institutions of tremendous importance in the information sector. The Associated Press is the nation’s largest news wire service, AARP: The magazine is the largest circulation print magazine in the country, NPR is the largest employer of radio journalists, and Wikipedia is one of the largest information sites on the Internet.
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Massively popular online services that are set up as nonprofits include Wikipedia, WordPress, Mozilla, and BBC.co.uk.
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Some types of journalism are so costly, and provide such a poor short-term financial return on investment, that commercial media will likely under-finance their production. We therefore believe that the nonprofit sector, broadly defined, should play a greater role in filling the gaps in labor-intensive reporting. Nonprofit media includes a wide range of players including large nonprofit media companies (such as the Associated Press and Consumer Reports), public TV and radio, nonprofit information or publishing websites (such as Wikipedia, Mozilla and WordPress), local independent nonprofit websites, Low Power FM, PEG channels, state public affairs networks (SPANs), journalism schools and nonprofit programming on satellite TV. Some receive government funds; most do not, which is as it should be.
We estimate it would take somewhere between $265 million and $1.6 billion to fill the current gaps in local reporting each year. Some will hopefully be filled by the commercial sector in the coming years but, at least in the near term, a meaningful chunk of this missing accountability reporting will need to come from the nonprofit sector, broadly defined, including individual citizens, foundations and philanthropists donating to nonprofit media. The main focus of government policy should not be providing the funds to sustain reporting but rather helping create conditions under which nonprofit news
operations can gain traction.
From the text of Rethinking Public Media, and also quoted in Information Needs –
What is meant by public service media? John S. and James L. Knight Foundation vice president Eric Newton told the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Future of Media study that he defines news in the public interest as “the news people need to run their communities and their lives.” He would expand the definition to include not only the existing public broadcasting stations and national systems, but also an entirely new non-profit media landscape that includes entities such as Wikipedia, online magazines such as Consumer Reports and locally focused websites such as Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego and the St. Louis Beacon. He argues that such sources should be included in the new public media ecology and receive federal funding.
There is broad agreement that public media include:
•CPB-funded networks such as NPR, PBS, American Public Media (APM) and the many affiliated broadcast stations, program producers and funders that belong to these networks (e.g., WGBH, KQED, Public Radio International, Independent Television Service, Radio Bilingüe, etc.)
•Community radio
•Low Power FM Stations
•Public Access or PEG TV (local cable public access, education and government programming)With the explosion of new digital platforms and delivery mechanisms, this definition is beginning to expand. New conceptions of public service media place greater emphasis on the function or mission of the organization (e.g., to inform and engage people around shared issues and civic concerns) than the type
of organization or its affiliations. Patricia Aufderheide of American University’s Center for Social Media has defined it this way: “Public media isn’t something you are. It’s something you do.”In this expanded view, the primary aim is still serving the public, not making a profit. However, some people would broaden the definition of public media to include a range of publicly funded, not-for-profit, professional and nonprofessional, and potentially even commercial media. The following media have
been suggested as part of an expanded definition of public media:•Wikipedia and other collaborative media
•Bloggers and podcasters
•Independent publications (e.g., Consumer Reports)
•Professional journalist sites (e.g., ProPublica)
•Citizen news sites covering local to international (e.g., Global Voices)
•Consortia of niche media (e.g., New America Media)
•Metro news sites (e.g., Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego)
•State investigative news sites
•University-led community news sites
•“Soft advocacy” sites (e.g., Sunlight Foundation, Common Sense Media)
•Online mappers
•Viewer-supported satellite channels