Restoring trust: Nieman Lab's helpful list of news credibility projects

These projects aim to restore trust.

In a blog post earlier this year, I wrote about the importance of Credibility as the new currency of journalism, its significance in an era of distrust of the media, and its economic value for high-quality journalism.

A big thank you to Christine Schmidt of Nieman Lab who has just produced a helpful list of news credibility projects. Among other things, it shows how the Knight Foundation is giving help to many of them.

Below is an abbreviated form of Schmidt's list, with a few details on each project. 

Trusting News
Participants/partners: Mainly local newsrooms, such as WCPO, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, St. Louis Magazine; also A Plus, Religion News Service, CALmatters, Discourse Media, USA Today

The Trust Project
Participants/partners: News outlets like the Washington Post, The Economist, the Globe and Mail, Mic, and Zeit Online; tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Bing; Institute for Nonprofit News

News Integrity Initiative, Based at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Participants/partners: The following groups received grants from the initiative’s first round of funding: Arizona State University’s News Co/lab, Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Media Engagement, EducationNC, Free Press, Listening Post Collective, Maynard Institute, OpenNews, Public Radio International, The Coral Project; Internews and the European Journalism Centre have also received funding

More proof that journalists need to brand themselves

Version en español aquí.

New York Times editor Jill Abramson says that half the people coming to the newspaper's website in the runup to the election were searching for Nate Silver, the political forecasting whiz who writes the blog FiveThirtyEight.

"He got huge, huge readership," she said at a conference covered by MediaBistro. "They weren't coming for the rest of the Times; they came for him,"

In other words, Nate Silver has developed a personal brand that is bigger than the New York Times when it comes to the niche of political forecasting.

Journalism schools could re-invent the industry

Newton (Knight Foundation

photo)

(Versión en español aquí.)

University journalism programs are not changing fast enough to meet the needs of students entering an industry in which job opportunities lie in ventures that are entrepreneurial and multimedia, say experts writing a series of articles for Nieman Lab.

One of the commentators is Eric Newton, who says it is not enough to make changes every few years; schools need to embrace a culture of continuous change or rapidly become irrelevant.

6,000 paid subs support digital news site in Nova Scotia

At first it seems an unlikely place for an expensive paywall business model to work -- Nova Scotia. 

Nearly 6,000 subscribers are paying $360 a year for access to the AllNovaScotia.com website, according to Tim Currie's story in Nieman Lab. 

That's about $2 million and represents 80 percent of the revenue of the site. 

How are they doing it? One of the key elements is focusing on basic public-records searches and document-based reporting.

Reloading an old business model for new media

Veteran journalist Tom Stites writes on the Nieman Blog that new digital media might be overlooking a venerable method of sustaining themselves -- the cooperative.

The cooperative is defined as a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit. Today we might call it crowd-funding.

When the market fails

Stites says that people form cooperatives when the normal for-profit market forces fail to supply a service or product that their community needs.

There are many examples of user-owned news cooperatives in other countries but none in the U.S.
Stites is trying to launch one here.

Stites reviews recent studies of attempts to establish sustainable business models and concludes that many of the media currently held up as models depend too much on foundation support, which rarely is maintained over the long haul. In addition many of these operations depend on volunteer work, and volunteers burn out. There is thus an urgency to find a new model.

A hybrid model for local news

What is appealing about the cooperative model is that there are many news organizations already functioning. They can be replicated. They mix characteristics of for-profit and non-profit businesses and they can be tailored to the needs of the local community.

More than any other type of news, local community coverage has suffered in the recent downturn of the news industry. The co-op might help give it life again.


Related:
Robert Niles: How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online
How much to charge advertisers? As much as possible
More paywalls won't save journalists' jobs
Google takes magic out of advertising sales process
How I ran my newspaper monopoly
Language barrier helps publisher paywalls
How to tailor news for 4 different platforms? 'Responsive design'