Foundation funding and the boundaries of journalism (Article)
By Martin Scott, Mel Bunce and Kate Wright. 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 […]
Read More
REPORT: The state of humanitarian journalism
By Martin Scott, Kate Wright and Mel Bunce. In this report we present some of the findings of our four year, global research project into the state of humanitarian journalism around the world. We ask, Which news organisations regularly report on humanitarian affairs? How are they funded, and what ethical problems or professional dilemmas does […]
Read More
Who’s reporting Africa now? NGOs, journalism and multimedia (Book)
By Kate Wright (@newsprof1). As news organisations cut correspondent posts and foreign bureaus, aid agencies, human rights groups and other NGOs have been swift to move in. Indeed, NGO-workers are now some of the most important providers of African coverage: regularly creating or commissioning multimedia for placement in mainstream news. But why and how do journalists use the […]
Read More
‘Doing good’ and ‘looking good’ in global humanitarian reporting (Book chapter)
By Martin Scott (@martinscott2010). This chapter investigates if and how a private donor’s apparent motivation to ‘look good’ – or to generate symbolic capital – interacts with a news organization’s ability to ‘do good’ by producing public service content. We address this issue by reporting on the findings of a year-long study of the online […]
Read More
Slack, virtual newsrooms and journalistic practice (Article)
By Mel Bunce (@meljbunce). Virtual newsrooms have enormous potential: enabling journalists around the world to pool their knowledge, skills and perspectives within joint projects, such as the Panama Papers. These virtual newsrooms are supported by Online Collaborative Software (OCS), the most popular of which is Slack. But although many of the world’s top news organisations […]
Read More
Foundation-funded Journalism, Philanthro-capitalism and Tainted Donors (Article)
By Kate Wright (@newsprof1). Not-for-profit news organisations are increasingly funded by private foundations, supported by wealthy entrepreneurs. This raises a range of ethical dilemmas for journalists, which are particularly serious when their donors are alleged to have been involved in unethical or illegal activities. Although this is a relatively common occurrence in the non-profit sector, […]
Read More
The influence of foundation funding on international journalism (Article)
By Martin Scott (@martinscott2010). How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but under-researched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organisation IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by the United Nations to a private foundation, […]
Read More
NGOs as News Organisations (Book Chapter)
By Kate Wright (@newsprof1) What does it mean to talk about NGOs as news organisations? Non-Governmental Organisations have long sought to shape news by providing research briefings, constructing newsworthy events or enabling journalists to access case studies. But in the past decade, scholars have highlighted the ways in which NGOs are changing organisationally to become […]
Read More
The politics of humanitarian journalism (Book chapter)
By Martin Scott (@martinscott2010). In this chapter, we draw attention to the considerable gaps in our knowledge about humanitarian journalism. While there has been comprehensive research on the content of humanitarian news, an especially on the question of which crises receive coverage, there is limited scholarship on the production or reception of this journalism. In […]
Read More
What is humanitarian journalism? (Book chapter)
By Mel Bunce (@meljbunce) The chapter, ‘‘What is Humanitarian Journalism?’ (Bunce, Wright and Scott) is forthcoming (2018) in The Oxford University Press Handbook of Journalism (Ornebring, H. (ed.)).
Read More
Martin Scott
January 11, 2019
Publication
No Comment