Journalism’s new model?
Does the launch of philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail signal a new era for journalism or is the model destined to be a passing fad, asks Cathie McGinn in this article first published in Encore magazine.
With little fanfare, philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail launched in February this year.
The online-only title received a generous five-year funding commitment from businessman Graeme Wood, founder of accommodation website wotif.com, who donated $15million.
At a time when the future of print media is being questioned, the issue of the cost of journalism is ever more pressing. As long established mastheads close their doors around the world – here in Australia, News Limited recently announced the closure of local Queensland titles The Noosa Journal and Weekender – the move to online reporting continues. And there is clearly an audience in this space, as evidenced by The Australian’s recent announcement 30,000 readers have taken up digital subscriptions to access content behind the first major news paywall in the country. While News Limited is seeing results in the attempt to monetise their online offerings, The Global Mail is doing the reverse instead choosing to put journalism first, monetisation never.
Sorry to be a stickler Cathie, but Crikey was founded in 2000. Not 2003. Cheers!
This form of e-commerce, in it’s formal representation, is crowd funding – one of the fastest growing forms of e-commerce on the planet. As a co-founder of the crowd funding platform, iPledg (http://ipledg.com/) I can say that this sort of application for crowd funding, whereby people fund initiatives of shared passion, is a growing trend, and Gartner Research forecasts is to become a $6.3bil business by the end of next year. We are in discussions with a number of groups with similar projects and can assure readers that there will be more of this to come