Dec 17, 2020

Published on December 11, 2020 December 11, 2020 • 43 Likes • 6 Comments Like December 11, 2020 The field of nonprofit news is collaborative. We love featuring our partners and collaborators. As INN’s Chief Network Officer, I get the opportunity to meet people working to shape the nonprofit news field from every angle. Here, I'm thrilled to share the spotlight on the folks working with us to change the future of journalism. With 2020 finally lurching toward an end (we’re still in March, right? ), it feels like the right time to launch a new way to stay in touch about what’s going on in nonprofit news. While everyone and their brother has an email newsletter, LinkedIn newsletters are still somewhat novel. My colleagues at the Institute for Nonprofit News and I hope this will be the start of an ongoing conversation between us about what’s happening in nonprofit news. And we do mean conversation — we want to hear from you about what you see in your communities and organizations, what you need and what you hope for as we head into 2021. Speaking of the end of the year, this is the time when every nonprofit is in your inbox talking about how important it is to make an end-of-the-year financial contribution, if you can. As you consider your year-end giving priorities, and at a time when the need is so widespread, I hope you’ll join me in giving to nonprofit news organizations. If you don’t have a nonprofit news organization you already support, I encourage you to head over to NewsMatch.org , where you can find an incredible directory of nonprofit, nonpartisan, objective news organizations doing incredibly important work at the local, regional, national and global level. These organizations are doing important work that strengthens our democracy — something that seems more important than ever. Keep in mind that in 2020, thanks to the CARES Act, you can deduct up to $300 in charitable contributions on your tax return even if you don’t itemize. This is a great chance to take advantage of a one-time tax law change from Uncle Sam to help nonprofits that matter to you. Readers: Tell us about a nonprofit news organization you’ll be supporting and why, by tweeting at us @INN . At the end of a long year, we’d love to share some positivity! CatchLight Local partners with INN, INN members to center community in visual journalism Last week, I co-hosted a virtual event with CatchLight , one of our members focused on photojournalism. Images are something we consume in such great quantity that it's easy to forget how essential they are to connecting readers to the people in the stories. As the crisis in local journalism has played out, photojournalism has born a disproportionate share of the cost — with severely negative effects. INN approached CatchLight in October 2019 about bringing their CatchLight Local model to Chicago in 2020. The idea was to create a shared visual desk for local, community media. My colleague Sharon McGowan is working with four of our members — Better Government Association , Block Club Chicago , ProPublica Illinois and Borderless Magazine — and CatchLight to create a sustainable, shared visuals desk that will better connect INN members and other community media in Chicago with high-quality, local photojournalism in places where wire photography may not be suitable. Fellows from this program joined other CatchLight fellows at our event last week The stories told by the fellows last week were incredible — we’re so excited about the perspective and talent these CatchLight fellows bring to the field. Read more about the program , INN’s involvement, the future of this great collaborative effort and how you can support or get involved in centering the community in local photojournalism. Follow CatchLight on Twitter to stay up-to-date on the program, or feel free to message me if you’d like to learn more. Partner Q&A: Three Things to Know about Mark Glaser Mark Glaser , the founder of MediaShift and an advisor + consultant for Dot Connector Studio and Knight Foundation in local news, has worked with a ton of partners in the nonprofit news space, including INN. We also happen to both have gone to the same high school, albeit some number of years apart. During the NewsMatch campaign, he’s been covering the value of nonprofit news and the ways our members are changing lives. Read his latest, five reasons that 2020 was the year for nonprofit local news. My colleague Thomas Khadoo asked Glaser about his experience with nonprofit news and public media, what he’s reading and more in this Q&A that I’m glad to be able to share with you here. How did you find your way to the field of nonprofit news? I started a blog for PBS called MediaShift in 2006, so was introduced to the public media side then, and had a podcast covering issues around business models for news, including nonprofits. Since I moved on from MediaShift, I've been a consultant, working on projects for LION Publishers (which has a good number of nonprofits), INN, Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund . Most recently, I've been supporting the New Mexico Local News Fund, with nine grantees who are in public media, commercial and nonprofit media. At this point, I think nonprofit, co-op and other non-commercial models really make up the future of the news business at the local level. What do you want folks to know about the future of news? It's a tough time for local news, with the pandemic and the shift in business models, with so many local newspaper chains owned by hedge funds and others who don't really care about the information needs of communities. But I find a lot of hope when I think about the investments being made by Knight Foundation (see this map I helped produce), Facebook and Google - nearly $900 million - and the rise of local foundations and philanthropists supporting both nonprofit and for-profit news outlets in their communities. These are not going to "save" local news, but they are a piece of the puzzle to find a solution for supporting local news in many places. What books/news stories have intrigued you and why? Since I moved to Santa Fe this summer, I joined an online book club through Nextdoor, and have been reading a great book about New Mexico history and culture, "The House at Otowi Bridge" by Peggy Pond Church. It details how a woman, Edith Warner, moved to New Mexico and started a teahouse on the outskirts of Los Alamos in the 1920s, and was able to bridge the cultures of the Pueblos with the scientists who came to Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. At a time of chaos and tumult, it's nice to read about the slower pace of life back then, and the connection that Puebloans have with nature and the earth. We need to slow ourselves down in order to make the human connections to bridge our differences. That goes for politics and for the information needs of communities. Get involved: Work with INN or its members Nonprofit news is collaborative. Email me or message me here to learn more about how to get involved with INN as a member, partner or supporter. Especially in this time of COVID-19 when in-person gatherings are limited, I’m always eager to connect virtually with people who are passionate about our shared work of strengthening democracy by strengthening nonprofit media. Have a great holiday season — we’ll be back with our second edition in January.