NewsPay is produced by
Bill Mitchell and is focused on questions of how news will be transformed and financially sustained.
More background on the blog, some of which was posted in an intro post Jan. 15:
Every day, with increasing urgency, journalists and the people they serve are confronting the question of how news will be transformed and sustained. The answers are mostly tentative, sometimes intriguing and occasionally encouraging.
They portray a future of news that looks cloudy and complicated. But the idea behind this blog is clear and simple: track those answers as usefully as possible.
NewsPay has its roots in a conference Poynter convened in November to explore what can be done now to enhance the chances of discovering workable economic models for news.
Bill Densmore, who heads the Journalism that Matters initiative,
documented the proceedings in a Wiki. He quoted Paul Tash, chairman of Poynter and the newspaper it owns, the
St. Petersburg Times, as pushing the group to produce something more than "a white paper that doesn't get read."
NewsPay is part of a Poynter initiative focused on transforming
ideas about funding news into
action that puts the best of them to work.
In addition to the blog, Poynter library director David Shedden is
aggregating resources that users will be able to access by whatever areas of journalism's transformation they're addressing, especially economic models to sustain the work.
As promising ideas emerge, Poynter President Karen Dunlap will convene working groups of journalists and media leaders interested in spending several days, sleeves rolled up, moving way past white papers.
Exactly how we do all this will depend on you. In addition to Poynter colleagues, Josh Benton of the
Nieman Journalism Lab and Matt Thompson, a former Naughton Fellow at Poynter now
exploring the future of news at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, have been especially helpful so far.
We welcome your suggestions and corrections. Please send them via comments attached to individual items, e-mail to Poynter Online editor
Julie Moos or e-mail to
me. Or give me a ring at Poynter at 727-553-4313.
