Public interest journalism is unlike other news content. Audiences do not read it out of pure interest but because they need to stay informed about the institutions around them, said Adam Newby, director at the independent news discovery platform NewsNow, speaking at the Funding and regulating public interest journalism in a world of fake news event last month.
Investigations into public or private organisations take up months and even years and are costly to produce. This means that public interest journalism cannot be financed just through advertising which is often the main source of revenue for smaller and local publishers. Although the pandemic has made the situation even worse, ad money has been drying up for years and much of it went to the big tech.
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Source: How to finance public interest news in the misinformation world | Media news