Last week we announced an awards project to help Baby Boomers launch news startups. This week, we chuckle at our new nickname and shine a spotlight on the history that gave the project momentum. “Geezer grants” is the term some wags have applied to the $12,000 startup funding open to people age 50-plus who want
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Journalism Education: It’s Time to Craft the Gateway Degree
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Oct. 31, 2014 in Blog
If the journalism industry really wants to engage its audiences and woo new ones, and if the academy wants its journalism schools to flourish – it’s time for journalism schools to embrace a larger mission and to construct a different narrative about the merits of a journalism education.
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Gender Gap Blues? Build Your Own Sandbox
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Jul. 3, 2014 in Blog
Women comprise only 36 percent of the journalism workforce and only 23 percent of the leadership (where they make 25 percent less than their male counterparts). Yet they make up 64 percent of journalism school enrollments, where many will elect careers in public relations.
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Donors Liking Public-Indie Media Partnerships
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Nov. 14, 2013 in Blog
Creating public-radio and indie-media partnerships may open new paths to fundraising, station executives told a session at Tuesday’s Public Radio Super-Regional meeting outside Washington, D.C.
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The Death and Re-birth of Journalism
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Oct. 20, 2013 in Blog
How can media help people feel like they are part of a common purpose and foster the information and engagement that citizens need to be citizens? These and other questions were addressed at a 3-day gathering of some 20 funders, media makers and civic engagement experts at the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown, N.Y.
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A New Kind of Activist Journalism: When Finding Solutions are Part of Journalists’ Job, Too
Four years ago, UrbanMilwaukee.com zeroed in on South 2nd Street, a pocked roadway in the city’s Walker’s Point section that seemed “ripe for improvement,” said site co-founder David Reid.
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Launching Proof of Concept – Then Leveraging It
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Dec. 13, 2012 in Blog
So where can a $14,000 media start-up award get you? It can get you just where you want to go, judging by the recent winners of the McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneur (NMWE) Awards.
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Let’s Get Real About Homicide Watch
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Sep. 10, 2012 in Blog
Kudos to Homicide Watch for exceeding its Kickstarter goal. I was among those who donated. But I have to confess to a lot of head -scratching over all the rallying cries, berating national foundations for not supporting a good local news site. The fact of the matter is, the founders are leaving the start up
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Trending: University News Sites
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Jun. 6, 2012 in Blog
Quietly, and not so quietly, journalism schools around the country are starting to give their students new news opportunities. More than beefing up course catalogues with multimedia and convergence offerings, the schools are becoming incubators for entrepreneurial news startups – news websites that are populated with student content.
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The Tail Wagged the Dog
Posted by Jan Schaffer on Feb. 28, 2012 in Blog
Amid the current shakeouts of independent news sites, it’s important to understand all the ingredients that make these sites successful. In the case of the Chicago News Cooperative, its problems were not confined to its failure to raise revenues. From its very start, the site was never able to generate the kind of juice that
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