The three pillars of financial sustainability in local journalism
The internet's challenges to journalists today are intertwined, forcing professionals and non-professionals involved in news production to adopt a new stance when seeking solutions to the high mortality rate in local journalism projects.
The dilemma of financial sustainability defines who will survive or not in the effort to produce news that fulfils people’s needs and interests. It is a fundamental issue because it involves not only intellectual and financial investments in journalism projects but also the expectations of the public. Furthermore, it is a problem that includes three highly interdependent issues, forming a three-pillar whose absence leads to almost inevitable frustrations.
The first leg of the three pillars involves the need for people to develop an awareness of the value and relevance of the information they receive through a local publication. People will only pay for news that they consider essential to their daily lives or that arouses some interest. This brings us to the issue of the news agenda. Here it is already possible to detect an important problem. Most journalists, especially those linked to companies that still depend on paid advertising, tend to follow the agenda influenced by advertisers and decision-makers.
However, this agenda is associated with the interests and needs of businesspeople and politicians, items that ordinary people would hardly pay to read, hear, and see in news outlets. Under these conditions, it’s perfectly understandable that 75 to 80% of people are against paying for news.
To change the agenda, it is necessary to find out what people want in terms of news. This is only possible through direct experience between the journalist and the public, a behavior that requires identifying the news flows that are influencing people’s opinions as well as observing social routines with an almost sociological perspective. This is important because we all tend to express opinions and positions conditioned by the information we receive, which directly and indirectly links us to the dominant news agenda in the current press.
Information activists
This brings us to the second leg of the tripod, the need for a change in attitude among journalists in their relationship with the public. Journalists who inherited the professional DNA of the legacy media are still strongly influenced by the rules of impartiality and objectivity. This distances them from the public and tends to create distrust and even hostility among many people.
However, the so-called information activists, practitioners of journalism acts, born in the digital age, have a quite different attitude. Information activists usually act empirically, that is, based on trial-and-error procedures when exploring information cyberspace. Their relationship with people occurs intuitively and ends up materializing journalistically in the news which has almost nothing to do with the agenda of the mainstream press.
The big problem for activists, who are multiplying at a digital speed given the facilities offered by the internet and computing, is that the failure rate of their initiatives is extremely high, almost 70%, according to estimates made in the United States. Each failed project feeds the pessimism of information activists and the unemployment syndrome. even more troublesome is the fact that people gets increasingly skeptic about alternative media, something that creates additional difficulties for new projects.
How to start?
There is also no point in developing an alternative agenda or being immersed in the community of readers, listeners, and viewers if the news messages are not formatted according to the local culture and technological devices. The third leg of the tripod is what is conventionally called digital narrative, which today prioritizes information flows through digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, in the form of audio, visual and textual messages.
Each community has its specific characteristics when it comes to narratives, which will require research into the local reality before starting any project. There are places where people use Instagram more, in others it is Facebook and there are those who prefer Tiktok. Usage preferences vary among young people, women, and adult men. Each social segment also requires specific attention to identifying the most engaging type of narrative and which digital platform has the largest local audience.
Financial sustainability is not an easy goal to achieve. This is an issue where local particularities emerge more clearly while searching for a solution. Current experiences in several countries, especially in the United States, point to the need to start by setting up a sustainability framework based on a new relationship between journalists or information activists and the target audience of the journalistic project. The successful tripod strategy may create the necessary conditions to the emergence of an environment of mutual trust between reporters and the people who will pay for the news they need, whether in the form of subscriptions, donations, taxes, or provision of services.