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EDITORIAL Looking beyond the traditional media business model This special issue of Ethical Space explores the ethical dilemmas arising in the turbulent journalistic environment created by digital transformation and its impact on the traditional media business model. In that model, advertising revenue supported journalism, but as advertising has migrated online, revenue has fallen, with consequential dramatic reductions in the number of journalists’ positions. One statistic illustrates the point: in the United States, the number of journalists employed full-time in newsrooms fell 42 per cent between 1990 and 2014. 1 At the same time, digital transformation has created new opportunities. While old media empires may have shrunk, online publishing platforms are, theoretically at least, open to anyone with an internet connection and basic literacy skills. However, between theory and reality lies a minefield of financial, editorial, ethical and, in some cases, security challenges. The papers in this issue explore some of the most pressing and ubiquitous of these and, in doing so, reflect the lived reality of online journalism in a range of socio-political contexts: mature democracies, established but fragile democracies, and states that are positively hostile to quality journalism. As these accounts and discussions unfold, it will be seen that one of the oldest, most complex and ultimately unresolved ethical issues that has confronted practitioners of journalism and conscientious media owners for centuries remains at the heart of current dilemmas: how to generate the money needed to produce quality journalism, while retaining editorial independence. Whether the money comes from commercial media organisations, not-for-profit foundations, quasi-government bodies or anywhere else, editorial independence remains an issue. Are journalists reluctant to bite the hand that feeds? Are they capable of independently critiquing their funding source? Are they free of funders’ constraints in deciding what stories to cover and how to cover them? Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016 3
Mel Bunce’s case study of the role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in funding ‘development journalism’ raises all these questions, and more, at the global level. The Gates Foundation requires that its money be spent on journalism that has some kind of assessable impact. Defining journalistic impact is hard enough; measuring it is laden with unresolved methodological challenges. The requirement to show ‘impact’ could have possible consequences for the story proposals journalists offer when seeking a grant: they may be more likely to pitch stories about micro-level problems on which evidence of progress or impact is easier to adduce, rather than addressing long-term issues that may be objectively more important to the public interest. The Gates case study shows that the foundation has an advocacy agenda, which the journalistic work it funds is expected to advance. This presents a challenge to conventional notions of journalistic impartiality. Moreover, as Lyn McGaurr’s account of a conservation photography expedition shows, advocacy agendas can conflict with one another, and so can the uses to which the journalistic content is put. In the case of the Great Bear Rainforest, conservation photography was initially obtained for the purpose of raising public awareness about a threat to the environment, and non-profit funding was used to achieve it. However, some of the images were later re-purposed to promote tourism in the area, and their original conservation-oriented context was stripped away. At the local level, Dave Harte reports research into the financing and issues of editorial independence at a newspaper established by a community housing organisation on the outskirts of Birmingham in the UK, and reveals similar questions there. His work also raises the question of ‘whose news’: is hyperlocal journalism really the ‘voice of the people’, as some imagine, or do the professional norms of journalism mean that there is an unbridgeable gap between what the community wants to read about itself and what professional journalists produce about it, even when they are employed to provide that local voice? As Harte says, the mantra of the newspaper is to ‘tell it like it is’, but the question of what ‘it’ is remains contested. This question of story ownership is starkly illustrated by Jocelyn Williams’s account of how the stories of seven community groups in New Zealand were developed and told as part of a series of joint exercises between tertiary teachers and students on the one hand and the community groups on the other. Degrees of control over the stories varied widely, with one group in particular taking more or less complete ownership and asserting control on their own terms. This illustrates another facet of editorial independence. When the subject of a story takes the story over, where does professional accountability fit in? 4 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016
Page 1 and 2: Beyond clickbait and commerce The e
Page 4 and 5: Contents Editorial Looking beyond t
Page 8 and 9: These questions of independence are
Page 10 and 11: of the work produced by foundation-
Page 12 and 13: Crisis Center, for example, has a g
Page 14 and 15: library that spotlights progress in
Page 16 and 17: journalists working on the developm
Page 18 and 19: Note on the contributor Dr Mel Bunc
Page 20 and 21: 2014). One response has been to par
Page 22 and 23: and/or distributed by ENGOs to mobi
Page 24 and 25: democratic dissent’, while DeLuca
Page 26 and 27: ecording the interviews, I engaged
Page 28 and 29: spent two weeks collecting images a
Page 30 and 31: Although photographs of spirit bear
Page 32 and 33: up the article ‘Pipeline through
Page 34 and 35: Alexandra Garcia, iLCP communicatio
Page 36 and 37: killed/, accessed on 27 December 20
Page 38 and 39: Dave Harte ‘Tell it like it is’
Page 40 and 41: Veronica Coatham and Lisa Martinali
Page 42 and 43: which content its audience is most
Page 44 and 45: in the 1990s and early 2000s. Borge
Page 46 and 47: in Leeds, he notes the valuable rol
Page 48 and 49: Yet the nature of the journalism at
Page 50 and 51: Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowl
Page 52 and 53: Unitec research colleagues; media p
Page 54 and 55: voice in seven unique contexts was
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therefore, challenging to strike th
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7 The Pacifica Mamas, ‘matriarchs
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sharing approach to collaboration,
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programme, and they wanted the spot
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and that I was entrusting myself to
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ecosystem (Cooren 2015b). In a 2015
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Saifoloi, Malama, Stowers-Ama, Jarc
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informed citizenry. Most see journa
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While there is no universally accep
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news organisation are decisions to
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is largely seen as unethical to ask
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open to paying for content. Others
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Conclusions Overall, oppositional n
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Foster, Michelle (2012) Calling the
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Judith Townend ‘Charitable journa
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In the second category, where the r
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Among the issues is the Charity Com
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House of Lords (2012) House of Lord
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press in a democracy to campaign, l
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The tribunal’s decision For the p
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charitable journalism may be recogn
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Denis Muller Conflict of interest:
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Tanner et al. (2005: 187) identify
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to its audiences. To engage in jour
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creating a commercial climate in wh
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that a sponsor would have no role i
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Items about Dove not labelled as sp
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their public-interest responsibilit
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Murtha, Jack and Gourarie, Chava (2
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Recognising the shadow elements of
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admits that ‘systematic’ may be
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Rather than ethics being an issue t
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