https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1510/S00016/scoops-solution-to-the-news-crisis-the-scoop-foundation.htm
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Scoop's Solution to the News Crisis - The Scoop Foundation |
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The news is broken. As traditional advertising revenues dry up, New Zealand’s major news publishers are dumbing down or distorting the news to keep their businesses alive. The newly-formed Scoop Foundation for Public Interest Journalism charitable trust is seeking your support for its solution to the news crisis.
In this campaign we’re seeking $50,000 from individual donors and targeting corporate and institutional donors for a further $50,000 in matching funds. If we're successful we'll be able to complete the establishment phase of the Scoop Foundation and it’s Scoop Publishing Company. In doing so we hope to significantly improve the outlook for freely accessible, timely, quality public interest news services in New Zealand.
Over the past 8 months, with the assistance of your pledges - initially to “Help Scoop To Fly” in February and March, and then during our “16 Days of Scoop” Crowd Selling 16th Birthday campaign selling Scoop Memberships - we have managed to turn around The Scoop Publishing Company’s business fortunes with an innovative new business model for funding news.
Scoop’s “ethical paywall”, launched in May, is an innovative approach to copyright which answers the challenge of funding public interest journalism. It’s not dependent on advertising, but instead creates a commercial incentive aligned to the Scoop Foundation’s purposes — encouraging and enabling publication of useful, quality, timely and ethical public interest journalism and information. More than 60 organisations — including Parliament, Govt. Departments, lawyers and a university — have already bought licences.
And Scoop Membership was launched at the end of June. So far we have over 300 Scoop Foundation financial members including one corporate member, NZ’s telecommunications company Spark New Zealand. Membership and corporate sponsorships appear to be a second useful new business model to secure the Scoop Foundation’s long-term future.
So far the global #futureofnews
effort has failed to deliver any reliable solutions to a
news funding crisis caused by digital disruption of
advertising markets. Those solutions which are being trialed
are almost certainly not viable in a local news market the
size of New Zealand's. Making thousands of journalists
redundant and chasing reader eyeballs through click-bait,
30-second videos, and adding cats in the news stream — is
not improving the situation. The solutions being proposed
— paywalls and micro-payments — are unlikely to work at
NZ scale.
Saving the news will need many solutions. All
we know for certain, is that only innovation can get us
there.
Scoop has been playing the role of news innovator since it started in 1999. We’ve built a remarkably strong network of New Zealand communicators and communications. We’ve networked blogs and built a platform which supports partnership publications including Werewolf.co.nz, Pacific.scoop Wellington.scoop and the Scoop Review of Books.
Our +500,000 monthly readers, millions of incoming links, and influential audience has made Scoop the ideal platform for developing a new business model for online news. We want to continue our collaborative role within the NZ news ecosystem, this role has been central to our efforts to transform Scoop into a not-for-profit over the past three years.
Scoop launched the initial Scoop Foundation Project —- to create a charitable Trust to fund investigative news projects — in April 2013. 21 months later, in December 2014 “Operation Chrysalis”, a three-step plan to transform the privately owned Scoop publishing company into a not-for-profit foundation began. In 2015, 321 generous pledgers provided $36,874 to "facilitate the gift of Scoop.co.nz from its current owners to a new structure".
Over the past six months these funds were used to:
Income from licence sales and memberships is growing rapidly and we're tracking towards becoming fully sustainable from licence and subscription revenue alone by May 2016.
In five months we've sold commercial use licenses to over 60 organisations including Government Departments, law firms, universities, corporates and PR firms, and recruited over 300 members. In September we launched a campaign to recruit members and contributors (people who actively help the Foundation) on an ongoing basis at takebackthenews.nz.
The Scoop Foundation's trustees, Margaret Thompson (formerly owner of Scoop.co.nz) and Alastair Thompson (director and editor of the Scoop Publishing Company) are in our video above.
Our core
editorial team consists of:
Heading the Business Development Team is Steven Wood, assisted by sales assistant Olexander Barnes and accounts administrator Kristen Dowsett. Scoop's sales development and campaign work is supported by Enspiral network collaborators Damian Sligo-Green and Noshi Creative. On the technical side, our systems are kept running by Andrew Thompson and Wiremu Demchick.
The inner circle of
the wider Scoop network also includes:
The Scoop Foundation’s immediate work programme includes:
Meanwhile the Scoop
Publishing Company needs The Foundation’s assistance to
invest in:
ENDS
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