News Fix # 42: Is innovation irrational?
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Fundraising for news, maybe fundraising for anything, is an opportunity to watch just how information asymetry works. The people asking for money could know everything about their product but almost nothing about what a funder needs to hear. It's high-stakes mind-reading that incentivizes less than complete honesty about need, vulnerability, and even vision.
Maybe that's why there has been a lot of conversation and even some anxiety about a recent report by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro. It asks big questions about how grant money is distributed across the nonprofit news ecosystem. It then offers big-picture advice to funders on how to make their investments count, using grant applications as data. Most newsrooms don't yet have quite enough resources to do their jobs well, so this kind of interrogation about funding priorities could make people nervous. More mind reading.
Hansen-Shapiro and I spoke last week, and I'm publishing part of our conversation here. She is not trying to take anybody's lunch money away, that is for sure. But the phrase "hard choices" did come up a lot. The word "scale" gets a reflexive eyeroll from me, but Hansen-Shapiro had a take I could appreciate.
She wants to see funders better organize among themselves to meet the demands and the needs of the field, and by extension, the actual people we’re trying to serve with news and information. In our conversation, she was incredibly complementary about what the field of nonprofit news has accomplished in the past few years.
We talked about civic information, whether innovation is rational or irrational, being realistic about subsidies for the long term, and much more. I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know what you think, and tell Hansen-Shapiro, too. She's as eager for feedback as I am.
Ever the researcher, she had some questions for me too. She'll publish that part of our conversation separately, and I'll link to it when she does. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
Sarah Alvarez
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