Community-Powered Journalism: A Manual for Growth and Sustainability in Independent News

The Manual offers editors and publishers the insights and tools required to thrive in an unprecedented era. The authors’ goal is to contribute to prosperity for independent media, including heritage enterprises that seek renewal after decades of decline. 

 

Davis and Hunter provide a detailed roadmap to business models based on deepening relationships with customers, supported by emerging and available technologies, and founded on creating and capturing value in concert with the communities who need our work.

 

They demonstrate how to harness the full knowledge and force of editorial and business staff in tandem to serve their communities, and to grow the resources and returns needed for that task.

 

Key strategies include identifying and documenting the attributes and needs of end users, and the book proposes specific listening, marketing and promotion tactics to reach and recruit them, along with technology stacks to enable and support innovative business models. 

 

The authors draw on numerous examples from their decades of work with hundreds of independent media outlets across the world, as well as insights from the practitioner and scholarly business literature and from industries besides media, in a direct, engaging style. 

 

Davis and Hunter, faculty of the Future Media Management Programme in the Anne-Marie and Gustav Ander Centre for Media Studies at SSE Riga, are familiar with the challenges as well as the opportunities facing independent media, and they document success stories along with best and next practices. Field-tested, enriched by original peer-reviewed research and a wealth of recent studies, this book creates a platform for the coming era of growth in news.