All media face financial pressure

After several weeks of learning about nonprofit media, I'm completely on bored.... At least I was until I read a Slate article about some of the harm associated with nonprofit journalism.

There are a lot of benefits to non-profit media. Outlets are free from major corporate sponsors, which often support and push a specific agenda. This means that with a major news outlet, like Fox or CNN, there's no guarantee that the information and sources presented will be accurate or objective. We have proof of this as it was recently announced that Brian Williams, an NBC Nightly News Anchor, lied in reports about being involved in a helicopter crash.

Furthermore, because many non-profit media outlets are not tied to a corporate agenda and generally address a specific audience, the media outlets can report in a biased manner and are not limited in what they can report... so it seems, though the article claims that this assertion may not be true.

At the same time, since these organizations are nonprofit, they don't have a foolproof way of sustaining funding, so they get sponsored by philanthropists and other organizations.

According to the Slate article, "handouts come with conditions."

Unfortunately, as journalism has progressed in our capitalistic society, the need to make money has sometimes overpowered the need to reach an audience, and, in a nonprofit outlet, reaching a large audience isn't going to them any money; they need to please potential investors. While this shouldn't make an impact on the stories reported, according to the Slate article, it does.

Independent media is such an appealing area because the stories written have been groundbreaking and highly influential. This is both a good and bad thing. The nonprofit outlets have that room to do that kind of muckraking journalism and their sponsors often encourage such reporting, BUT because the sponsors really want the outlets to be publishing impact pieces, outlets will feel pressure to swing their stories in favor of their sponsors desires.

The whole point of being an independent media outlet is to be free from financially based influences. That isn't to say that nonprofit media outlets aren't doing good reporting, or at least better reporting than many corporate media outlets, it's just something to keep in mind.