Newswise — The Membership Puzzle Project, a public research project studying how to optimize news for trust, has launched the Membership in News Fund, which will support existing news sites’ development of sustainable membership models—with the larger aim of encouraging support of independent journalism.
The Membership Puzzle Project (MPP), funded by Luminate, Democracy Fund, and the Knight Foundation, is collaboratively run by New York University and Dutch journalism platform De Correspondent. The 18-month long project is a global experiment designed to support the testing of new membership models within news organizations.
MPP’s Membership News Fund (https://membershippuzzle.org/fund) will support innovative membership models at news sites around the world as part of a global experiment. The fund is an expansion of the project’s work to identify best practices for supporting and sustaining independent journalism in the 21st century.
The $700,000 fund, backed by Luminate (previously the Governance & Citizen Engagement initiative at Omidyar Network) and Democracy Fund, seeks applications from sites with a range of organizational structures, including for-profits, non-profits, co-ops, and more.
“We’re launching this fund so that sites around the world can more freely experiment with membership as a way to develop sustainable models for the support of independent journalism,” write Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a co-founder of the Membership Puzzle Project, and Emily Goligoski, the project’s research director. “Together with our partners we aim to increase the depth, variety, geographic reach, and financial sustainability of different approaches to membership.”
Funds will be allocated to news organizations through a “request for proposal” process. MPP will review proposals on a rolling basis and, with the NYU Sponsored Research Office, award funds to competitively selected “subcontractor projects” hosted by news organizations.
News sites selected for the Membership News Fund support will work in coordination with MPP and consulting experts to host experiments around several topics, including: generating revenue, audience participation, forms of governance, inspiration from disciplines beyond news, and online-to-offline and offline-to-online behavior
Ariel Zirulnick, former director of the New Tropic in Miami and foreign correspondent, will serve as the fund’s research operations manager.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
With a team of international researchers, the Membership Puzzle Project examines membership in and beyond news, from motivation to monetization. At the heart of the puzzle is the contract between journalism sites--including journalists--and their members. The project researches journalism organizations that are diversifying revenue and their audience engagement and involvement practices. For more, please visit membershippuzzle.org.
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