| This dissertation focuses on the provision of public affairs journalism by nonprofit news organizations. Specifically, I develop the idea that public affairs journalism throughout much of the 20th century was a byproduct of commercial journalism, enabled by subsidies that have since eroded. Today, a new subsidy is arising: philanthropic funding flowing to news organizations that are being founded by former mainstream journalists concerned by a perceived erosion of public affairs journalism. I employ the theory of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012) to situate these news organizations against the other fields that together comprise the field of journalism, and ask how these organizations are different. To address this question, I conducted ethnographic work at three nonprofit news organizations: the Center for Public Integrity, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and MinnPost. Unlike many journalistic reform movements, these organizations are not focused on challenging norms and practices of traditional journalism; rather, they aim to bring back the investigative, public-interest oriented journalism that they perceive has long been a mainstay of traditional news organizations, and which they say has eroded. Their revenue is connected to their ability to help democracy, rather than coming from the sale of access to content; this gives them an incentive to strive for as broad a readership as possible, rather than walling off their stories from those who don't pay. As a result, I found that they make explicit a long-standing but unacknowledged newsroom behavior, one that I call "news sharing." I observed four major variants of news sharing in the newsrooms I studied: collaboration, sharing through distribution, being mentioned and offering commentary. The organizations engaged in these behaviors with the goal of achieving "field repair" (Graves and Konieczna, 2014)---that is, improving the journalistic institution from within both by producing quality journalism and by creating infrastructures that encourage other organizations produce this kind of journalism. The economic crisis in journalism and the rise of a collaborative environment on the internet have helped make these behaviors ever more common. |
