Fundraising is already well underway for the new UK Media Fund, a crowdfunding platform that allows anyone to join and contribute to a national co-operative fund to sustain and develop the grassroots news and media sites that the public most wants to support. The fund will be directly democratic and transparent for contributors; will help alleviate the financial pressures faced by online media organisations that can jeopardise journalistic quality and neutrality; and bring alternative media organisations together to become more than the sum of their parts, allowing them to survive in a competitive market dominated by vast multi-national corporations. The fund will also provide the infrastructure for further developments in democratic, co-operative funding of the media, such as independent funding for long-form, journalistic investigations and campaigns. The fund has launched a £10000 fundraising campaign to cover start-upcosts at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/mediafund
Details
The project is spearheaded by Real Media, alongside a number of other independent media organisations across the UK, and the official launch will take place at the Media Democracy Festival on the 10th of December at Birkbeck College, University of London. The fund will have two types of stakeholder – media organisations, and public contributors. If they are deemed of a sufficiently high quality (in adherence to the National Union of Journalists’ code of conduct), media organisations can become members of the fund by helping to cover the fund’s running costs in return for featuring on the list of potential recipients of donations on the media fund website and app. Public contributors will log in, choose the organisation(s) that they want to support from a list of quality-assured news sources and pledge a regular amount of at least £1 per organisation per month. There is no decision-making mediation by a board, or absorption of any portion of contributors’ donations into the running costs of the site – every £1 donated to a particular organisation goes directly to that organisation at the end of every month.
Funding has been a perennial problem for the grassroots news outlets that have otherwise flourished in the internet age. With no generally successful revenue model available for these organisations, funding issues can often impact upon the quality and quantity of output, and even threaten journalistic impartiality. Furthermore, with 80% of the UK press being in the hands of five billionaires, and the vast majority of broadcast news being in the hands of the state, it is no surprise that the traditional sources of media are becoming increasingly out of touch with the population at large. The need for independent media in the UK is greater than ever, but this need can’t be satisfied when financial issues are hindering the development of alternative news sources. The Media Fund will allow independent media organisations to come together to surmount this seemingly intractable problem through co-operation – alleviating financial and outreach pressures whilst creating a space in which alternative media sources can collaborate to fund independent projects that would otherwise be financially unviable.
Links
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/mediafund
https://twitter.com/themediafund
https://facebook.com/themediafund
Affiliated Organisations
NATIONAL
Real Media
Novara Media
New Internationalist
Centre for Investigative Journalism
Open Democracy
Consented
SpinWatch
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Now Then
Pride’s Purge
Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom
Streets Kitchen
Reel News
The Radical Film Network
Union News
LOCAL
The Salford Star
The Manchester Mule
Dorset Eye
Bella Caledonia
The Bristol Radical Film Festival
