How Non-Profit, For-Profit Newsrooms Are Working Together

PBS Mediashift reporting:
As traditional newsrooms shrink and budgets tighten, media outlets have realized they can't do as much investigative, time-intensive reporting. But one solution has been for competing news outlets to begin collaborating, whether working together on reports or with content-sharing deals.
And with the rise of local non-profit watchdog sites such as Voice of San Diego and the St. Louis Beacon, there's more chances than ever for collaboration to happen between non-profit sites and for-profit mainstream media outlets. That was the subject of a recent roundtable discussion convened by the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and led by the IRP's leader, Lowell Bergman, as well as Matt Isaacs and Haleh Hatami. The roundtable was funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
...Steven Waldman:"The for-profit folks have a brand and large distribution networks, but don't have the content," Waldman said. "Others have content but lack the brand and distribution networks. To put it in crass terms, the commercial sector is outsourcing accountability journalism to the non-profit sector."
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