MCCM
RESILIENCE
OUR MEDIA
Power is Everywhere: How Stakeholder-Driven Media Build the Future of Watchdog News is a new 162-page book arguing that hegemony of mainstream media has given way to a “media environment in which a stunning range of actors control their own media, and use those media to directly affect individuals, communities, organizations and society”.
The book defines stakeholder-driven (SDM) media as media created and controlled by communities of practice and interest and stakeholders as “people who affect or are affected by issues and organizations” arguing that SDM represent a significant and fast-growing piece of the news industry.
“That’s a broad definition that lets it lump together ProPublica and Breitbart, the Center for Public Integrity and 30A — something that brings partisan media, mission-driven media, and simply reader-centric into what some might would consider a natural grouping”, Nieman Lab noted in the book overview.
The fundamental difference between mainstream media and SDM, as the authors see it, is that stakeholder-based groups unabashedly see themselves as partisan members of or advocates for the groups that they represent, comments Nieman Lab.
One of the goals of the book is to help the business side of SDM. The books aims to help investigative news organizations think more creatively about their businesses and wean themselves off foundation money, which many assume is the only way to pay for watchdog reporting, Nieman Lab noted.
The book’s head author is Dr. Mark Lee Hunter , researcher at the INSEAD Social Innovation Center in Fontainebleau, France. Co-authors are researchers Luk N. Van Wassenhoven and Maria Besiou.
The book is aimed at professors and students at journalism schools, as well as investigative journalists. All these groups, the authors say, should understand both how stakeholder-based news organizations are driving the news agenda, and how journalists can use the concept to build audiences around their own work, Nieman Lab reports.
