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Beyond Journalism
Mark Deuze and Tamara Witschge
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Mark Deuze and Tamara Witschge 2020
The right of Mark Deuze and Tamara Witschge to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4341-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4342-7(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Deuze, Mark, author. | Witschge, Tamara, author.
Title: Beyond journalism / Mark Deuze, Tamara Witschge.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Among the most significant changes affecting journalism is the emergence of startup culture. Through case studies of journalism startups, this book provides insight into the promises and pitfalls of media entrepreneurship, ultimately recognizing new voices as legitimate participants in the discourse about what journalism is, can be and should be”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019016714 (print) | LCCN 2019980604 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745643410 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745643427 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Journalism.
Classification: LCC PN4731 .D47 2019 (print) | LCC PN4731 (ebook) | DDC 070.4--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016714
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980604
Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Sabon
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
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Prologue: The Beyond Journalism Project
In the summer of 2013, Mark moved to The Netherlands after spending ten years working and living in the United States. Tamara had then just come back from maternity leave, after returning to her home country the year previous to Mark, having lived and worked in the United Kingdom for five years. Both of us assumed positions at our universities (Mark at the University of Amsterdam, Tamara at the University of Groningen) with responsibilities regarding administration, teaching, and research in journalism and media studies – at a time when both fields shifted under the influence of technological and social transformations.
Whereas changes in journalism manifest primarily in the decline (or disappearance) of local news media, with subsequent large numbers of layoffs in news organizations all over the world (and especially in overdeveloped nations), in The Netherlands we were also confronted with a new kind of energy: independent journalistic ventures such as Follow The Money (a financial-economic investigative journalism collective founded by Eric Smit, Mark Koster, and Arne van der Wal in 2009), Blendle (offering an online kiosk that sells articles from a variety of newspapers and magazines on a pay-per-article basis, started in 2012 by Marten Blankesteijn and Alexander Klöpping, and expanding to Germany and the United States in 2016), and De Correspondent (an online in-depth journalism magazine launched as a crowdfunded initiative in 2013 by Rob Wijnberg, Harald Dunnink, Sebastian Kersten, and Ernst-Jan Pfauth, opening an international division in the United States in 2018) were making headlines, both nationally and internationally. Something was brewing in our home country – a development partly inspired by the economic downturn, and greatly enabled by funding agencies such as the Dutch Journalism Fund, a government-sponsored institution offering subsidies for innovation.
Traditionally, the Dutch Journalism Fund supported legacy news media in their efforts to develop new ways of publishing news. However, in 2010 a new subsidy program was adopted (titled Persinnovatie [Innovation of the press]), redirecting its efforts to support both individual journalists and teams of journalists as well as news media organizations to take advantage of – and experiment with – new, digital opportunities. In the first five years of this program it received over 550 applications, of which 93 applications were granted with well over 10 million euro in subsidies. Approximately half of the projects were continued by the applicant after the subsidy was spent.1
The availability of a lot of (unemployed) journalistic talent, new sources of financial support, a growing frustration with the lack of innovation in the Dutch news media landscape (among journalists and certain segments of the public alike), as well as the emergence of charismatic and media-savvy reporters and editors such as Smit, Klöpping, and Wijnberg, cemented a path for journalism startups – admittedly, a path partially paved for them by belonging to the dominant class of journalists in The Netherlands