Portland Media Lab

[Guest blog by David Rosenfeld of the Lundreport]

When I heard about Portland Media Lab and the We Make the Media Conference a few weeks ago, I was admittedly a bit miffed that the organizers hadn’t reached out to a fledgling non-profit investigative news source that’s been showing promise much of this year. So to calm my hysteria, Cornelius suggested I write something here.

I edit and report for TheLundReport.org, a source of investigative healthcare news for Oregonians. Created by Diane Lund-Muzikant, who directed the Oregon Health Forum for 17 years, The Lund Report is a 501c3 non-profit with both an issue and geographical focus. We do some aggregating, but mostly original reporting and commentaries.

Since April of last year when we launched, we’ve been catching the attention of the press and many others in the way the Oregon Health News did under Diane’s leadership for so many years. For those not familiar with her work, Diane is well known as a bulldog reporter, sparking controversy from time to time with the healthcare industry. We’ve already earned the reputation, among the Oregonian editorial board at least, as a healthcare watchdog. And with the recent folding of Oregon Health Forum, our importance will only increase. I am currently the sole paid staff person. I serve as the web editor and contribute a large part of the content. We also pay for occasional freelance work.

Diane’s reputation was clearly a big factor in our ability to solicit contributions even before we had a Web site. We now put out occasional calls for donations. And Diane, for the moment, is dead set against accepting sponsorships or underwriting. I personally don’t agree with this position if the site is to reach full potential. I think for sites like ours, free content with revenue from advertising – especially for those without name recognition — is the right way to go. For idealists, just limit the advertising to friendly sources.

I also think all sites like ours and other non-profit watchdogs that rely on the Internet to get their word out could benefit from a whole lot more communication and networking. Basically I would like to see a version of Alternet.org created for Portland or Oregon where content from a regional association of alternative investigative news sources was aggregated at a single source. Articles would be organized by issues and communities.

Through this site, readers could choose to sign up for individual email alerts. Sites could in turn share their own email lists to create a master list of possible readers for this gateway site. If successful news outlets don’t want to contribute, that’s okay. There are plenty of us struggling who can still produce strong content.

This opens the door to a business opportunity, which is fine as long as contributors are compensated. Alternet and many others such as Truthout.org have shown they don’t have to compensate anybody even if they run the whole entire article. A mutual advertising model similar to Google ads but for liberal bloggers exists in several ventures such as this one: http://web.blogads.com/advertise/the_liberal_prose The same model could also work for underwriting support for our collection of non-profit news outlets.

As our old sources of media crumble before our eyes, journalists are splintering off more than ever these days. I think the job of the current generation of reporters and people who care about journalism is to bring these efforts together in order to recreate the credibility and widespread dissemination that newspapers and other traditional news sources have enjoyed. Without it, we’re peeing in the wind.