Community foundations and endowments. Many current experiments in changing the news business are funded, in part, by foundations, endowments, and non-profit agencies. These same sources can be an additional source of revenue for The Next Newsroom, at least in the start-up phase of the project. A Community Foundation in a specific locale may be interested in helping launch The Next Newsroom.
While JTM-The Next Newsroom is mission driven, the goal is the achieve a level of sustainability which could provide a return on capital to private or institutional investors consistent with other social investments.
Local venture capital. Because the Next Newsroom intends to make money, local or regional venture capitalists may be interested in investing in the start-up. The Next Newsroom is conceived as an ongoing, self-sustaining example of a new kind of local news-gathering organization that could be grown and replicated elsewhere.
Lessons learned from this project are designed to help others build similar news-gathering organizations that are profitable. Venture capital may well be interested in these new models. Journalists themselves also likely will be interested in this project.
Software companies like Microsoft that support digital publication through VISTA, and hardware companies like Hewlett-Packard, which has done work with home printers with digital addressing capabilities, could also find this project attractive as a way to market digital-publishing tools, and might invest as an R&D initiative.
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