No decision has been made about whether the JTM-NN prototype will launch as a profit or not-for-profit entity. In whatever corporate form, JTM-The Next Newsroom is mission driven, but its 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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