PaidContent's interview with the two execs just named to run the Bay Area News Project, a journalistic enterprise backed by $5m foundation funding, debates some interesting concepts:
Editor in chief Jonathan Weber on relationships between media organisations: "The nature of the environment currently is that in a lot of situations you're going to be both collaborating and competing with the same entities sometimes. I don't think there is even a competitor or a competitive set per se. It's a very complicated set of interlocking relationships."
And on how to pay for new journalistic enterprises: "In terms of profit versus non-profit, I've certainly been an advocate of the for-profit model. I do think there are for-profit models that work, but at the same time, the reality these days is that investment capital is not going into for-profit companies where the primary use of proceeds of that capital is to pay journalists. For whatever reasons, investors have not seen that as a big opportunity to date. There may be a few exceptions in narrow niches but certainly for general news there's been very little investment of that type."
