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Unconventional Wisdom: Digital Newsrooms Should Fail More Often

November 16, 2023

In his "Second Rough Draft" journalism newsletter, Dick Tofel suggests that the very low failure rate of digital news nonprofits isn't a sign of industry resilience. To the contrary, Tofel believes it represents "funder timidity, founder stubbornness and industry stagnation." While he acknowledges the hardship of employee job loss and that newsroom survival shouldn't be based completely on traditional business profitability models, Tofel says a higher failure rate may be necessary if the industry is to survive. Lessons about audience and budgeting learned from a larger percentage of failures -- a rate that comes closer to that of for-profit venture capital funded enterprises -- could be applied to creating more sustainable nonprofit news operations in the future.

Read more of Dick Tofel's "Second Rough Draft" piece here.
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