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Scoop editor and general manager Alastair Thompson (left) and Pacific Media Centre’s director Professor David Robie at the Scoop Foundation launch. Image: Del Abcede/PMC |
By Alastair Thompson
In a push to offer new support and momentum for public interest journalism, New Zealand's leading independent news provider, Scoop Media, is lending its weight to two initiatives being announced for the first time.
The first initiative, the Scoop Foundation Project, brings Scoop.co.nz together with a group of New Zealand’s leading practitioners of public interest journalism to create a charitable trust to fund investigative journalistic work.
This coincides with the launch by Scoop of a $5000 Pacific Scoop internship being awarded in conjunction with AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre (PMC). The first recipient, Danish radio journalist Daniel Drageset, was named at the School of Communication Studies Awards event held at the newly opened Sir Paul Reeves Building at AUT last week.
The name for Scoop's "Scoop Foundation Project" plays on the associated ideas of "foundation" and "construction". It is clear that we now need to build a new journalism.
The one that we have has been struggling for some time, and a key component of it - print - is now on life support.
And to build a new journalism we need to start by (re)constructing some foundations. And that is what the Scoop Foundation project will do.
The first important thing to understand about the Scoop Foundation Project is that it is a completely separate entity from Scoop Media Limited, publisher of the Scoop.co.nz.