We believe strongly that business journalism should be both more transparent and more collaborative.
We know as journalists that great reporting yields long interviews, document troves, and rich datasets, of which only a small selection of quotations and statistics makes into a finished product in a magazine or on T.V. We believe this material should have a second life, available to readers who want to dig deeper, to researchers at academic and nonprofit institutions who want to include it in their work, and to other journalists who spot the opportunity for a future scoop. Good business journalism comes from stories that build upon one another, not from a single scoop boxed away after it is complete. We ask our grantees to open up their process to one another, to other researchers and to the public so that their work can be built upon and have a greater impact.
We know too that researchers outside journalism have access to material that journalists do not: information collected through extensive field research, analytical reports showing deep subject area expertise. We believe business journalism can benefit from making greater use of this work. But it is highly technical when most business journalists are not technically trained in finance or economics. Moreover, nonprofit and academic writing is often published long after the research it describes has concluded. We believe that allowing academics and nonprofit researchers to share their findings directly with journalists, in realtime, would allow more of this in-depth data to find its way into the press and into public debate.
Currently, we’re in the process of building a platform on our website to facilitate this exchange, allowing journalists, academics and nonprofit researchers to share material with one another in a secure setting, while also enabling them to share as much as possible with the public on our blog. Oxford’s Said Business School, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Global Witness and City University (London) are among the organizations already signed up to participate and we are eager for more. If you are a news organization, academic institution or nonprofit and want to be a Public Business partner, please get in touch at partnerships@publicbusinessmedia.org.