While we're waiting for the red tape to clear, what should Public Eyes be doing?

I'm keen to write an 'historic article' about the original Public Eyes group. The National Library in Wellington has almost the full set of newsletters that were published by the group back in 1985-89. It's a good, nah great, story to tell. Anyone keen to help?

. . .

It would indeed be interesting to revisit the history of the group from the eighties, as Rogernomics took over, and formal New Zealand journalism professionalism (i.e. a functioning association) collapsed.

Experiences from that time could be used to inform discussion on problems facing journalism now, e.g. a lack of funding and other resources.

My feeling is that we need to come to a decision on whether or not journalism debate has been 'captured' by ideological dogma to the extent where we talk about finding new "business models", when it is corporate business models that have gutted the profession in the first place, including in public media.

My further suggestion would be that Public Eyes looks at widening the debate from just business models towards a more inclusive debate on "funding models".

Happy to help, from JAFA land at least !

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happy to help Stephen.
I've been thinking about funding models, etc., and how an effort like this can 'start small'. Assuming we won't be showered with wads of cash from the outset, it strikes me that when (note optimism) we get the trust set up and charitable status in hand, we can use that status to crowd-fund specific projects. i.e. instead of trying to raise money for as-yet unspecified PI journalism, we invite project proposals offering to not just guide/assist the editorial side but the crowd funding side, allowing the journalists to do their thing. This means not needing big money up front. Naturally this would need a lot of working through, but I'm all for diving straight in, and this might be one way of doing it.

Also, speaking a little more directly to the question, it would be good if we could do a bunch o work on the PIJ website while the trust/charities red tape grinds on. What do people think we might do with the site...keeping in mind the usual fact that we are a group of volunteers so don't (yet) have the resources to run anything wildly fancy or labour intensive.

My thanks to everyone who has volunteered time to help with this project so far. I really like the name "PublicEyes", rolls off the tongue more easily than the other names used so far. My initial impression from the site and the lapse in use of this group is that the initiative has stalled. I hope I'm wrong, and that discussion and work has simply been focused somewhere less obvious.

If the project is still active, it's very important to keep the homepage looking loved, and up-to-date. My advice is to keep it very simple. Have very few pages, and make sure they are all checked for relevance (and updated or removed if necessary) at least once a month.

I suggest writing a new blog post at least once a month too, as that makes it clear the project is active. Shouldn't be too hard for a group of journalists ;) If there's absolutely no news from the Public Eyes project that month, how about a few words of news about what's happening behind the scenes in media organisations, and how Public Eyes might be able to help improve practice.

Anyone in a position to ‘pay it forward’? Positive News has spent 22 years applying the 'social enterprise’ model to new reporting, and they have one week left to get to the target for their current crowdfunding effort:
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/positivenews?utm_content=bufferebf73&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://positivenews.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PN_Business_Plan_2015.pdf

^{^} looking at this I find this.

http://img.scoop.co.nz/stories/images/1507/positive_news.jpg

Postive News which has raised $500,000 in equity crowd-funding to relaunch itself is - in online audience terms - 1/10th the size of Scoop.co.nz.

True @alastairthompson1 but they started off with a newspaper (soon to be relaunched as a magazine), whereas Scoop has always been an online entity. Also Positive News is now structured as a cooperative, which everyone who contributed to that crowdfunding is now an co-owner of, whereas Scoop is a family-owned private company, yes?

BTW Any news on the progress of PublicEyes?

The newspaper had a circulation of 3500.

Scoop is turning into a not-for-profit in September most probably. As for Public Eyes hopefully it will proceed shortly. The constitution has been approved by the Charities Board which is pretty cool.

Great news for Scoop's future @alastairthompson1 . I think the traditional for-profit company is a 19th century structure, operating in a 21st century environment. It's great to see 'social enterprises' experimenting with cooperative companies structures (eg Loomio, and Positive News), and self-funding not-for-profit structures.