The Big Thaw

The Big Thaw is here!

Read our groundbreaking new study, The Big Thaw: Charting a New Future for Journalism.

Welcome to the Media Consortium!

The Media Consortium is a network of the country’s leading independent journalism organizations. We support smart, powerful and passionate journalism that redefines American political and cultural debate. The Media Consortium is creating a solid cooperative infrastructure that will serve a 21st-century audience and offer a sustainable future for independent media. Millions of Americans are looking for honest, fair, and accurate journalism-We’re finding new ways to reach them. Our strategy has three focal points: Making Connections, Building Infrastructure, and Amplifying Our Voice.

Making Connections

Through meetings and collaboratively built projects, The Media Consortium enables our members to build relationships, strategize, and constructively work together to reinvent the independent media sphere.

Building Infrastructure

We’re analyzing who reads, watches and listens to our members’ work so that we can reach millions more Americans looking for honest journalism. We’re making joint investments in training, technology-sharing, advertising, promotions and learning how to communicate effectively with one another.

Amplifying Our Voice

It’s time to do together what we can not do alone. The Media Consortium seeks to fulfill the role of media in a democracy. We’re strengthening a vibrant, fact-based community of independent journalism producers that educate, inform and engage citizens to create the world to which we all aspire.

RSS Consortium Report

  • Shifting Roles
    The new competencies outlined in Chapter 2 will help media organizations succeed in the new competitive environment. As a result, traditional roles will shift and overlap. (To read more of Chapter 2 and see charts of the shifting roles, download The Big Thaw.) These changes threaten many people’s ...
  • Weekly Mulch: No Treaty in Copenhagen?
    By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger Last weekend in Singapore, President Barack Obama acknowledged that a comprehensive international climate deal will not be reached during the climate change summit in Copenhagen. While many might view this as a letdown, lowering expectations might actually b...
  • Counterintuitive Ways of Working
    Funders and investors are already cautious of funding experiments since most fail. Counterintuitive ways of doing business and producing content may seem even more risky, but they can also be the biggest game changers. Counterintuitive Ways of Doing Business Many organizations in both the for-profit...
  • Weekly Diaspora: Fort Hood, Pundits and Immigration Reform
    By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger First it was immigrants from Mexico, now Muslims in the armed services. After the tragic shootings at Fort Hood, conservative pundits are verbally attacking Muslims and Arab-Americans, much like they have vilified the immigrant community. The complexities of Islami...
  • Weekly Pulse: Bachmann Fan Threatens to Shoot Up Newspaper
    By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger A Michigan woman threatened a Minnesota newspaper with mass murder for criticizing Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)’s anti-health reform rally, reports Paul Schmelzer in the Minnesota Independent: …A woman in Michigan, angered over a newspaper...
  • Strategic Technology
    Taking community seriously requires a greater allocation of resources toward both technology and the personnel who can use it effectively. “Many organizations only see one piece of the puzzle and want to do small experiments—hire an intern and a few people here and there—without seeing how tha...
  • Slideshow: The Big Thaw
    The below slide show is a compendium to The Big Thaw. We pulled out the most thought-provoking information and implications for independent media, including: The four overarching questions that media orgs/journalists need to address in order to thrive in coming years. A breakdown of current industr...
  • Weekly Audit: Saying ‘No’ to Corporate America
    By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger By proposing financial reforms that won’t curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don’t demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers ...
  • Getting Serious About Community
    Many people in the media industry talk about building community, but what does that really look like? “It’s not enough to have a place where readers talk back—or the classic letters-to-the-editors pattern,” Clay Shirky says. “Rather it’s about providing a platform for readers to coordina...
  • New Competencies: What New Capabilities are Needed to Succeed?
    The new competitive landscape requires publishers to build many new competencies, including community-building, strategic use of technology, multi-platform agility, greater integrated organizational functions and an ability to experiment, which may require counterintuitive ways of working. Media org...

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