VIENNA — In August 2008, two wars unfolded in South Ossetia. Georgian newspapers and television stations reported an aggressive, unprovoked Russian invasion of their country. Russians, meanwhile, watched images and read tales of Georgian troops committing genocide.
For a brief period, Georgians could flip between TV stations to watch both versions. Soon, access to the Russian [...]

VIENNA — When a massive earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12, there was only one foreign correspondent — a writer for the Associated Press — in the country to cover the disaster. In the following days, media from around the world parachuted in, relying heavily on NGOs for sources and context.
Two weeks later, most media [...]

For the next couple days, I’ll be attending a seminar on how changes in the media landscape are affecting diplomacy. The event, the Milton Wolf Seminar, will include a series of panels and discussions with leaders at international NGOs, journalists, and members of the diplomatic community — a group I’m excited to meet and interview [...]

[The Internet opens up new means of communications for major NGOs. But does it also make their position vulnerable to a new breed of web-native upstarts, who understand the power of technology more fully? Denise Searle, who has worked with some of the world's best known NGOs, explores that in this, the final part of [...]

Ron Schiller, the new senior vice president for development at National Public Radio, doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the nation’s news media are in a state of crisis. Is the landscape changing? Absolutely. But this is no time to wallow in doom and gloom, according to Schiller. It’s an opportunity to take the case [...]

[If more of our news is going to produced by non-traditional sources — like NGOs who have an interest in promoting their own agenda — how can news consumers sort through their sources and figure out who to believe? Our friend Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center asks those questions in this essay, which examines a [...]

[Not too long ago, it was clear who was a producer of news — and who were the sources who fed them. Not so in a world where the production of media has been democratized, and the rules that governed that production are up in the air. In this essay, journalist Glenda Cooper examines several [...]

[It's one thing for NGOs to get into the news-producing business; it's another for their news to get noticed. Here Larry Kirkman and Laurie Moy explore the case of one NGO, OneWorld.net, and how its partnership with megalith Yahoo! News has put its work before an entirely new audience. This is the fifth part of [...]

[Journalists concerned about the future of the news business tend to worry about important issues receiving a decreasing amount of coverage. But what if the problem is less the amount of coverage but the assembling, filtering, and sorting of that coverage? Is there a role for a new class of news coordinators? Our friend Lokman [...]

[The publishing power of the Internet has opened up new possibilities for NGOs seeking to spread their messages. But is this new access changing the kinds of messages NGOs create, or is it reinforcing old paradigms? Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths, University of London, examines how the online landscape has changed NGO communications. This is the [...]

Nonprofit business models often pop up in our coverage, and in recent weeks we’ve run a series on the relationship between non-governmental organizations and the news ecosystem. But here’s something we’ve only touched on in passing: the decline of investigative journalism and its impact on nonprofit accountability. Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at the Georgetown Public [...]

[I've asked our nonprofit blogger extraordinaire Jim Barnett to respond to some of the ideas we've been exploring in our NGOs and the News series, cosponsored with Penn's Center for Global Communication Studies. Here's Jim's first take. —Josh]
Back in the 1980s, before they began full-blown advertising campaigns aimed directly at consumers, prescription drug companies used [...]

[This is the first essay in our series examining the evolving relationship between NGOs and journalism, produced with Penn's Center for Global Communication Studies. Kimberly Abbott of the International Crisis Group leads off by exploring the pros and cons of established news organizations relying on NGOs for help in their reporting. We're collecting the entire [...]

[Today we're beginning a series of essays here at the Lab dealing with an important set of players in contemporary journalism: non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. Its title: "NGOs and the News: Exploring a Changing Communication Landscape." Our friends at Penn's Center for Global Communication Studies explain below. —Josh]
The past decade has seen dramatic changes in [...]

Here’s a press release headline that’s likely to be recycled many times: “Nonprofit Institute Hires Investigative Journalist.” Just add the names of the nonprofit and the journalist, and you’ve got another story about the future of watchdog journalism in the post-newspaper era.
Now here’s a test: What if the institute in question is a right-wing think [...]