Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
The media becomes an activist for democracy
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Aug. 21, 2012, 9:28 p.m.
Business Models
LINK: www.publicintegrity.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   August 21, 2012

Last year, CPI tried what (to be honest) struck me as an odd rebranding, swapping their decades-old brand for “iWatch News.” It wasn’t a rebranding exactly — more the creation of a news site semi-distinct from the news organization. But the iWatch News brand was front and center.

Yesterday, CPI took back its old identity and sent iWatch News to the ash heap of history. Here’s CPI’s Bill Buzenberg:

It sounded good at the time and looked good on paper, but it never fit quite right. And frankly, it led to some confusion about who we are — which is and always has been The Center for Public Integrity, one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations…

What we learned in the last year is that our website isn’t a product of The Center for Public Integrity — it is The Center for Public Integrity. That’s why we have decided to reclaim our name and be known by a single identity. By embracing our given name, we’re taking the confusion out of who we are and reaffirming what we stand for.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”