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Heidi Radford Legg | Will knowing who runs and funds our media rebuild trust | 2023-03-29 | CACOR Zoom Presentation
March 29, 2023 @ 13:30 - 16:00 EDT
Speaker: Heidi Radford Legg
Topic: Will knowing who runs and funds our media rebuild trust.
Time: Mar 29, 2023 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Summary:
Heidi Legg is focused on increased transparency into who funds our newsrooms. With the massive disruption in digital news and the proliferation of newsrooms with global reach, understanding who funds our news is imperative to rebuild trust in journalism, which has been plummeting to an all-time low. Platforms like Google and Facebook spend large amounts on our newsrooms through secretive NDAs, the Canadian Periodical Fund has begun to send massive funds to new digital players, and the move to Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations is worth consideration. The Canadian landscape is fascinating, given the push for Bill C18 to have platforms pay for news, the challenges for funding across the globe for newsrooms in a disruptive market where the billion-dollar ad market has moved to platforms, and the emergence of nonprofit news through Canada’s new Registered Journalism Organization (RJO) – (See theNarwal.com). It is more important than ever that western democracies think about how to ensure journalism survives as a pillar in our democracies.
Biography:
Heidi Legg spent the past 18 months as the Future of Media fellow at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard where she indexed the entire US and Canadian media system with extensive ownership details on every outlet. By mapping the commercial and non-profit US Media ecosystems she has been able to offer informed solutions on improving transparency and trust in news. Her index work was published in mainstream media Axios, USA Today, Nieman Labs, Columbia Journalism Review, and the UK’s Press-Gazette. Heidi wrote sweeping white papers while at the Shorenstein Center from 2018-2020 including The Fight Against Disinformation in the US, A Landscape Study of Local News Across America and Preserving America’s Thought Leader Magazines. She was the founder of TheEditorial.com. She is mission driven to ensure more people have access to quality knowledge and that journalism survives with its own revenue model. She also published numerous OpEds on local news models for CNN and the Boston Globe, on section 230 for both the Boston Globe and new Capital Hill Citizen.
Born in Moncton, New Brunswick, she holds a Graduate degree in Journalism from Concordia University, Montreal (1994) and a Bachelor of Communications, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax (1993), with a minor in History from Dalhousie University (thesis on Marshall McLuhan, our own Canadian media theorist).