Giving Compass' Take:

• NiemanLab interviews Tow Center's Emily Bell about the role of public service journalism in a challenging media environment and why it's crucial to our democracy.

• How is philanthropy supporting public media? Bell emphasizes that the main issue is with reach and consistency. Both those aspects can be assisted through more funding.

• For more on philanthropy can support strong reporting, specifically solutions journalism, click here.

The ability of the media to secure democracy is being challenged by great disruptions: ad funding doesn’t work that well anymore and large, non-transparent platforms are increasingly central in our information flow. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, thinks public service media may be about to play its most important role since World War II.

Facebook and Google have taken over not only an increasing share of the attention, but also much of the ad market. This has taken away another large chunk of the revenue that supports journalism, following classified ads in the unbundling of the business model that once made newspapers a thriving business.

The rise of subscription models and paywalls has begun to inject fresh money in some media houses, but those who aren’t subscribing to journalistic media could be left worse off. It’s no longer a matter of picking up a single newspaper copy at a newsstand; a paywalled news industry limits information to those able to make a long-term financial commitment, one that usually involves disclosing your personal data. And that personal data has become a commodity, being used to target everything from advertising to political manipulation.

“In a way, that’s what we think we’ve seen in the 2016 election cycle: Certain people getting certain messages, others getting different ones, and not really knowing where it’s coming from, who’s deploying it, and with no kind of transparency,” Bell said. “We are being made to feel a particular way by the media we’re consuming, and it is not an organic, cultural phenomenon, but a highly manipulated political phenomenon. Unless you can have free high-quality news, you don’t have an antidote; you really don’t have an antidote.”

Read the full interview with Emily Bell about public service journalism by Anders Hofseth at niemanlab.org