About Public Media Review

Newsrooms are institutions with balance sheets, and this publication treats them that way. Public Media Review covers public interest media, newsroom economics and journalism innovation: where the money comes from, what it buys in coverage, and which communities lose a reporter when a title folds. Its readers are editors, publishers, funders, researchers and the people trying to start something local.

Output is analysis and explainer, not rewritten announcements. A piece will set a revenue model against actual retention figures, or follow a grant from award letter to the beats it eventually paid for. Launch coverage that repeats a founder's projection gets refused. So does nostalgia; the argument here concerns what sustains reporting now, not what once did. Sums appear in full wherever a funder or a filing discloses them, and anonymous complaint about a rival newsroom is not reporting.

Media examines ownership, funding structures and the policy governing them. Innovation reviews the formats, tools and distribution experiments newsrooms are actually shipping. Journalism concerns craft and standards: sourcing, verification, corrections, the ethics of a beat. Local tracks coverage at city and county level, including news deserts and the civic effects of losing a paper. Media News reports launches, closures, layoffs and funding rounds as they occur, and Business News follows the wider media economy of advertising, platform payments, subscription markets and consolidation.

Public Media Review is issued by VUGA Media Group as part of the VUGA Enterprises Network.