Newsrooms need to get comfortable expressing their business value - and raising money on it.

Link: Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them., by Yoni Greenbaum in Backstory & StrategyArts organizations learned long ago to prove their economic value with hard numbers: attendance, tourism revenue, multiplier effects. News, as Yoni Greenbaum argues here, likes to cling to civic virtue and assume that the work should speak for itself.“Journalism operated on a commercial advertising revenue model for over 150 years. Publishers sold readers to advertisers, while editors fretted about maintaining a church-and-state divide between the newsroom and business desk. Journalists saw themselves as watchdogs, not wealth generators. Pitching our value based on our own economic impact felt gauche, too close to an advertorial.”Yoni points out that this is starting to change. We know that news deserts cost communities at least $1.1B a year, for example, because of a report by Rebuild Local News and the University of Illinois Chicago. But newsrooms themselves tend to shy away from…