We started the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism at a dreadful time for investigative reporting. Not only had the news landslide begun to erode institutions once considered teflon, but many publishers had given up on the deep and incisive journalism that we wanted to produce with BINJ.
It was 2015, and the industry’s buzz phrase du jour was “pivot to video.” While the concept has since become a literal laughingstock sure to get howls upon mention in any media insider setting, don’t let the respectable news fraudsters fool you. Most of them believed the hype, followed the herd, and failed. In the process, their mastheads shed innumerable solid journalists, along with their unique sources and leads.
I will spare you the obvious sob story about how the news landscape has devolved into the Lorax in the brutal decade since. As well as the heroic tale about how BINJ stuck to its mission and endured against outrageous odds and gutless opposition, all while collaborating with a lot of those gifted abandoned journos. As the editorial director, my sole reason for writing this post beyond marking a year of BINJ posting aggressively on social media is to share the exciting news that we commissioned our first reported video.
I’ll save the subject of the piece for its release later this week, but will say that the same contributor, Eliza Dewey, cut one of the most viral BINJ visuals to date, an outstanding complement to a series of articles about excessive police drone surveillance. The difference with this coming effort is that the video is the main event. It won’t be the last time either, and so I deemed it a worthy occasion to mark, and this post is my time capsule and testament.
We haven’t snoozed through the past myriad multimedia movements. BINJ dropped videos sporadically along the way, but mostly we have watched the medium enthusiastically and even jealously, the latter since until recently there were prohibitively costly or burdensome logjams in the record-edit-spread it routine. Now that a neanderthal can shoot and upload hot takes on multiple platforms and bulk up with steroidal AI—in fact many of them have found much success in this realm—even small nonprofit newsrooms like BINJ can dance in the mud while still doing extensive underlying journalism.
As many of our longtime readers have hopefully noticed, since roughly this time last year BINJ has posted multiple videos every week. Most are clips cut from our weekly BINJ Live show, featuring interviews with sources and contributors. Others range from event coverage to one-offs linked to specific stories, and they’re all published on more than a dozen platforms. It’s a lot of heavy lifting despite the cheap and accessible tech that makes effective grassroots distribution possible, but it’s worth it because, put simply, it’s working.
BINJ is still finding its way in these strange waters, but our efforts so far have already lured millions of new eyeballs turning this way which otherwise wouldn’t have seen us. Most views amount to mere seconds, and there’s insufferable hate and stupidity to contend with in the comments, but we’re built for it, and at this point we’re already on track to replace your reader contributions and grant funding with YouTube earnings by 2040! (Until then, we’ll need as much help as you can give us.)
In the meantime, we are still committed to longform, investigative, and explanatory journalism—including, sometimes, about music and the arts, and occasionally via opinion or even polemics. And we’re determined to continue maintaining our own paywall-free site, binj.news, which has seen increased traffic this past year, largely due to bolstered online recognition. You read that correctly—while we have to wrestle with the same AI grim reapers picking off readers from all remaining outlets, thousands of people still find our treasure trove of features every week.
Finally, we need your assistance in this foreign theater of engagement, and I don’t just mean donations. As anybody knows from experience, if they have ever cursed an app like Spotify for making weak suggestions while requiring users to enter the full name of artists or podcasts they listen to daily just to retrieve accurate search results, content with integrity must multiply organically. For that to happen, we need you to watch, share, and hopefully still read our longform too. If you can find time between the videos.
*In fairness, the second line of the title could have just as well been, Now, we’re doing what even we never thought we’d be able to do.
