For some time, Linda Pinkow, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism’s excellent development director, has been encouraging our editorial staff to start including a letter at the top of our BINJ.News Weekly Newsletter where we can let readers know what’s going on with BINJ and provide an quick overview of our biggest articles to essentially invite everyone into our latest edition.
So, today, we’re launching “This Week In BINJ.News” to both perform that function and to also appear as a standalone article each week for people that don’t yet receive our newsletter and land on our homepage from anywhere else on the web.
Welcome.
=
One thing to know about BINJ.News is that we hold our big annual fundraiser—during which we raise a significant portion of BINJ’s annual budget—every November and December. And as much as we’re careful to never overfill readers’ inboxes with our entreaties for financial support, many of our 11,000 subscribers (and growing!) will be getting fundraising emails from us every week for the next two months in addition to this weekly newsletter.
Our fundraising emails serve a different function from our newsletters. Through them, we tell regular readers the story of BINJ, why we do what we do, and why we need your donations to stay afloat in what have become extremely difficult times for journalism. We hope you will look them over in the same spirit of friendship and respect with which we offer them to you.
—Jason Pramas, Executive Director
Sometimes the chasm between how a story is reported by most outlets and what really unfolded is a canyon.
In two decades of reporting in the Bay State, I have never seen that gap as wide as exists between coverage of the World Cup and the real impact and cost of hosting FIFA and its fans from near and far.
Our latest post-mortem analysis, the fifth installment in a series based on documents we wrestled away from the state which has been slow to produce public records, shows how Boston may be on the hook for as much as $12 million in police overtime for the World Cup.
It’s a story you will only get from BINJ. There’s a gulch between our reporting on this front and the baseless back-of-the-napkin World Cup economy boosterism pushed by everyone else. But if you really want to know what happened, we need you to make the leap. And to support us during NewsMatch.
—Chris Faraone, Editorial Director
This Week In BINJ.News is produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, by Chris Faraone and Jason Pramas and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
