Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation

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Fourth Estate
Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation
AbbreviationFourth Estate or 4E
Formation2011 (2011)
FounderW. Jeffrey Brown
Type Cooperative public-benefit corporation [1]
Legal status Cooperative
Public-benefit corporation
Focus Freedom of the press
Media Ownership
Media ethics
Journalism
News Deserts
Local News
Headquarters600 14th Street NW, 5th Floor Washington DC, 20005
Location
  • United States
Area served
Global
MethodAdvocacy
lobbying
publications
outreach
education
entrepreneurship
Membership
Public Benefit Cooperative
Executive Director
W. Jeffrey Brown [2] [3]
Budget
undisclosed
Staff
20–50
Website www.fourthestate.org

The Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation (or Fourth Estate PBC) states that it is an international, non-partisan, human rights, membership organization dedicated to a strong free press.

Contents

Aims

Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation describes its name as referring to the Fourth Estate, which it sees as politically significant. [4]

Its national office is located in Washington, DC. Its membership is global. Individual members may be: news consumers, or working journalists; organizational members are news organizations, corporations and educational institutions.

The organization provides news and journalism content, and technology services to customers that pay a fee to use the services.

Structure

The corporation states that it is organized as a public benefit cooperative, a type of member social cooperative, [5]

Key initiatives

The organization's initiatives include: advocacy, publicity efforts, investments, and strategic litigation strategies.

Journalism ethics and standards

In November 2019, the Fourth Estate revealed a new Journalism Code of Practice designed to reflect the key standards and principles of modern journalism. [6] The new Code of Practice is particularly notable for officially recognizing that journalism is no longer solely the preserve of the professional journalist. [7]

In April 2019, the organization announced the creation of the announces the "Office of the Journalism Advocate [8] " and the appointment of Alan Sunderland to the newly created role. According to the organization's Executive Director "the Journalism Advocate serves as the independent and authoritative voice for journalism in the Fourth Estate, free of any particular news company influence or affiliation." [9]

First amendment and freedom of press advocacy

The Fourth Estate advocates for the First Amendment and Freedom of Press and works cooperatively [10] with other civil-society organizations [11] on Freedom of speech programming and initiatives.

Journalism entrepreneurship

The Fourth Estate Angels provide seed and early stage funding in the range of $5K-$25K for news and journalism startups. [12] The Fourth Estate Angels is not a fund and does not invest as a LLC. Members collaborate in the due diligence process, but make individual investment decisions.

NewsFoundry was a prototype program that sought to apply proven lean and startup tools and techniques to build successful journalism businesses over 54 exciting and inspiring hours.

JournSpark is an incubation program that provides free web hosting and support for startup digital news organizations, press clubs, or student news publications.

Virtual private network (VPN)

In March 2019, the organization announced that it was launching a global virtual private network service for members of the organization. In 2021 the organization spun the project off into a stand-alone service called SupraVPN.

Journalism awards and grants

The Fourth Estate runs various contests open to professional, collegiate and high school journalists and news organizations in all forms of media. [13]

Awesome Journalism was a program that provided a monthly $1,000 micro-grant to a journalism project that commits a crazy, brilliant, positive act of journalism in the public interest. The initiative was originally launched as a cause-oriented chapter of the Awesome Foundation before becoming a more formal standalone program. It operated independently.

Media law network

The Journalism and Media Law Project connects members of the Fourth Estate with access to reduced fee or pro-bono legal representation and assistance with First Amendment issues. [14]

Social media

The Fourth Estate runs the Newsie.social instance on the Mastodon social network. Newsie is aimed at journalists, newspeople, journalism educators and comms professionals. Its operating costs are crowd funded.

Structure and governance

The organization is structured as a multi-stakeholder public benefit cooperative. The Fourth Estate's Constitution, organizational bylaws, and appendices outline governance and the rights and responsibilities among the organization's member-owners. [15] Membership is organized into eight categories of member-owner classes representing the major stakeholder groups, and three non-owner associate classes.

Committees and advisory board

As of 11 April 2018, Fourth Estate PBC's Advisory Board [16] includes[ who? ].

Strategic litigation

In March 2016, the Fourth Estate filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Wall-Street.com, LLC and Jerrold D. Burden alleging that the defendants infringed on its copyrights and intellectual property. The Fourth Estate argued before the court that copyright owners risk losing the right to enforce their intellectual property rights in an infringement action because of the long time period the United States Copyright Office needs to review a copyright application. [17] The court ruled that copyright registration, not application, must precede suit. [17]

Related Research Articles

Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation, the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles.

Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products. It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Journalist</span> Person who collects, writes and distributes news and similar information

A journalist is an individual who collects/gathers information in the form of text, audio, or pictures, processes it into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism.

A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organization, also known as a non-business entity, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in contrary with an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a profit for its owners. A nonprofit is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organization's purpose, not taken by private parties. An array of organizations are nonprofit, including some political organizations, schools, business associations, churches, social clubs, and consumer cooperatives. Nonprofit entities may seek approval from governments to be tax-exempt, and some may also qualify to receive tax-deductible contributions, but an entity may incorporate as a nonprofit entity without securing tax-exempt status.

In social science and economics, public interest is "the welfare or well-being of the general public" and society. While it has earlier philosophical roots and is considered to be at the core of democratic theories of government, often paired with two other concepts, convenience and necessity, it first became explicitly integrated into governance instruments in the early part of the 20th century. The public interest was rapidly adopted and popularised by human rights lawyers in the 1960s and has since been incorporated into other fields such as journalism and technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Omidyar</span> Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder of eBay (born 1967)

Pierre Morad Omidyar is a French-born Iranian-American billionaire. A technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist, he is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015. Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004. As of 2023, Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 245th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $8.7 billion.

Journalistic ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and good practice applicable to journalists. This subset of media ethics is known as journalism's professional "code of ethics" and the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements by professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.

A 501(c) organization is a nonprofit organization in the federal law of the United States according to Internal Revenue Code and is one of over 29 types of nonprofit organizations exempt from some federal income taxes. Sections 503 through 505 set out the requirements for obtaining such exemptions. Many states refer to Section 501(c) for definitions of organizations exempt from state taxation as well. 501(c) organizations can receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and unions.

Laws regulating nonprofit organizations, nonprofit corporations, non-governmental organizations, and voluntary associations vary in different jurisdictions. They all play a critical role in addressing social, economic, and environmental issues. These organizations operate under specific legal frameworks that are regulated by the respective jurisdictions in which they operate.

Ina Fried, formerly Ian Fried, is an American journalist for Axios. Prior to that, she was senior editor for All Things Digital, a senior staff writer for CNET Network's News.com, and worked for Re/code. She is a frequent commenter on technology news on National Public Radio, local television news and for other print and broadcast outlets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Student Press Law Center</span> American non-profit organization promoting student press freedom

The Student Press Law Center (SPLC) is a non-profit organization that aims to promote, support and defend press freedom rights for student journalists at high schools and colleges in the United States. It is dedicated to student free-press rights and provides information, advice and legal assistance at no charge for students and educators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Associated Press</span> American multinational nonprofit news agency

The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are distributed to its members, major U.S. daily newspapers and radio and television broadcasters. Since the award was established in 1917, the AP has earned 58 Pulitzer Prizes, including 35 for photography. The AP is also known for its widely used AP Stylebook, its AP polls tracking NCAA sports, and its election polls and results during US elections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Editors Network</span>

The Global Editors Network (GEN) was an international association of over 6,000 editors-in-chief and media executives with the mission of fostering digital innovation in newsrooms all over the world. GEN had three main programmes: Editors Lab, the Data Journalism Awards, Startups for News, as well as an upcoming hub for the international data journalism community. The organisation’s flagship event, the GEN Summit, gathered over 830 participants from 70 countries. The GEN newsletter was read weekly by more than 13,800 subscribers. It is a non-profit, non-governmental association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RStudio</span> Integrated development environment for R

RStudio is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs on a remote server and allows accessing RStudio using a web browser. The RStudio IDE is a product of Posit PBC.

Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over US$34 billion was raised worldwide by crowdfunding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rich Edson</span> American journalist (born 1981)

Rich Edson is the State Department Correspondent for Fox News Channel and a former Washington Correspondent for Fox Business Network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Casebook PBC</span>

Casebook PBC is a US cloud computing public-benefit corporation headquartered in New York City. Incubated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the company initially developed child welfare solutions and has since expanded to provide a SaaS platform servicing the whole of [Human Services] organizations.

Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, 586 U.S. ___ (2019), is a Supreme Court of the United States case in which the Court unanimously ruled that a copyright infringement suit must wait until the copyright is successfully registered by the United States Copyright Office.

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.

References

  1. "Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation". B Lab. Archived from the original on September 23, 2018. Retrieved May 5, 2017.
  2. "About the Fourth Estate: fourthestate.org". Archived from the original on September 23, 2018. Retrieved April 6, 2018.
  3. "FIU looks to bring entrepreneurship to journalism with appointment". South Florida Business Journal. Retrieved May 8, 2017.
  4. "fourth estate". Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House. Archived from the original on October 29, 2017. Retrieved June 28, 2017.
  5. "Governance Documents of the Fourth Estate". Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on February 8, 2019. Retrieved May 31, 2017.
  6. "Journalism Code of Practice". Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on January 25, 2020. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  7. "The Fourth Estate Code of Practice for Journalism". Fourth Esgtate. Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on October 1, 2020. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  8. "Office of the Journalism Advocate". Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on April 4, 2019. Retrieved April 4, 2019.
  9. "The Fourth Estate Announces the Creation of the Office of Journalism Advocate". Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on April 4, 2019. Retrieved April 4, 2019.
  10. "Fourth Estate + Project Galileo". Project Galileo. Cloudflare. Archived from the original on April 13, 2018. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
  11. "Org Spotlight: Fourth Estate". National Association for Media Literacy Education . Archived from the original on March 30, 2018.
  12. "Fourth Estate Angels". Gust.com. Gust. Archived from the original on March 11, 2018. Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  13. "Journalism Awards".
  14. "Media Law Network".[ permanent dead link ]
  15. "Organizational Structure and Governance". Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on February 13, 2022. Retrieved February 13, 2022.
  16. "Fourth Estate Advisory Board". Fourth Estate. Archived from the original on April 12, 2018. Retrieved April 11, 2018.