Paper short abstract:

This paper is concerned with how the motivation to ‘look good’ – or to generate symbolic capital – affects the news organizations’ ability to ‘do good’ – or focus on producing public service content.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the phenomena of philanthropist funding of international nonprofit journalism as an example of 'doing good' in order to 'look good'. Specifically, we are concerned with investigating how the motivation to 'look good' - or to generate symbolic capital - affects the news organizations' ability to 'do good' - or focus on producing public service content.

We investigate this issue by discussing how news production at IRIN, the world's largest and oldest humanitarian news agencies, changed when it moved from United Nations to foundation-funding, in January 2015. Drawing on 12 months of research involving content analysis, newsroom observations and semi-structured interviews, we will examine how the pursuit of symbolic capital shaped IRIN's managerial strategy, its external relationships and the form and framing of its actual news output.