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Power is Everywhere: How Stakeholder Driven Media Build the Future of Watchdog News

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The book, draws on ten years of peer-reviewed research, interviews and case studies by The Stakeholder Media Project, based in the INSEAD Social Innovation Centre in Fontainebleau, France. In five chapters, the book provides a blueprint for the conception and operation of media that serve stakeholder groups – communities of interest who affect or are affected by organizations like governments and businesses. Power is Everywhere shows how these media, from greenpeace.org to breitbart.com, differ from mainstream media in their value propositions, content and operations.

The authors argue that stakeholder-driven media (SDM) will continue to proliferate, and that they will be an increasingly powerful vehicle for sustainable, fact-based watchdog journalism.

The book serves as a manual for founders of stakeholder-driven media, coaching them through the process of creating a business model and putting it to work. A key feature of SDM business models, say the authors, resides in changing the relationship of a media to its users, by entering their community to serve them. The SDM business model, they argue, aims first and foremost to protect, promote and prevail for its users.

The book also sets out a new strategy for achieving social impact through watchdog journalism, based on studies of organizational crises in which communities and coalitions serve as levers of influence. The authors show that SDM can and do generate impact even in the absence of attention from mainstream media. They dissect strategies by which stakeholder groups have prevailed in conflicts with much larger adversaries. They show that the power of actionable, verified information enables coalitions even among communities who pursue different goals. In conclusion, the book details monetization and growth strategies for the next generation of SDM. Says co-author Mark Lee Hunter, “At a time when mainstream media are downsizing, SDM will provide jobs to many journalists, and news to a growing public. We seek to identify and improve a model that will meet those goals through valid, influential information and meaning.”

The Stakeholder Media Project was created at INSEAD in 2006 by Hunter, also a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, a global leader in research on industrial and humanitarian operations, who recruited system dynamics expert Maria Besiou. Their scholarly research on SDM has been published by California Management Review, Sloan MIT Management Review, The Journal of Business Ethics and Corporate Reputation Review, while their practitioner articles have been featured in GIJN.org, OpenDemocracy.org, and Harvard Business Review. Their work has been supported by The INSEAD Social Innovation Centre, Kuehne Logistics University, Johnson & Johnson, the Thomson-Reuters, Open Society and Aga Khan Foundations, and WAN-IFRA. Power is Everywhere is designed by Anne Barcat.

For further information and contact with the authors, please write to

poweriseverywhere2017@gmail.com, or connect with The Stakeholder Media Project on Facebook

 at: https://www.facebook.com/StakeholderMediaProject/