Abstract
This article explores journalism cooperatives, a sub-field of journalism practice and a type of news organization that is becoming more popular as an organizational option in journalism internationally. While other non-traditional ways of funding and producing news - such as non-profit media or crowdfunding initiatives - receive growing attention from journalism researchers, cooperative enterprises remain largely neglected. This study develops an inventory of 29 such news outlets in Europe, North America, and South America. It presents a portrait of the cooperative field in journalism in terms of founding year, geographic location, linguistic tendencies, and cooperative sub-types. Second, based on an analysis of the official websites of seven of these cooperatives, the article describes the revenue sources, workforce, governance structures, and missions of such needs-rather than profit-driven news outlets. The study finds that their organizational traits oscillate between alternative media, non-profit media, and mainstream media attributes. However, in addition, journalism cooperatives possess a unique feature, namely internal democratic governance mechanisms, which have the potential to increase public trust in the news media. Moreover, for the seven cooperatives investigated here, this potential is enhanced further as they assign a key role to audiences as owners, managers, and funders of the organization (they are either reader-owned or co-owned by journalists and readers). I argue that the results of this exploratory study on journalism cooperatives, together with existing research on news non-profits, invite us to consider that the social economy might be a better default home for journalism than the capitalist marketplace.