I’ve been asked a lot recently — by friends in the U.S., by American friends in Costa Rica, by Costa Rican friends in Costa Rica — why I’m continuing my internship at PBS MediaShift while studying abroad at la Universidad Nacional.
It’s a two-pronged answer, one answer more honorable than the other.
Non-profit newsrooms, and the organizations that fund them, stand to gain a great deal by knowing the impact of their reporting on local communities.
But impact is not easy to compute, according to a recent report from the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) at American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.
“There is a discussion that has been going on now for a few years … There’s still not a complete consensus,” said Chuck Lewis, co-author on the study. He is the founding executive editor of the non-profit IRW, the largest university-based reporting center in the country.
Zach C. Cohen 