The media landscape today is a very different one from the one in which the media development field was born. The skills and information gap between Global North and Global South is much narrower. Aut...
Nishant Lalwani is CEO of the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which supports media organizations and ecosystem-level interventions across four focus regions: Africa and the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. It aims to boost the economic resilience of independent media organizations in crisis, to support experimentation and innovation, and to bring about a new paradigm of sustainability for independent public interest journalism.
He was previously managing director of Luminate, a global philanthropic organisation with the goal of empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies, where he led Luminate's global strategy for funding independent media.
Prior to joining Luminate, Nishant co-founded the non-profit Global Innovation Fund (GIF). As COO, he led GIF’s investment process and venture support team, making investments and grants across the world, including Burkina Faso, Pakistan, and the Philippines, as well as funding the first Social Impact Bond in Mexico. Nishant was also on the founding team of the Monitor Inclusive Markets (MIM) group in India, which sought to drive scale among market-based solutions to poverty. He previously worked at the UN Development Programme in Zambia, developing new financing products for supply chains that engaged small businesses.
The focus of this session will be to explore the progress of the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM), a bold initiative that seeks to distribute a new raft of resources at scale and s...
Foundation funding confidential: why the foundations do it, how they do it, and what “success” looks like
For most editors and newsrooms, the thought of asking for money to support editorial priorities is a highly daunting prospect. How do you match foundation support and real editorial priorities? Once y...
How do some of the world’s most prominent foundations focused on supporting media and journalism make their decisions on who or what to fund? What do they really look for? Which ideas energise them ...
How we can fight the political undermining of the media and promote freedom of expression
Globally, media is in crisis: in addition to public mistrust and eroding revenue models, we are witnessing overt threats and attacks against media, often by government actors or vested interests. Th...
The panel will focus on media ownership, investigating the relationship between quality journalism and independent foundations. The role of foundations regarding quality journalism will be discusse...
Local news in the US and Europe is in crisis. Research in the US, UK, the Netherlands and elsewhere has revealed widespread 'news deserts' or 'dark spots', where citizens have little or no access to l...