(Artistry from ABC)

This posting over at Social Edge about Keely and the Acumen Fellows meeting with journalist David Bornstein the other day got me thinking of an idea I've been working on for a while with a couple of other people. The idea is a news agency covering international development, social entrepreneur and social enterprise work ... sort of what you find here, but actual on the ground coverage. It would possibly be a hybrid profit/nonprofit, though we're still tinkering with how that would take shape. I think it is extremely important to cover the work of social entrepreneurs and important to get their stories out. I feel it is also equally important that any such coverage be journalistic, meaning that it keeps some measure of distance, as well as a critical and analytic eye.

Keely quotes Bornstein here:

He talked about the need for more positive media about the social sector. "The private sector has never had a magazine called Bankruptcy, instead they have things like Fortune which radiate a bob the builder cartoon "Yes We Can!" attitude." The social sector needs more positive coverage in the media so when we talk about our schools or hospital systems needing to be fixed, we hear Bob the Builder say, "Can we fix it? Yes, we can!"

Now I don't want to dismiss these sentiments outright. I like Bornstein's work and I think more media coverage would be beneficial both to telling the stories of social entrepreneurs and spreading their ideas for others to emulate. But that should not mean that something like this goes searching just for positive stories. Do we really want cheerleaders for social entrepreneurship, or an actively engaged media that shows both the positives and negatives and helps others learn from both success and failure? There is already a somewhat limited amount of academic work going on in the fields of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise, though that is certainly changing. Certainly, positive stories must be told, but there are negative stories as well, failures, glitches, problems of structuring organizations, difficulties in scaling, start-up, and hand-over. So no need for more positive spin. There's already quite a lot of that going on from what I see. There is an absence of real, thoughtful, on-the-ground and in-depth coverage of the work social entrepreneurs are doing.

A slight personal digression here: I often feel, and felt this through some work I did documenting some social entrepreneur projects in India and Sri Lanka, that just telling the story, warts and all, gives the best overall picture of reality of the SE situation. Seems simple enough right? But that wasn't what those I was documenting the projects for wanted. They wanted a story with a positive spin. I felt the inherent story itself was positive, but there were questions that remained unanswered and problems that could arise, as well as problems that had yet to be worked out at the time I documented the projects. There are investors, angels, and other interested parties that start-ups want to persuade their project will work, that the return will be there, that it won't be simply throwing money in the bonfire. A media covering social entrepreneurs has to be independent of that spin, wary of it, and ultimately beyond any infatuation with social entrepreneurial work in a way that they can be very objective. Otherwise it turns into a press junket.

I hope we can eventually do this, but we'll see. It will take a lot of financing and time finding the right people to work on such a project and a good amount of time rolling it out. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on media coverage of social entrepreneurs, so please leave comments below or mail me at: michael.standaert@gmail.com