Blockchain for good. Women rising in India. The $2.5 trillion SDG challenge. Reviving American communities. Financing climate action. The impact investing beats go on.
As the scope and scale and, frankly, impact of impact investing expands, ImpactAlpha is scrambling to cover more news beats and cover them better. As other news organizations lay off journalists, we want to hire them.
And so, we’re delighted to be part of the first cohort of the new media accelerator launched by The Information, an innovative and growing (profitably, it claims) technology-business publication.
At the publication’s Subscriber Summit last week, founder and CEO Jessica Lessin announced ImpactAlpha and four other media companies (from among 188 applicants around the world) would get yearlong help from The Information in growing revenues and distribution. (That’s me on the lower left in the photo, above.)
The Information reveals the startups in its first media accelerator and plans hiring spree
This is part of what we were talking about in our summer letter to FOIAs, or Friends of ImpactAlpha (it’s entirely coincidental that ImpactAlpha and Information Accelerator share the same initials). As we said then, we are proud to have become the go-to news source and media outlet for impact investing’s early adopters and first movers. The Brief now goes out to 24,000 highly engaged subscribers from across the globe and capital markets. We said then that our growth is tied to the growth of impact investing. That step-change is now evident around the world.
Now it’s time to move to the next phase: strengthening our media business model and scaling our journalistic enterprise. That’s why it resonated to hear Lessin at last week’s event say The Information is zigging while others are zagging. She showed a slide of editorial job losses at major media outlets. The New York Times, down 109. The Wall Street Journal, minus 48. Even survivors like ESPN, Bloomberg and Fox Business have shed dozens of journalists and producers. Lessin, like me a former Wall Street Journal reporter, plans to double The Information’s editorial staff from 15 to 30 by the end of next year.
The Information Accelerator’s weeklong bootcamp in January will be opportunity to learn from that pool of experience and boost the revenues we need to fulfill our mission. We are eager to learn from our accelerator colleagues as well, including Ashley Catherine Woods, founder of a local news startup in Detroit, Richard Rushfield of The Ankler, YuChing Lu and Michael Chou, founders of Daodu.Tech and Beniamino Pagliaro of Good Morning Italia.
If you want to dig in deeper on how we think about “the beat” here at ImpactAlpha, have a look at Catherine Cheney’s post about our recent session hosted by the Solutions Journalism Network. “Bank said he sees impact investing, the beat that Impact Alpha covers like no one else, as a solutions journalism beat,” Cheney writes. “I subscribe to the ImpactAlpha newsletter, and it has gone from an email I read when I can, to one I look out for and count on for my daily news on impact investing.”
The CEO of Impact Alpha on Solutions Journalism and Impact Investing
“There’s a set of shifts, of market transformations that are underway,” I told Benzinga for a profile of ImpactAlpha on Nasdaq.com. “We’re always looking for the business case for social impact investing.” Check out the interview with co-founder Zuleyma Bebell and me on Nasdaq.com.
ImpactAlpha Tracks How Investors Are Making A Difference In The Global Community
