Promises Granted: Venture Philanthropy and Tech Ideology in Metajournalistic Discourse

The past half-decade has seen the rise of venture philanthropy in the journalism industry, a kind of charitable giving often driven by tech industry actors Google and Facebook working through intermediary institutions such as the Knight Foundation and the American Journalism Project. As an ideological project, this intervention symbolizes both a significant economic and cultural investment. This paper interrogates how venture philanthropists and their investments have been made sense of via metajournalistic discourse. Through a critical discourse analysis of reporting and commentary about venture philanthropy, we find that professional discussions are often notably insular, framing journalism's public values in market-centric terms and establishing funders as transformative figures intervening in a journalistic culture ill-prepared to adapt to the needs of the market. The analysis shows how venture philanthropy works as a site of tech industry influence and ideology in the field of journalism, primarily by demonstrating how the discourse construes publicly focused journalism as existing in part thanks to the largesse and beneficence of the tech companies who structure and extract value from the digital public sphere.