The state of media today is not sustainable. It doesn’t sustain the health and well-being of our children, of our society, or our democracy. In its current incarnation, it profits from monetizing hate. We aim to build the future of sustainable media, to hold makers and distributors of media to be measured on a higher standard. A standard that doesn’t profit from knowingly doing harm.
Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability is not about the physical environment for media, it’s the social and economic resources we commit to the world of information and ideas that we live in.
Sustainable Media seeks a revenue stream that doesn’t put the media makers in conflict with their media’s ethical mission. So, for example, a news organization can’t be sustainable if the only way to remain solvent is to be paid by platform partners who facilitate and garner their revenue from amplification of misinformation, hate, or other anti-social community standards.
If media companies’ underlying economic survival requires funds generated from platforms that make substantial revenue from amplification of misinformation, these media are not sustainable.