The Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation is an international, non-partisan, human rights, membership organization dedicated to a strong free press. Organized as a member owned social cooperative, members of the Fourth Estate are both individuals and organizations representing news producers as well as consumers. The organization's initiatives include: advocacy, publicity efforts, investments, and strategic litigation strategies. Its name references a segment of society that wields an indirect but significant influence on society even though it is not a formally recognized part of the political system. Its national office is located Washington, DC. Its membership is global. Individual members are: journalists, educators, and news consumers; organizational members are news organizations, corporations and educational institutions.
In Nov 2019 the organization revealed a new Journalism Code of Practice designed to reflect the key standards and principles of modern journalism. The new Code of Practice is particularly notable for officially recognizing that journalism is no longer solely the preserve of the professional journalist.
The journalism advocate
In April 2019 the organization announced the creation of the announces the "Office of the Journalism Advocate" and the appointment of Alan Sunderland to the newly created role. According to the organization's Executive Director "the Journalism Advocate serves as the independent and authoritative voice for journalism in the Fourth Estate, free of any particular news company influence or affiliation."
College News Network provides qualifying university and college media organizations with professional level news CMS and syndication services. The program is free to qualifying college media outlets. Non-member syndication clients must subscribe to receive access to network content. The program provides a platform for an international network of autonomous chapters of micro-philanthropists that provide small grants for journalists to produce news and journalism. Each independent and fully autonomous chapter funds and supports awesome local journalism projects and stories through micro-grants, usually given out monthly. Awesome Journalism chapters are geographic or are organized along topics.
News and journalism entrepreneurship
The Fourth Estate operates numerous programs to foster news and journalism entrepreneurship including free and discounted web infrastructure services, entrepreneur mentorship programs, and startup seed funding.
Fourth estate angels
The Fourth Estate Angels provide seed and early stage funding in the range of $5K-$25K for news and journalism startups. The Fourth Estate Angels is not a fund and does not invest as a LLC. Members collaborate in the due diligence process, but make individual investment decisions.
Offtherecord.network
In December 2018 The Fourth Estate announced, via Twitter, the launch of an OffTheRecord, a highly secured – messaging, collaboration, file sharing platform for Fourth Estate members. According to the company the service provides multiple security layers including the option for :End-to-end encryption.
In March 2019 the organization announced that it was launching a global virtual private network service for members of the organization.
Zero knowledge dns
In December 2017 The Fourth Estate announced the launch of a "Secure, Encrypted, Zero Knowledge DNS Service for journalists and public interest news organizations". The service is designed to make it harder for governments, ISP's, and/or corporations to use DNS requests to spy on journalists and news organizations. It is referred to as a "zero knowledge" DNS service because the way that the DNS query data is stored, encrypted and managed.
Journalism awards and grants
The Fourth Estate runs various contests open to professional, collegiate and high school journalists and news organizations in all forms of media.
Media law network
The Journalism and Media Law Project connects members of the Fourth Estate with access to reduced fee or pro-bono legal representation and assistance with First Amendment issues.
Awesome journalism
Awesome Journalism was a program that provided a monthly $1,000 micro-grant to a journalism project that commits a crazy, brilliant, positive act of journalism in the public interest. The initiative was originally launched as a cause oriented chapter of the Awesome Foundation before becoming a more formal stand alone program. It operated independently.
Newsfoundry
NewsFoundry was a prototype program that sought to apply proven lean and startup tools and techniques to build successful journalism businesses over 54 exciting and inspiring hours. NewsFoundry participants same from a wide range of backgrounds—editorial, product, business, design and delve into an innovative curriculum that culminates with lively presentations.
Journspark
JournSpark was an incubation program that provides free webhosting and support for startup digital news organizations, press clubs, or student news publications. The program was discontinued on January 1, 2018. According to the organization, JournSpaark will be replaced by a new program for news and journalism startups.
Committees and advisory board
The organization's Advisory Board consists of select members from the journalism, academic, legal and business communities represent and support the organization's efforts and mission.
Strategic litigation
In March 2016, the Fourth Estate filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Wall-Street.com, LLC and Jerrold D. Burden alleging that the defendants infringed on its copyrights and intellectual property. The Fourth Estate argued before the court that copyright owners risk losing the right to enforce their intellectual property rights in an infringement action because of the long time period the United States Copyright Office needs to review a copyright application. The court ruled that copyright registration, not application, must precede suit.
