Ben Nishimoto Is Our New Director Of Philanthropy
Now that Civil Beat is a nonprofit we’re beefing up our membership and donor-outreach staff.
Please say aloha to Ben Nishimoto who has joined us in a new position we’re calling Director of Philanthropy.
As part of our recent move into the nonprofit world聽we’re serious about expanding our reach even further into local communities throughout the state. Of course, that will mean continuing to grow and evolve our efforts around聽in-depth news stories, analysis and commentary. But we also want to find more ways to reach out directly to readers and community and business leaders.
To that end, we are looking at Ben as our ambassador to the community. As someone who has worked for many years in public media and online organizations, he’s certainly well-positioned to help Civil Beat get on a firm footing as we move forward as a public news operation.
Ben comes to us from where he most recently held the title of vice president of advancement. Born and raised in Aiea, Ben graduated from the聽, a charter school affiliated with the University of Hawaii. He majored in political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles then came home and got a job as a grant writer for PBS Hawaii, helping establish the HIKI NO statewide student news network that is now in 90 schools on six islands and involves thousands of students.
An offer to help a nonprofit startup that wanted to bolster micro-savings programs took him back across the Pacific to San Francisco for a couple of years. But Hawaii eventually drew him home again and he soon found himself back at PBS.
Ben has a strong belief that journalism should be for the public good and shouldn’t be tied to making a profit.
“I’ve always felt that for-profit journalism has failed to uphold news as public good,” he says. “The result has been less in-depth reporting and a narrowing range of viewpoints, and an over-reliance on talking points.”
And not just in Hawaii. Ben thinks there is a lack of balanced news sources throughout the country, mainly because many media organizations are beholden to corporate interests.
We think so too, which is why we have never accepted traditional advertising. We don’t want to have to rely on the number of clicks a story gets in order to bring in revenue or fear losing money because an advertiser might not like what we have to say about them or their industry.
That’s one reason, Ben says, that he’s been a fan of Civil Beat since we launched six years ago.
Civil Beat’s “focus is on news as a mission more than as a product that can be sold,” he says. “I’ve always considered it news that serves the public good.”
But journalists need money too. We need to pay the rent,聽feed our聽families, send our聽kids to college like anyone else.
So the cash flow even to a nonprofit journalism operation is important. But, as Ben contends, a nonprofit has a unique ability to serve the community in ways a for-profit generally finds harder to do.
“A diversified source of funding from the public pitching in only helps improve the balance of coverage and allows us to do the kind of explanatory journalism that is not influenced by corporate interests, he says.
It’s also exciting to be working for a company that values innovation and creativity. “We can experiment and identify best practices not only on the editorial side but on the fundraising side,” he says.
He thinks that Civil Beat, in聽its organization and mindset combined with the kind of content it produces, “offers a more sustainable path for the industry.”
Like all of us here at Civil Beat, Ben has a real interest in making Hawaii a great place to live and work. He’s a new father, with a 1-year-old daughter at home.
“By coming back to Hawaii and starting a family here I made a decision that I want to make an impact on this place that is always going to be my home,” he says.
You’ll be hearing more from Ben as he builds our membership program and donor network from scratch.
In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to drop him a line at bnishimoto@www.civilbeat.org or call him on his direct line at 738-6609. Twitter users can message him at @ben_nishimoto.
And you can always help make his job easier by clicking the Donate Now button at the top of this page or clicking here.
