Media Development Loan Fund

The organization whose board meeting I’m attending in Prague is the Media Development Loan Fund, and you can see its newly revamped website at mdlf.org.  It is a media assistance organization, one that focuses on helping media companies – newspapers, radio, TV, internet – in the emerging market and developing world that provide a sizable amount of quality newsreporting.  Unlike most such organizations, however, MDLF focuses on investing money in the organizations at subsidized rates.  It’s essentially a non-profit, mission-driven private equity fund.  That means that it has to address issues of mission (what kind of media to support, where, etc.), finance and business management (if we don’t recover our investments, we will go out of business), and nonprofit governance (how do you measure mission success, e.g.).

I’ve been the board chair for a very long time, but it looks as though I might finally step down – really, someone shouldn’t be the chair of a nonprofit board for so long, so the turnover would be good for the organization and good for me, as I’d like to write about some of the issues in finance and development, media business models, nonprofit governance, and the like that I don’t feel completely comfortable writing about academically when chairing the board of the largest media assistance organization (some $50 million in investments, depending on you measure the portfolio in the downturn) you’ve probably never heard about.   It’s a great organization, though, and does great work in areas of free expression, transparency, access to information, quality journalism – vital areas in the support of open societies.