Clare is an award-winning journalist and experienced researcher who is a change agent, passionate about business viability for independent media, who blends digital strategy and audience-centric approaches while advocating for democratisation and plural media ecosystems.
She has published in international media and business journals, book chapters, reports and books to emerge as one of the thought leaders in media management today. Her expertise focuses primarily on business sustainability, especially through the lens of revenue models.
Her recent research into hyperlocal and politically pressured media revenue models has been used as evidence by the Department of Culture Media & Sport and the Department for International Development. Her work on viability, sustainability and resilience co-authored within Sustainable Business Models on the Net and Nesta’s Mapping the Road to Sustainability and Resilience are noted for their high level of instrumental impact with media practitioners.
Her focus is primarily on putting knowledge into practice. She delivers and course leads programmes in journalism business models to media managers and students from across the European digital media sectors.
Her work pushes the boundaries of innovation with field trials and prototyping as well as action research labs. Her portfolio of consultancy includes work with International Media Support, Google Digital News Initiative, FOJO Media Institute, Sciencescom Audencia and Wan-Ifra’s Sustaining Media and Society programme.
Her research funding has also come from Research Council UK, Facebook, Google Digital News Initiative, Internews Europe, Civitates and more. She is an experience grant assessor.
She will continue to work through projects seeking to push the resilience of niche media globally. Her work is regularly disseminated via conference papers, talks, panel presentations, exhibitions, interactive reports, books and journal articles.
She is co-founder of the Media Innovation Studio, the University of Central Lancashire’s media research and development lab in the UK. Nurturing the lab as a powerful force for change since 2012 has been one of her career highlights and she is privileged to work with a dynamic and creative team. The studio has several core aims around community, innovation, inclusion and sustainability and works across a range of themes: data, sustainability, internet of things, sensors, methods for research and the Civic Drone Centre.
Her research includes Research Council UK funded projects exploring collaborative revenue models and open media innovation. She has lead and been involved in several research bids with national and international research councils and has been commissioned by several external bodies to carry out research projects within the civil society and hyperlocal media sphere.
Clare speaks internationally in French and English, including events such as SxSw in Texas, WMEMC in New York, the International Journalism Festival, at Obsweb and Conférence nationale des métiers du journalisme.
She completed her doctoral thesis in 2021 Understanding Revenues in the Business Sustainability of Web-Indigenous Journalism: A pragmatist approach. She graduated from the University of Hull with Special BA(Hons) in European Studies and has since completed her National Certificate Journalism and National Certificate for Trainee Journalists. She became a fellow of the Higher Academic Institute with a PG Certificate in Teaching and Learning.
She tweets @cecook and writes on Medium
Projects, consultancy and speaking engagements in the areas of:
- media sustainability
- journalism and media business models
- revenue models
- hyperlocal journalism
- hyperlocal distribution technologies
- media development
- technology for good
- ecosystems theory
