Meet Jim Barnett

senior strategic advisor at AARP
participant: We Media Miami ’10

Barnett serves as an in-house consultant on the nonprofit business model in journalism for AARP’s publications and digital strategy groups. Among other things, he advises AARP executives on potential new strategies and tactics for engaging members through high-quality journalism.
Barnett also is studying nonprofit management at The George Washington University. He writes a related blog on nonprofits in journalism for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University and at journalismnonprofit.blogspot.com. In this role, he has appeared as a commentator on Jeff Jarvis’ New Business Models for News site and on Bob Garfield’s “On The Media” show on National Public Radio.
Previously, Barnett worked 20 years as a newspaper reporter, first at The (Raleigh) News & Observer and the last 10 years as a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The Oregonian, where he specialized in investigations based on economic data. He built a model of President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, which revealed structural biases against people in their 40s, and his reporting showed how the Bush OMB’s proposed clean-air regulations conflicted with pro-life values.
As a master’s candidate at the University of North Carolina in the mid-1980s, Barnett studied under Philip Meyer, an early advocate of the nonprofit model, and he attempted in 2005-06 to launch a nonprofit newsroom that would cover federal and state government using the principles of Meyer’s seminal work, Precision Journalism. His undergraduate degree is from Georgetown University, and he is an avid Hoya fan. Contact him at journalismnonprofit@gmail.com.