The downside of MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, Washington Independent, et al. - By Jack Shafer. The nonprofit news business—if that isn't a contradiction in terms—is spreading like a midsummer algae bloom. Philanthropists, who in different times would have endowed a seat at a university or contributed to a new research wing at a hospital or established yet another museum of modern art, have turned to funding new, nonprofit journalism outlets.
Herbert and Marion Sandler poured the financial foundation for ProPublica two years ago. And the Knight Foundation has come to the aid of Voice of San Diego (seeded by retired venture capitalist Buzz Woolley), MinnPost, St. Louis Beacon, and others. Earlier this summer, Texas Monthly veteran Evan Smith picked the pocket of venture capitalist John Thornton to get the Texas Tribune going, and last week, San Francisco billionaire Warren Hellman staked the new Bay Area News Project to a $5 million bankroll. All this silly money arriving in the nick of time to fund what some like to call "serious journalism" can only be applauded. The Trouble with Non-Profit Journalism | Jonathan Weber | New West Blog. The financial problems of the newspaper business have produced all manner of hand-wringing about the danger to democracy allegedly inherent in the alleged fall of the fourth estate.
I certainly don’t argue with the proposition that good journalism is important to society – on the contrary. But the solution du jour – that newspapers should be run as non-profit organizations – strikes me as cop-out. We’re only in the early innings of figuring out how new business models might replace the industrial-age structures of traditional newspapers, and we’re already throwing in the towel. Warren Buffet has a few extra billion, so there’s an easy fix! In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, two portfolio managers from Yale, David Swensen and Michael Schmidt, argue that newspapers should be organized like universities, with non-profit status and large endowments. Neither do statements like “news organizations have cut costs, with grave consequences.” So the model they are proposing is…Yale. Six-Figure Salaries: A Win for Nonprofit Journalism? Investigative Shortfall
Many news outlets are doing far less accountability reporting than in the past, bad news indeed for the public. New nonprofit investigative ventures have emerged, but they can’t pick up the slack by themselves. By Mary Walton Mary Walton (marywalton2000@yahoo.com) is a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her most recent book, “A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot,” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August. This article was funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute. On her last day at Fort Lauderdale's Sun-Sentinel, Mc Nelly Torres knew another round of layoffs was in the works. Roberta Baskin, director of the investigative team at WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., was waiting to take the bus back from New York City, where she had collected her third duPont-Columbia Award. Tom Dubocq didn't wait for the ax to fall.
What happens, I ask Dubocq, when people like him vanish from the newsrooms of America? CIR is headed by Robert J. The Nonprofit Explosion Foundation-funded investigative journalism plays an increasingly important role. The big question for the future: "Sustainability. " By Mary Walton Mary Walton (marywalton2000@yahoo.com) is a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her most recent book, “A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot,” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August. This article was funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute. "Ihave in my wallet three million dollars," Jack Shafer announced, turning to two members of the panel he was chairing in April at the 2010 Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium at the University of California, Berkeley. The panel was titled "Who's Going to Foot the Bill? " Shafer was joking, of course. Whether carried out by a CEO or a development pro, fundraising is a consuming and never-ending quest at journalism nonprofits, as much a part of their business as advertising sales are to a publisher in the traditional media world.
Yes. T. Nonprofit Journalism. Texas Tribune Shows Non-Profit Doesn’t Mean Non-Growth: Tech News and Analysis « There are plenty of bad-news stories in the media industry, so it’s nice to hear from a company that is not only beating its revenue and traffic targets, but seeing what it calls “hockey stick” growth. The Texas Tribune, an independent non-profit publisher based in Austin whose focus is on public-service journalism, turned one year old yesterday. CEO and co-founder Evan Smith says the Tribune has exceeded almost all of its targets, despite the fact that it didn’t really have a road map of what to expect. In a blog post on the anniversary, he said the startup was “humbled and energized and elated and tired.”
“It’s important to note that we more or less made all this up as we went,” Smith, a former editor of Texas Monthly magazine, said in an interview with me on Tuesday. “The world of online non-profit journalism isn’t really very big — there was no real playbook to follow.” Tribune CEO Evan Smith The company now has 26 full-time employees, Smith said, and half of those are reporters. Bay Area Emerges as Center of Nonprofit Journalism - NYTimes.com. In its ten months of existence, California Watch, an offshoot of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which is located in Berkeley, has placed 21 stories with the San Francisco Chronicle. One of those stories, on seismic safety in California’s public colleges and universities, was distributed to more than 80 news outlets, Robert Rosenthal, the center’s executive editor, said. It has become one of the most prominent examples of the Bay Area’s new growth industry: the non-profit news organization.
As regional newspapers have shed reporters over the years — a recent count said there are now 500 journalists covering news compared with 900 a few years ago — non-profit news groups have stepped in to cover the gap. Non-profit news organizations are not a new concept around San Francisco; they have just taken on increased significance during the past year. “It’s a market that has gone from one of the best news markets to one of the worst in the last five years,” said Ms. A nonprofit journalism pioneer shifts strategy - On Media. October 27, 2010 The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news organization launched decades before the decline of traditional journalism outlets made such organizations the rage, is planning a strategic overhaul aimed at matching donations with earned income in hopes of charting a more sustainable path for nonprofit journalism.
The new strategy, unanimously approved by the Center’s board last Friday, will seek to make the Center’s website a high-traffic destination that can generate revenue through underwriting (nonprofit speak for ads) and membership (nonprofit speak for subscriptions). Until now, the Center has focused on partnering with other media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and POLITICO, to get its stories to the wider public. “As the news industry contracts, readers have stated clearly that they still want serious, nonpartisan public-interest journalism,” said Bill Buzenberg, the Center’s executive director, in a statement.
The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism. Centrul Roman pentru Jurnalism de Investigatie Sprijina CRJI Pentru a sprijini activitatea CRJI puteti face donatii in urmatoarele conturi: Volksbank Romania, Sucursala Bucuresti Centrul Roman pentru Jurnalism de Investigatie, CF 15126857 Sau puteti redirectiona 2% din impozitul anual pe venit descarcand de aici formularul precompletat. Cheltuirea si provenienta sumelor donate vor fi prezentate anual in Raportul de Activitati al Asociatiei. Trimite un pont Rezultate concurs sustinut de Fundatia Soros Romania si Centrul Roman pentru Jurnalism de Investigatie Castigatorii competitiei "Jurnalism de investigatie in slujba interesului public" sunt: Alina Moscalu, Roxana Jipa, Oana Dan, Olimpia Filip, Radu Burlacu, Vlad Mixich, Petru Zoltan, Daniel B ... Publicat de S.O. 10-08-11 Wikileaks Romania CRJI publica pe site-ul propriu ( toate telegramele care mentioneaza Romania, telegrame pe care le-a obtinut de la organizatia Wikileaks.
Publicat de S.O. 05-07-11 Noutati Owner. Nonprofit journalism: The journey from anomaly to a new paradigm ? Nieman Journalism Lab ? Pushing to the Future of Journalism. Journalism nonprofits have been operating in the shadows of major metro dailies since the dawn of the newspaper age. In 1846, a handful of New York newspapers created a cooperative to pay for dispatches from the front lines of the Mexican-American War. That effort became the Associated Press, and it remains a nonprofit. But what once was an anomaly is becoming a business model in its own right. This is an historic time, with new nonprofit newsrooms launching every month. Many are doing the kind of difficult work that for-profit newspapers are shirking — investigative, enterprise, watchdog and explanatory journalism. It’s the good stuff we need to keep democracy working. What makes the nonprofit model compelling in these times? But can all the startups survive? This is the lesson I’ve gleaned from my travels: Great journalism isn’t enough.
The reader’s bond How can that be? Andrew Donohue of Voice of San Diego underscored that point a few weeks ago. Are there flaws? Clay Shirky’s “second great age of patronage,” foundations, and journalism. « Maimonides’ Ladder. I’ve written about foundation funding for journalism before (in fact, it was what got me started doing this thing in the first place). But Clay Shirky’s Cato-Unbound piece (interesting choice of publication site) arguing inter alia that we’re entering “a second great age of patronage” got me thinking again about this topic.
Shirky writes: this new patronage is “. . .either of the ‘one rich person’ model, as with Richard Mellon Scaife’s subsidy of conservative journals, or the NPR Fund Drive model, where the small core of highly involved users makes above-market-price donations to provision a universally accessible good run for revenue but not for profit.” Your local journalism fundraiser says it’s actually got to be both at the same time – since that is what a successful nonprofit fundraising program almost always looks like. Right now, everyone’s attention is focused on foundations. “None big enough to influence the journalism in any way.” What difference does this make? Like this: How nonprofit journalism is changing the 'news ecosystem' This guest commentary was written by Robert McClure, whose stories on the dangers of rat poison in the environment are being published Tuesday and Wednesday on msnbc.com: By Robert McClure Today’s msnbc.com story on how a super-toxic second generation of rat poisons is mysteriously seeping into the environment might have remained a buried and unnoticed piece of history if not for a new movement sweeping America: nonprofit journalism.
It’s an important force that is likely to become a key part of what folks are calling an evolving “news ecosystem” in this country. Today’s pairing of the efforts of two nonprofit journalism entities with the for-profit msnbc.com is an example of the kind of experimentation that’s becoming common. I wrote the rat-poisons story for InvestigateWest, a nonprofit investigative journalism center focused on the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia that I helped to found in 2009. More common are smaller groups such as InvestigateWest. iLab: New journalism ecosystem thrives. By Charles Lewis Oct. 29, 2010 ShareThis In the immortal words of Sir Isaac Newton more than three centuries ago, “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” It is perhaps peculiar and maybe even ill-advised to apply Newton’s immortal Laws of Motion to the quirky, peculiar world of journalism.
But this much we know: As news consumption in America began to decline decades ago, as advertising revenue and commercial newsgathering began to contract, the bean counters increasing their brutal, cost-cutting efficiencies, the out-of-town owners harvesting their mature (i.e. no longer growing) investments, newsrooms becoming quieter and less enterprising, many serious reporters and editors necessarily went elsewhere. They were desperately seeking a different, more hospitable milieu in which to work, a non-commercial, nonprofit environment more conducive to investigative and other public-service journalism. See all of the organizations Determining the list Will the new models work?