NIMSP and Transparency

One of the best examples that the nonprofit sector can play in supporting watchdog journalism comes from our friends at the National Institute for Money in State Politics.

The institute prides itself as the "only publicly available source in the country of comprehensive state-level campaign-finance information." Its painstaking work is the fuel for journalism that may not win a lot of Pulitzer Prizes, but lets elected leaders know that someone is watching and that they are accountable.

Founded in 1999 and based in Helena, Mont., the institute this week celebrates its 10th anniversary with a stakeholders' conference on Flathead Lake. It goal is to continue to make its online data more accessible to users of all kinds - and in the process, create the kind of transparency could have been imagined only a few years ago. It is positioned to become an essential resource to startup journalism nonprofits. As a result, its value to states and communities across the country is certain to grow exponentially. As executive director Ed Bender notes:

The demise of legacy news organizations means our resources are more valuable than ever to the citizens in states that no longer have reporters in Capitol rotundas or in the halls of legislators.

Best of all, it's free.

Here's some info on ways to join the conference remotely:

Please join us in these important and informative discussions: we will broadcast a video feed live via the internet. Find the video on our homepage:

• FollowTheMoney.org, or on our
• Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/login.php#/pages/FollowTheMoneyorg/136781845057) (under the boxes tab), or
• direct from our Ustream page (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Flathead-Convening).
• Send feedback and questions via Twitter, using the hashtag #Transparency09.
(If you aren’t already following us on Twitter, find us at: @MoneyInPolitics.)

View the schedule at: http://www.followthemoney.org/content/flathead-convening.phtml?em=55. If you are unable to view these discussions live, look for them on our webpage after the event.

Please join us for any or all of this conference. If you have any questions about this event you can send them at: http://www.followthemoney.org/Contact/index.phtml?em=55.

J-Lab: By the Numbers

Here's a follow-up on the item posted here last week about the J-Lab at American University and its groundbreaking report on philanthropic support of news projects.

As a review, the report found that a collective $128 million had been raised since 2005 for 117 projects excluding public broadcasting programs, the underwriting of documentaries, journalism training and student news services.

A major criticism of the nonprofit model is that there will never be enough money to go around to make a dent in the need for enterprise and investigative journalism being left by traditional (newspaper) media. And some people said the J-Lab report only underscored that problem because it found that $30 million of the $128 million went from the Sandler foundation to ProPublica.

I won't argue either point in this space. But I thought it would be interesting to crunch the numbers in the J-Lab database. Here's what I found out: Indeed, nearly half the money counted (about $63 million) went to three news sources: ProPublica and two established outfits, Center for Public Integrity and New America Media/Pacific News Service.

More telling, perhaps, is that the average of all grants listed in the database is about $453,000, but the median is $80,000. That tells me two things: 1) The Big Three indeed are racking up the lion's share of grant money. 2) But there are lots of relatively small (less than $100,000) grants out there going funding a lot of people's experiments, hopes and dreams.

J-Lab's executive director, Jan Schaffer, said her group discussed whether to include the big ones. But they decided to go ahead because they wanted to capture the fact that investigative startups have begun commanding big donations. In an email, she writes:

We debated whether or not to include the likes of the big investigative grants, like to Pro Publica or Center for Public Integrity. But we realized that if we didn’t include them, we’d miss out on showing how investigative projects overall account for something like $65 million of this pool of money. Fresh money went into 5-6 investigative startups that have launched fairly recently.

Another slice of the database showed that some smaller outfits have succeeded in diversifying their donor base - a key to long-term survival. While the big names still lead in number of donors, some lesser known names - Health News Florida, for example - crack the top 10.

Here's a look at the top 10 fundraisers as measured by J-Lab:

Organization - Grants Since 2005
ProPublica $30,800,000
Center for Public Integrity $14,942,479
New America Media/Pacific News Svc $13,922,091
Stateline.org $7,500,000
Ctr for Investigative Rept’g $7,249,000
Schuster Institute for Investigative Journ $5,000,000
Calif. Ctr for HC Journalism $3,700,000
Chicago Matters $3,660,000
California Healthline $2,500,000
iHealthBeat $2,500,000


And here are the top 10 in terms of donors:

Organization - Number of Grants
Center for Public Integrity 42
Ctr for Investigative Rept’g 40
New America Media/Pacific News Svc 34
Women’s eNews 18
Pulitzer Ctr on Crisis Reporting 8
New York Cmty Media Alliance 8
Health News Florida 8
ProPublica 7
Gotham Gazette 7
Voice of San Diego 6

The Kinsley Report

If you don't get The Washington Post at home or online, it's worth a few minutes to read Michael Kinsley's column this morning on the role of "grandees" in supporting journalism, for-profit or nonprofit.

The upshot of Kinsley's piece is that the nonprofit model is no better at providing the "combination of financial security and editorial freedom that newspapers need" than old-fashioned, deep-pocketed, profit-seeking owners.

On what does he base this conclusion? His time at Harper's, where his board was comprised of people who held "ruthlessly conventional views about most subjects and an inability to imagine how anyone sensible could hold any other views."

Sorry to hear that Kinsley had a frustrating experience trying to get his ideas into print - what good journalist hasn't? - but that's a bit like arguing the Google model is bad because he had a hard time selling mainframes for IBM in the 1990s.

Kinlsey's argument really is a thinly veiled peeve - a drive-by - and I expected more from him. It lacks intellectual rigor, and more to the point, reflects little knowledge about the role of the nonprofit sector in our democratic society. It's a place for creativity and experimentation, and it has a long history of producing ideas that eventually turned into profit-making businesses. A related point is that the debate here isn't about newspapers so much as the enterprise and investigative journalism they produce. That's what needs to be saved.

Interview: Phil Bennett

If nonprofits are to transform the ailing news business, their investigative reporting must “enter the discussion in a really forceful way. … Impact is what is going to define success,” says Phil Bennett, former managing editor of The Washington Post.

So far, that hasn’t happened, Bennett says. New, high-profile forays into investigative journalism haven’t taken the place of what the nation’s biggest newspapers are still doing, he says. And to some extent, they compete.

Meanwhile, major philanthropic support has bypassed smaller communities, where it is needed most, he says. The Post, for example, easily could raise $5 million or more to endow its investigative desk. But what about the Kansas City Star or other smaller papers?

“I think what is happening is that the organizations that have the least amount of need for it are the most attractive to donors,” he said. That disconnect is among the “contradictions that have to shake themselves out.”

Bennett, who will begin teaching at Duke University this fall, was asked in an interview to discuss how newsroom executives view the emerging nonprofit sector in journalism – and the extent to which they might employ nonprofit models in the reporting of news, particularly enterprise and investigative.

In his new job at Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Bennett will be at the forefront of a major new effort to address the “fundamental market failures” that threaten enterprise and investigative journalism. Among other things, the center is investigating how the nonprofit model might lead to solutions.

Converting existing newspapers into nonprofits isn’t among them, Bennett says. Journalists tend to think that by shifting a newspaper to nonprofit status, it becomes okay to lose tens of millions of dollars a year, he says. But that’s not so. If anything, tax laws that apply to nonprofits would expose newspapers to greater public scrutiny of their finances.

“Nonprofit status does not solve the current business crisis,” Bennett says. “The conversion model doesn’t convince me.”

Beneath Bennett’s top layer of skepticism about the nonprofit model replacing newspaper journalism runs a deep vein of ideas for how nonprofits might partner with traditional news organizations.

Journalism nonprofits work best when they grow organically to address a community need – and when they are “niche-y,” Bennett says. By that, he means they should address a specific community defined either by geography or a special interest such as health, or more specifically, diabetes.

Another possibility for the nonprofit model is that newspapers might shore up their standing as aggregators of community interests – if not their finances, as well – by spinning off nonprofits, he says. For example, after its series on the abuses at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, the Post might have spun off a nonprofit site that is dedicated to veterans’ health issues.

Bennett is among a growing consensus that believes a truly new business model that supports enterprise and investigative journalism has yet to manifest itself, regardless of whether newspapers are the medium. And as for a nonprofit model that works for newspapers, he says, “We’re waiting for a model to replicate.”

Duke and Journalism

Play word association with “journalism school,” and you might blurt “Columbia” or “Missouri” or “Carolina.” But “Duke”? That seems an odd pairing, especially for us Chapel Hill alums. But Duke’s conference on nonprofit media last month was no random act. It was part of a new, deliberate effort by the university to help save the business of journalism.

Under a new director, Jay Hamilton, and a new, five-year plan, Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy is applying a think-tank approach to the “fundamental market failures” that threaten enterprise and investigative journalism. Among other things, the center is trying to discern how the nonprofit model might be best applied; the May conference was part of that effort.

In an article in Duke Magazine, Hamilton, an economist, had this to say about the premise for nonprofits in journalism:

When you look at where news markets are today, I think that it's pretty clear that the biggest market failure lies in the threat to accountability journalism. People have four different types of information demands: producer, consumer, entertainment, and voter. The first three work pretty well, because people seek them out. For voter information, the fact that you're not really the decider, that your single vote will not determine the outcome of the election, means that many people remain rationally ignorant about the details of politics. That means papers often don't have a profit incentive to engage in significant watchdog or accountability journalism.

As part of the center’s new direction, it has hired two new professors, both of whom previously worked at The Washington Post.

Sarah Cohen, who will teach and pursure reasearch in “computational journalism,” which Hamilton says “holds the promise of combining traditional public records and database work with new methods and tools adapted from other disciplines to help renew watchdog coverage.”

Phil Bennett, the Post’s former managing editor, will teach and be “a strong contributor to debates about the future of accountability and watchdog journalism,” Hamilton said.

Bennett talked with me today about his view of evolving role of nonprofits in journalism. More about that in a post coming soon.

J-Lab: Toolkit for Journalism Nonprofits

We all know that nonprofit journalism is on the rise. But now Jan Schaffer and the J-Lab at American University's School of Communication have done what no one else has - they've actually put real numbers around the size and scope of the movement.

The J-Lab report, released today, found that 180 foundations have contributed nearly $128 million since 2005 to "news and information initiatives." The report's overview also gives a sense of the hunger for old-fashioned, independent journalism that exists in communities across the U.S. It says:

These are not random acts of journalism, such as eyewitnesses uploading photos or videos of a major catastrophe. Nor are they the rants of Internet cowboys opining on the state of neighborhood affairs in their individual blogs.

Rather, these new projects are often organized acts of journalism, constructed with an architecture and a mind-set to investigate discrete topics or cover geographic
areas. The projects provide deliberate, accurate and fair accounts of day-to-day happenings in communities that nowadays have little or no daily news coverage.

And increasingly, as legacy news organizations fret about future business models or fail entirely, these shoestring start-ups are attracting support from philanthropic organizations whose mission statements never mention the word “media.”

Better still, the J-Lab also offers a toolkit on how to go about getting funding for such start-ups. There's also a database of grants made.

This is powerful stuff - a desperately needed bridge between the worlds of journalism and philanthropy that had become increasingly conspicuous by its absence.

The Charles Barkley of Nonprofit Journalism?

As Kaiser Health News, a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, makes its formal launch today, it's worth reflecting on what this new venture can do to advance the cause of nonprofit journalism.

KHN plans "to do in-depth coverage of health policy that informs and explains and that increasingly cannot be done in the mainstream news business," Kaiser president and CEO Drew Altman said in a release this morning.

A remarkable aspect of KHN is the foundation's decision to grant it editorial independence under an advisory board of leading journalists led by former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie. In today's release, Downie sizes up the stakes:

Kaiser Health News is an important initiative in non-profit news reporting, which will be closely watched in the search for new models for in-depth, public service journalism.

But will KHN - can it - be a role model that inspires emulators? Surprisingly, Altman has played down that notion. In a column written May 1, Altman says:

Will KHN be the model for nonprofit journalism? I'm not so sure. That's not our goal, and that in fact is the wrong question, from our perspective at Kaiser.

But he goes on to say:

Our aim is not investigative reports, snarky opinion or blogs, or breaking news headlines that can fit on a cable news ticker or Twitter feed, though we have no problem if KHN sometimes “breaks news.” Nor do we want to cover regular daily health news, a job which will get done without us. ... Indeed it is what is most different and un-replicable about us that is probably most striking. KHN’s objective is simply to report, inform and explain.

NBA great Charles Barkley also tried to lower the stakes for himself, saying, "I'm not a role model." But saying you're not a role model doesn't make it so. Likewise, by any measure, KHN is a slam dunk.