Opportunity Lost in Baltimore

Riding the Metro this afternoon, I bumped into an old newspaper colleague, Paul West, the chief (and last remaining employee) of The Baltimore Sun's D.C. bureau, who told me that the Sun had just laid off 60+ newsroom employees.

Bad as that news is, I learned later that the big layoff apparently also signals the end of a plan to return the Sun to local ownership and operate as a nonprofit. According to a report this evening on Poynter Online, Baltimore County businessman Ted Venetoulis thinks his plan to operate the Sun as a nonprofit is DOA. From Rick Edmonds' report:

Venetoulis and other local backers have been working on a deal to acquire the paper for years and thought they were close as recently as a few weeks ago. But complications involving Tribune Co.'s bankruptcy proceedings had pushed the schedule back several months, Venetoulis said in a phone interview.

And by ditching so many experienced print editors, Tribune Co. could be signalling that it plans to continue running the operation itself rather than selling it.

"One assumes that the publishers have balanced the need to respond to economic conditions," Venetoulis said, "with a need to provide a quality editorial product." But he sounded doubtful.

Not surprisingly, Venetoulis supports a bill written by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., to allow newspapers run as tax-exempt nonprofits. Venetoulis, a former county executive, gave $1,000 to Cardin's Senate campaign in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

A Nonprofit Model for The New York Times?

Heads up, nonprofit number crunchers. Here's a great look at what the nonprofit model is up against - at least in terms of savings newspapers.

Prof. Penelope Muse Abernathy of the J-School at UNC-Chapel Hill has done a thorough analysis of how the model could be applied to The New York Times.

Abernathy examines four possible solutions for saving the Times and its parent company from annihilation when the next big payment is due in two years. Three are nonprofit (an endowment, foundational support, ownership by an educational institution) and the last would preserve a for-profit model (purchase by an "angel" investor).

I won't spoil the plot by telling you which model she prefers. But her analysis does speak to the difficulty of preserving the print product for the long haul and - I think - argues for using the nonprofit model as a Star Trek-style escape pod for enterprise and investigative journalism until the day a successful for-profit model is developed.

Interestingly, Abernathy's foundational support model envisions funding for some high-social-value news desks (e.g., foreign) - and an ensuing food fight over resources within the newsroom:

Who determines, for example, what is a foreign desk expense vs. a national desk expense? Are the salary and expenses of the reporter who covers the State Department assigned to the foreign desk or the Washington bureau?

I'm more inclined to take a half-full view of this problem. In a recent post on the NYT's blog page, Geneva Overholser talks about newspapers' evolving role as aggregators of news from various sources. The aggregation of reporting and information from many sources will be a central function of newspaper companies. So these kinds of turf issues could be solved quickly - especially when the alternative is near-certain extinction. She writes:

Of course, newspapers have to make clear their own reporting from that of community sources, and set standards for selecting its partners. These changes will be difficult for newspapers which have considered themselves the primary newsgathers, but they may lead to the next chapter of American journalism.

And there is some early evidence that a highly collaborative model - even beyond what Overholser suggests - can work. Earlier this month, a reporter from The Washington Post teamed up with a colleague from ProPublica.org to produce an investigation of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's oversight of the New York Fed.

But we digress. Abernathy's paper is worth a read. And it will be a topic of discussion at a conference on nonprofit media ownership May 4-5 at Duke University.

Writing the Rules of the Road

So exactly how do foundations and other donors decide which journalism nonprofits to support? This is not a question many journalists spend a lot of time thinking about. But they should.

As Steve Katz, a top fundraiser for Mother Jones, reminds us, funders are a fickle lot. And so far, there are no rules of the road for supporting journalism. The risk: Even the most accurate, best-intended journalist is certain to be accused of bias simply by virtue of having taking money from somebody and/or their foundation.

If nonprofit journalism is to have any value as a public good, Steve argues, funders they need to develop some standards for handing out the cash. In his blog, he recommends that "philanthropic decision making regarding support for investigative journalism as a public good needs to be organized itself as a transparent, public-facing, collaborative process."

Some suggestions: Create a common application form or create an "RFP/open invitation approach." He adds:

(I)t may be time to begin discussions within philanthropy about forming a new affinity group specifically focused on investigative journalism (or journalism generally). Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media (GFEM), an existing foundation affinity group, has a mission that could conceivably be tweaked to make this happen, but I don’t know enough about how they work to say for sure.

It would be a start.

The Nonprofit Journalism Unconference

By Edwin Bender
edwinb@statemoney.org

At a recent "unconference" sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation, I watched as sparks flew between advocates of greater transparency and high-tech practitioners. I can't help but think now would be an excellent time to bring together newly sprung journalists eagerly adopting new models for reporting and dissemination and those from the "old school" referenced on this site to share ideas and excitement, but also to develop some "best practices" and guides for building out the new news infrastructure.

For those who have never experienced an "unconference," it works like this: A group with similar interests but widely varied backgrounds gather in one place, submit ideas or topics for discussion to a moderator, who places the ideas and those who will present the topics on a time-line grid, grouped for maximum impact. It's an incredibly efficient way to start experienced-laced conversations around high-value ideas and concerns.

The energy and momentum of the unconference is being harnessed regularly by the open-source community, as well as Web programmers and practitioners around the world.

Enlisting non-profit-development experts for nuts-n-bolts assistance setting up non-profits would help many mulling the idea make the leap.

Most importantly, we don't want to have folks trying to re-invent the wheel as they struggle to be journalists. Let's get reporters on the same Web page now.

A former journalist, Ed Bender is executive director of the National Institute for Money in State Politics in Helena, Mt.

Welcome

The blog is new, but as those who know me can attest, this is a topic I’ve been following for several years.

The goal is to create a resource for people interested in journalism nonprofits – practitioners, funders, grant writers, etc. I’ve tried to seed the blog with news clips and posts on issues I’ve seen so far. But I am more interested in what others are thinking and reading. So please post! Or email me at journalismnonprofit (at) gmail.com. And please share this link.

Special thanks to Phil Meyer, who at the outset of my career gave me the tools to do journalism the way I wanted to do it, and to Chuck Lewis, who gave me words of encouragement (and bought me a beer) when I needed them most.

Keeping Genuine Journalism Alive

One of the great criticisms of the nonprofit model is that it doesn’t provide a long-term answer to the demise of newspapers as sources of credible information. But here’s the thing – it doesn’t have to.

While the idea of nonprofit journalism may be new even to many journalists, some smart people who have been studying it for some time believe the goal really is to preserve journalism until a viable for-profit model emerges - whenever that might be.

Phil Meyer of UNC-Chapel Hill, articulated this idea five years ago in a forward-looking essay for Columbia Journalism Review entitled “Saving Journalism” in which he suggests the nonprofit model as a means to “keep genuine journalism alive.”

If we are to preserve journalism and its social-service functions, maybe we would be wise not to focus too much on traditional media. The death spiral might be irreversible. We should look for ways to keep the spirit and tradition of socially responsible journalism alive until it finds a home in some new media form whose nature we can only guess at today.

Notably, Meyer’s piece also talks about other avenues, including certification of journalists to help readers sort though the heaps of misinformation available in the online age.

Certification is a form of communication. It tells employers and consumers alike that a practitioner has attained a minimum level of competence in some specialized field. In television, it has already become common for weather reporters to be certified by the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association…. Certification would never, of course, be a prerequisite for practicing in a field, just as an accountant need not be a CPA to advise you on your income tax. But it is information worth having when you decide whom to listen to.

Fast-forward to 2009, and we see the essence of both ideas being put into practice among some of the startups. In creating Kaiser Health News, the Kaiser Family Foundation saw a “window of opportunity” to preserve quality journalism by hiring reporters with years of experience in covering health care, said Matt James, senior vice president. As newspapers and other mainstream media shed jobs, many reporters are moving to other professions so that society no longer benefits from their experience. Kaiser isn’t wading into the certification debate, but its goal is the same – maintaining a high standard for an important journalism specialty.

At the risk of making a long post longer, it’s worth noting Meyer’s answer to the nagging question: Why do newspapers continue to cut newsroom jobs when journalistic quality is their main value proposition? Meyer draws from Harvard Business professor Michael Porter in labeling the strategy a “last-resort business model for companies undermined by substitute technology.”

He (Porter) calls it "harvesting market position." Managers do it by raising prices and reducing quality so they can shell out the money and run. I know of no newspaper companies that are doing this consciously, but the behavior of most points in this direction: smaller newshole, lighter staffing, and reduced community service, leading, of course, to fading readership, declining circulation, and lost advertising. Plot it on a graph, and it looks like a death spiral.

Pulitzer Day

Columbia University handed out the Pulitzers today, and even before the award winners were announced, this year's competition was notable because it was the first time that Web-only news sites, including start-up nonprofits Web-only news sites were eligible for the prizes.

The results? Another big haul (five) for The New York Times and two prizes for an old-guard nonprofit, the St. Petersburg Times, including one for national reporting to the staff of its PolitiFact.com site. Not a single .org made the list of finalists and winners. But change comes slowly to the Pulitzer competition, and the new eligibility rules mean the door has been opened.