This article appeared as an op-ed in the Sunday, Dec. 13, edition of Newsday.
Will news nonprofits bankrolled by foundations and philanthropists be pillars of the future media ecology? To judge by the fast decline of mainstream media’s business model, and the fast rise in philanthropy-funded journalism, it’s starting to look that way.
This has been an extraordinary year for the creation of new-media organizations and Web sites, and a big reason is the money that foundations and wealthy individuals are investing. Thousands of community news sites have been launched, and most of the prominent ones are nonprofits. Just in the last month or so we’ve seen launch announcements about the Bay Area News Project (with $5 million from Warren Hellman), the Texas Tribune ($4 million from John Thornton and others) and the Chicago News Co-operative (grant money from several foundations).
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But community news sites are only one of the arenas in which nonprofits are rapidly filling the news vacuum. ProPublica (with $10 million a year from the Sandler family) is leading the revival of investigative reporting, and it’s hardly alone. State and regional investigative reporting nonprofits have emerged in New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, California and Washington state; more are in the works.
Nonprofits of a different sort – universities and their journalism schools – also are gearing up. In California, UC-Berkeley journalism students are joining forces with the Bay Area News Project. At the University of Southern California, more than 100 students working on the news site Neon Tommy are producing journalism that serves Greater Los Angeles, not just the campus.
Will the growth of these nonprofit news sectors continue? In the short term, almost certainly. The primary factor that caused it – public concern about the hollowing out of mainstream media – isn’t likely to end soon. Moreover, these projects have been successful innovation experiments, demonstrating that news organizations much smaller than the daily newspaper can produce news that has value and impact.
That isn’t to say there aren’t questions about nonprofit news. What about nonprofits’ independence from funding sources, or their ability to compete with for-profits? And the big question, of course: sustainability. It’s foolish to rule out long-term philanthropic funding. But it’s probably true that most foundations and philanthropists are likely short-term investors.
Even now, though, we can see the ground shift, with new kinds of organizations putting money into news and information. Non-governmental organizations like Human Rights Watch are adding news units designed to get their message out. Labor is also entering the picture, giving money to Web news sites like the soon-to-launch Voice of Orange County in California, with expectations that these sites will probe issues of interest to their workers. This trend will take us deeper into the worlds of advocacy and agenda-driven journalism, a brand of news that used to be commonplace in the United States but that mostly disappeared with the arrival of monopoly newspapers and big networks.
This will make for a chaotic and unsettling period, where old boundary lines are likely to break down. The good news is that the disparate contributions of nonprofits, for-profits and non-news organizations have the potential to create a news ecology far richer and more democratic than the one that’s fading away.