All Posts Tagged With: "philanthropy"

Josh Stearns of Free Press called me out on Twitter yesterday: “@steveouting Would love to get your thoughts on Mutter… my response is here http://bit.ly/cVoWrc.” Well, I better not ignore that call to action…

Stearns is referring to Alan Mutter’s item this week on his Newsosaurus blog, “Non-profits can’t possibly save the news,” in which the news-media analyst opens:

“An amazing number of smart and sophisticated people continue to harbor the fantasy that philanthropic contributions can take over funding journalism from the media companies that traditionally have supported the press.”

Mutter cites figures that American newsrooms today are spending $1.6 billion a year less on journalism than in 2006, and suggests that there’s no way that foundation and philanthropic funding of non-profit news organizations will get anywhere close to making up for all that lost news coverage.

TexasTribune.org (a non-profit online news entity) founder John Thornton did a great job of refuting Mutter’s take on non-profit news, and I doubt I can do better. But to satisfy Josh, I’ll add my few cents. …

Of all that lost for-profit journalism that used to be published by newspapers, lots of it is no longer needed. Newspapers have lost plenty of movie and book reviewers; foreign and Washington, D.C., correspondents; sports reporters who travel across the country to cover every away game; and on and on. I don’t mean to belittle the loss of those jobs, but the Internet has made available plenty of credible replacements.

Is it necessary that my hometown paper have a professional movie reviewer, when I can read a wide range of professional and movie-goer reviews on my laptop or phone? I’m not the only person who’s stood in front of the multiplex theater deciding what movie to see by checking the reviews and trailers using Flixster on my smartphone. … That the local metro paper no longer has a correspondent in D.C. is lamentable, but there are plenty of replacements just a few clicks or finger-taps away. … Foreign news coverage? I’ve never had such a wide range of sources available to me, for free, no less.

In other words, plenty of that $1.6 billion in lost newspaper journalism is not going to be replaced; it already has been by other parties.

The part of that lost journalism that’s most important — and has not been replaced by new digital players because there’s no business model to support it — is investigative, in-depth, watchdog, enterprise journalism. You know, the months-long investigation by dogged reporters that uncovers the corruption by the county sewer board that’s led to poison in your drinking water. The stuff that wins Pulitzer Prizes.

Newspapers are doing less of that important work, and that’s unlikely to change. Non-profit news organizations like TexasTribune, ProPublica, Voice of San Diego, and many others can fill some of the loss — for a lot less than $1.6 billion a year.

Non-profit news will grow — it must grow — in order to cover that part of the news (the most important to our communities and society) for which a profitable business model no longer exists to support. I believe that foundations, philanthropists, individual donors, and development of non-profit business models that are sustainable without requiring unending foundation checks is achievable for a non-profit news eco-system to supplement the weakened for-profit news media.

Mutter, whose musings I often enjoy, is guilty of thinking too black-and-white, I’d say, with his blog post this week. Non-profit news will grow, prosper, and serve the public better than the sector has in the past. It will be but one part of an increasingly diverse news eco-system.

I can’t think of anyone in the media-criticism or industry-punditry space with views that fit into Mutter’s opening-paragraph description.

Reading the new report by Len Downie Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” today, I kept wondering: Who is this report aimed at?

Commissioned by the Journalism School at Columbia University, the 96-page report offers nothing much new to media geeks. If you follow the news industry and its travails closely, the treatise is just a handy recap of how we got into this mess (newspapers crumbling, reporters laid off, et al) and of all the various small news entities springing up to take over some of the tasks that old news media is shedding (like “accountability journalism,” which saving is a central theme of the report). And then some recommendations; again, nothing particularly original.

But I don’t mean to be negative, because I think the report is great for the right audience: philanthropists and foundations.

As the authors make clear, much of the new news ecosystem — the part doing the serious watchdog and investigative journalism that advertisers don’t especially want to pay for — will be non-profit, or low-profit. For this segment of the news sector to grow (and it must), philanthropic money will be critical. Such news organizations can’t rely on sugar daddies forever, but they’ll need it initially while they work toward and invent a model for long-term sustainability.

(I am not dismissing for-profit enterprises springing up out of the ashes of old media, and neither do Downie and Schudson — though they don’t give a whole lot of time in their report to for-profit solutions to the news crisis.)

I do hope that “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” is widely distributed and read by community foundations, national foundations that have not yet made grants within the news and information sectors, and various other philanthropists. Because this report will serve to educate them on a problem that they should know about, and to persuade them to join the party to find solutions.

Of course journalism has long had its support from key foundations, with the Knight Foundation at the top of the heap. But even that big pile of cash in Miami won’t support everything that needs to be done to make up for the degradation of newspapers and resulting alarming decline in accountability journalism. New players must come into the picture, including more community foundations and local philanthropists. The authors make the case that local accountability journalism is most at risk (and much of it already lost in some communities).

Knight already has been courting community foundations, with matching grants for those that take on local initiatives or programs to keep their communities informed. It’s also reached out to other national foundations, urging them to get involved. After all, if the good work by organizations that these foundations support in other need areas can’t get their messages out because of a dysfunctional and chaotic media ecosystem, then it’s in community foundations’ interest to start spending some money on news and information experiments and solutions.

Entrepreneurs looking to make a profit well may be able to create new news entities that don’t rely on philanthropy to get started and succeed long term. But I’m of the opinion that when it comes to serious journalism (accountability, investigative, watchdog, public-interest, whatever you want to call it), we’re headed into a period where that kind of journalism increasingly will be non-profit.

I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know from this report, but there’s a lot in there that caring people with money to give away to support their communities don’t yet understand. Let’s hope “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” gets on their reading lists, post-haste.