That’s a sentence, for better or worse, I could have written quite a few times in recent years. CPI was founded in 1989 by legendary investigative journalist Chuck Lewis, who ran the place for its first 15 years. But since then, it’s gotten new leaders in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2014, 2016, 2019, and now 2021, and not all of those departures were happy ones.

(Even that relative stretch of stability from 2007 to 2014 featured what I’d consider a finalist for Worst Idea in 21st-Century American Journalism: converting a deep-diving investigative newsroom that published a few times a month into a win-the-morning machine that would publish “10 to 12 original investigative pieces” a day (!), all of it to be monetized with ads (!!) and a $50-a-year membership for an ad-free site (!!!). Oh, and giving it the cringeworthy name “iWatch News.” Internal projections said they’d get 50,000 paying members within a year and be pulling in $16 million in annual advertising within five — all of which would more than pay for a planned $80,000 TV studio. And who should run this “Center 2.0”? How about John Solomon — a guy known at the time for putting The Washington Times “into a near-death spiral” and writing the sort of misleading stories that your employer’s ombudsman call “‘gotcha’ without the gotcha”? Not to mention a guy who’s since been known for turning Circa into a right-wing farm team for Fox News, prompting a staff revolt and management review at The Hill over sketchy pro-Trump exclusives, being labeled a “disinformation” vector by Fox News researchers, and becoming a main driver of pro-Trump, anti-Ukraine “smears” and “architect of Trump’s Ukraine conspiracies.” Yeah, that guy. iWatch News died a quick death.)

Ahem. Where were we? Anyway, despite still producing lots of great journalism (including two Pulitzer winners since 2014, not to mention a gazillion other award-winners), there has long been a sense that CPI wasn’t quite reaching its potential. To put it in numbers: In 2004, CPI had a full-time staff of 40. In 2009, ProPublica launched with a staff of 36.

Today, ProPublica’s staff page lists 174 people. CPI’s has 26.

Under its previous CEO, Susan Smith Richardson (now at The Guardian), CPI recentered its journalism on a single topic (though one that touches a thousand others): inequality. You can see the change in how the center describes itself. Before: “The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom investigating democracy, power and privilege.” Now: “The Center for Public Integrity inspires change using investigative reporting that reveals the causes and effects of inequality. “

The new CEO is Paul Cheung, best known for his role the past three years as director of journalism and technology innovation at the Knight Foundation, the largest philanthropic player in the field. Before that, Cheung worked in various journalism management roles at NBC News, AP, the Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal; he also spent four years as president of the Asian American Journalists Association.

I hopped on Zoom last week to chat with Chueng and current CPI editor-in-chief Matt DeRienzo, who joined the center a little over a year ago and has been part of that shift to inequality. Cheung was just finishing up his final days at Knight (today’s his first day in the new job); our conversation has been edited for length, clarity, and the false impression that none of us say “um” or “like.”

Benton: I don’t know if you guys have ever talked to Rodney Benson at NYU — he does a lot of work around studying nonprofit news as well as public media. One thing he wrote some years ago, that has always kind of stuck with me was — the United States doesn’t have this huge public-funded media institution like, say, the BBC. We have this booming nonprofit sector, which is wonderful, and performs some of that role a big public service broadcaster would.

But public service broadcasters are generally pretty attuned to the idea that they need to reach everybody. Like, the BBC has very much a mission that it is supposed to be universal, that it should try to represent and to reach the entire British community. And Rodney’s complaint was that a lot of nonprofit outlets in the states have been more satisfied reaching an audience that’s mostly highly educated and upper-middle-class — elites, by whatever definition of that term. It’s a tough problem for nonprofit outlets, I think, to reach outside the Beltway and New York, people who have no Acela stop anywhere nearby.

But there is one thread worth another tug, I think. The piece’s (worthy of gentle mockery) triumphalism — “Nobody can compete with The New York Times in 2020!” — is really a replacement for the last mistaken triumphalism in the news business. That would be the “We digital upstarts are going to crush those fusty old-timers at The New York Times!” version, circa the early 2010s.

The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington…The Style section is a more polished Gawker, while the opinion pages reflect the best and worst of The Atlantic’s provocations. The magazine publishes bold arguments about race and American history, and the campaign coverage channels Politico’s scoopy aggression…

I’m proud to be leaving BuzzFeed News as one of a handful of strong, independent newsrooms still standing amid the rubble of consolidation. But I miss the wide open moment 10 years ago, when we were among a wave of new players reimagining what news meant…

And I hope that earlier era of innovation didn’t exist merely to create a farm team and some lessons for the newspaper equivalent of the 1927 Yankees.

There were a lot of media people seven or eight years ago whose thinking went something like this: Yeah, things are really rough for newspapers. But there are all these smart digital companies like Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed. And all these smart hyperlocal bloggers. And all these smart nonprofit outlets getting started. Between them all, we’re gonna figure this out! Maybe the old world is dying, but a new world is coming up to replace it.

Reader, I might even count myself in that group.

But the harsh reality of the past few years has told a darker story: Yeah, things are still really, really rough for newspapers. And…there isn’t much coming to replace them.

Today’s difficult truth isn’t so much that The New York Times has in some sense beaten out the BuzzFeeds and Politicos of the world by absorbing the best of what they’ve learned in digital. That’s pretty standard behavior in a market. Some young upstarts might beat out an incumbent — but more often, they find themselves copied, acquihired, or otherwise transformed into a how-to guide for BeenAroundForeverCorp.

The big problem is that, in local news, neither the incumbents (newspapers) nor the upstarts (local digital news sites) have been able to figure out how to make it work sustainably and consistently.

In other words, the Times’ success is evidence that there is a good business to be had doing high-quality national and international news. All those VC guys funding the Vices and Voxes were right to think that there was a big and profitable market there and to give it a shot. But I am increasingly convinced that the market just won’t support high-quality local news in many, many places around the United States — whether it’s produced by The Daily Gazette or YourLocalNewsSite.com.

All that is preamble to this brief interview with Victor Pickard, a Penn professor who has reached a similar conclusion. His latest book, out last December, is Democracy without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society. The interview itself doesn’t cover new ground — Pickard’s Guardian piece last month hits the same notes — but it’s a distillation of this argument that local news has reached market failure and that non-market solutions should be considered.

The market’s failure to support journalism at a systemic level necessitates nonmarket approaches. Two general approaches have potential. One approach aims to minimise commercial pressures by relying on private capital. In the U.S., for example, news organizations can move toward this model by converting into nonprofit institutions (see the Salt Lake Tribune) or what might be considered low-profit institutions — or, at least where profit is not the sole criterion for success, such as public benefit corporations (see the Philadelphia Inquirer)…

A second approach is a public option, which is more systemic and, in many ways, more promising, but also more politically fraught. Public investments in local journalism could build on public broadcasting systems to provide news and information across all types of media and platforms. One major benefit with public systems is that a universal service mandate is baked into their DNA. One concern with these models is their political independence. Although government should help set up the funding mechanisms, this money should be guaranteed with no strings attached. The government can have no control over news operations, which should be democratized and bottom-up….

The core root of today’s journalism crisis is what I refer to as “systemic market failure”…Advertising had long served as a subsidy for print journalism, which is expensive and rarely pays for itself. Subscriptions and other payments schemes have not worked for most outlets, and there really is no commercial replacement for supporting local journalism. We must, therefore, shift our paradigm to focus on non-market-based means of support.

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

Mother Jones had a choice. It could either pay the $74,999 that VanderSloot had sued for — $1 short of what would allow the case to move to federal court — and admit wrongdoing. Or it could fight what it believed to be VanderSloot’s attempt to intimidate journalists. Mother Jones chose to fight, and it eventually won — but only after running up $850,000 in legal costs.

Taking the case to court was a gamble — but Mother Jones’ victory and the way it presented tha battle to readers ended up being a cunning way to fundraise, according to a new case study by Caroline Porter and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. The 43-year-old progressive outlet eventually published a story about the entire case that served as a launching pad for fundraising campaign that earned $350,000.

“The decision to talk frankly with readers about the legal attack, its cost and its effect on the overall organization and its reporting — that veered from journalism tradition,” the report says. “The inside workings of news organizations traditionally have been kept just that — inside. Mother Jones, frank and forthright in its editorial tone, opted to extend its reporting approach and its voice throughout its business operations, to voice its journalism mission and to cover it like a story, for its readers and the world.”

The report looks at the decisions the nonprofit made to strengthen its position and become a self-sustaining news organization during an extremely uncertain time in the news business.

Across the industry, one in four newsroom positions disappeared between 2008 and 2018, according to a July 2019 Pew Research Center report, as the total number of newsroom employees in the U.S. plummeted from 114,000 to 86,000.

By contrast, the number of people getting news from Mother Jones grew by 17 percent from 2014 to 2019, to a total audience size of 8 million unique visitors a month, including social followers across platforms, web traffic, print subscribers and podcast listens. The online and print magazine’s budget increased in recent years, which in turn has allowed for an uptick in hiring and reporting. Between 2014-2015 and 2019-2020, MoJo’s budget increased from $13.5 million to $18.1 million, and MoJo’s staff increased from 73 to 93 staffers…

The magazine was less dependent on advertising revenue than many of its peers, which were hit hard by the decline in ad rates across print and digital. By the end of 2019, it expects to raise $25 million through its “The Moment for Mother Jones” fundraising campaign, a striking achievement for the field of journalism.

Their strategies?

Prioritizing investigative and long-form journalism

In 2006, Mother Jones editors consolidated their print and digital teams after seeing their print subscriber base continue to age as it gained younger readers online. That left a “two-pronged news organization that produced daily news coverage as well as long-form feature writing.” It invested in hiring more full-time staffers (relying less on freelancers) to establish a bureau in D.C. to cover the United States invasion of Iraq, an issue that they knew readers cared about and which lent itself to more investigative reporting. The emphasis on investigation helped center Mother Jones’ brand around “smart, fearless journalism,” which later changed how it could appeal to potential donors.

Zeroing in on relationships with readers

When Monika Bauerlein became CEO in 2015, she shifted both the business and editorial strategies to be more reader-focused. That meant changing the marketing language and donation appeals to be more direct, as well as changing the formats of asks to look more like a news story.

Bauerlein believes that too often journalists make choices based on what they themselves think is good, rather than following readers’ preferences. “Journalism exists only as much as there is an audience engaging with [the work], large or small,” said Bauerlein.

Restructuring its fundraising campaigns

Mother Jones employs two types of fundraising campaigns that serve different purposes: seasonal campaigns throughout the year and institutional campaigns that run over the course of multiple years. Seasonal campaigns often respond to the news cycle and specific reporting needs; they’re typically fueled by small-dollar donors. Institutional campaigns appeal to Mother Jones’s long-term vision and goals and bring out the bigger checks. The divide smooths giving throughout the year and offers stability to the operating budget. It also makes sure to include multiple ways to donate to make the process as convenient to the reader as possible.

Betting on small experiments to build audiences

Lots of newsroom experiments happen in the realms of audience engagement and social media strategy. Ben Dreyfuss, editorial director for growth and strategy, said Mother Jones takes a “minimal approach” to new projects, spending about a week coming up with a new project instead of six months.

“If it’s not working after two weeks, we’ll try to fix it a few times. But it’s not going to take three months to kill it,” Dreyfuss said. “The most important thing I’ve done is make it clear that reporters and editors can publish whatever they want, but if they want it on Facebook or Twitter, they need to think about how it will engage a social audience. That carrot and stick — it is like being a front page editor.”

You can find the PDF version of the case study here.

“We’ll all root for them hardest and loudest. I’ll root hardest and loudest of all,” Smith wrote. “And I’ll be one of their first financial supporters.”

Public details on the new venture are roughly nonexistent at this point. Is this a daily news site or a “tool” for people who’ve mostly unplugged from daily news? Does “equal participants in democracy” imply an activism component? What does it mean to launch a news site specifically for women in 2020? How big will the staff be, and how much funding has been raised? What topics will be covered? Will the site take a stance on issues like abortion? Is the target reader a news junkie or a news avoider? What does real estate go for in Austin these days? And so on.

Zamora and Ramshaw remain employed at the Texas Tribune until Dec. 20 and Jan. 3, respectively, and won’t be sharing details until the new year. “The only thing I care about as much as informing and engaging with Texans on politics and policy is informing and engaging with women on politics and policy. That’s what I’m devoting my next chapter to,” Ramshaw said in a statement.

So more TK. In the meantime, see the announcement threads from Ramshaw and Zamora below, followed by a sampling of the Twitter speculation and gushing.

1/8 For the last decade, I’ve had the distinct honor of working in — and then leading — the greatest newsroom in America, @TexasTribune. Together, my extraordinary colleagues and I have harnessed the power of journalism, data and live events to build a better Texas.

— Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) November 19, 2019

1/12 Happy Tuesday, y’all. I hope you’ll indulge a brief thread from me on some important personal/professional news. I’ve taken a few good leaps in my career. And it’s time for my next. https://t.co/itUmAXNYms

— amanda zamora (@amzam) November 19, 2019

Two of the absolute best newsroom leaders and journalists @amzam and @eramshaw are taking their collective knowledge and wisdom and applying it to a news start-up for women. Genuinely excited to see the outcome of this https://t.co/QnoWP16cus

— emily bell (@emilybell) November 20, 2019

Because much of our industry a) underpays women and b) doesn’t prioritize boundaries or respect any semblance of work/family balance. https://t.co/E9aoL97bNd

— Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) November 20, 2019

I’ve known both @eramshaw and @amzam for a decade — long enough to know that any venture they lead is destined to be ambitious, innovative and impactful. Can’t to see the organization they build and the journalism they begin to produce. https://t.co/RX7tyAhLIl

— R.B. Brenner (@rbbrenner) November 20, 2019

Yes @amzam and @eramshaw are brilliant and could turn anything into gold. But after reading @rtraister's book Good and Mad…there is a raging fire burning below the surface, women who have become increasingly politically activated. They need news/info to further their goals.

— Carrie Brown (@Brizzyc) November 20, 2019

For all that’s wrong in the news biz, the ascent of @amzam through her work at The Washington Post, ProPublica and TexasTrib is an example of what’s good and changing in our industry. Wishing her + the legendary @eramshaw great success… https://t.co/VsslB4qQhF

— Mark Stencel (@markstencel) November 20, 2019

One of the most exciting and ambitious new news projects in memory https://t.co/TvXAo5MTar

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) November 19, 2019

Wowzer. "A new national nonprofit news organization aimed at giving women the facts, tools and information they need to be equal participants in democracy and civic life." https://t.co/n47Z7IVFf0 What a great idea.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 19, 2019

Lots of reasons to be excited about this, but personally I am *so* curious to see how @eramshaw and @amzam can take this more tool-and-resource-oriented framing of civic information vs. the more traditional here's-the-day's-news model that most news orgs rely on. https://t.co/XwUnZxkGQy

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) November 19, 2019

That's a problem for women and men, white folks and POC, young and old. But I suspect that some use of *identity*, along the lines of what they seem to be thinking, will be a key part of the answer.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) November 19, 2019

You better believe we’re not leaving Texas!

— Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) November 19, 2019

More than 250 media outlets closed across Canada from 2008 to 2019, according to a 2019 study by the Local News Research Project. A small Quebec paper, The Gleaner, nearly joined them.

Established in 1863, The Gleaner serves a string of rural communities in the Chateauguay Valley, west of Montreal, sandwiched by the St. Lawrence River to the north and the U.S. border to the south. The population is approximately 46,000, with about 26,570 French-speaking residents and 13,765 English-speaking residents, according to the 2011 census.

Instead of closing The Gleaner in November 2018, the English-language newspaper’s owner, Gravité Média, reached out to Stéphane Billette, the local National Assembly of Quebec member at the time. Gravité asked if the community once served by The Gleaner would like to own the paper’s rights, said Hugh Maynard, the chairperson of The Gleaner’s steering committee.

Billette contacted Maynard, who then called a public meeting, inviting the Chateauguay Valley community through email, word of mouth, and Facebook. Nearly 40 people attended the meeting and the non-profit organization Chateauguay Valley Community Information Services (CVCIS) was formed with Maynard as the executive director. Gravité Média sold the newspaper rights to CVCIS; as a symbolic gesture, CVCIS paid $1.

An 11-member steering committee got to work publishing the paper again. The committee consisted of former Gleaner journalists and editors, along with a retired secretary, an artist, a cartoonist, a retired teacher, a website designer, and a farmer. Many of the community volunteers had some background in media but several had no journalism experience, said Chantal Hortop, a former editor of The Gleaner.

“We had a number of people who stepped in due to their value of the newspaper rather than having any experience working in communications or journalism,” Hortop said. “They just felt strongly that The Gleaner had to keep going, and if there was a way to do it with community effort, we were going to make it happen.”

Like many publications across Canada, The Gleaner had been passed from media chain to media chain following a series of mergers and acquisitions. Until 1985, the publication was a proudly locally owned newspaper. But since its sale to Quebec-based media chain Les Hebdos Montérégiens, the publication has been moved between competing companies. The paper was sold to Quebecor in 2011 then Transcontinental in 2013. In 2015, The Gleaner became an eight-page insert in the free French-language weekly Journal le Saint-François. In 2017, when Journal le Saint-François was sold to the regional media company Gravité Média, The Gleaner’s eight-page insert went with it.

On June 5, The Gleaner re-launched with the first print edition since it was sold to CVCIS, printing 5,000 copies. Volunteers handed out the revived paper from a booth at the Huntingdon Fair, said Lorelei Muller, a committee member and former nonprofit executive director.

@KellyGreig Join Us for the Official Relaunch of The Gleaner
Wednesday, June 5, 2019 at 16h30
Salle Culturelle Alfred-Langevin, MRC Building, 10 rue King, Huntingdon, Quebec J0S 1H0

More information:
Hugh Maynard
Interim Executive Director, CVCIS
maynardhugh@gmail.com

— Qu'anglo (@TheQuangloAngle) May 29, 2019

The reaction to The Gleaner’s re-emergence has been positive, she said. “I have seen more than one person hug the newspaper,” Muller said. “It is our valley news. It is what connects us. If something big happens in the area, sure CTV or CBC or whoever is going to cover something big, but they don’t have our day-to-day stuff, our regular community news.”

Coverage of the local candidates running in the federal election was particularly important for the community, Hortop said. The paper ran a two-page election spread in the September edition.

For Cathy MacFarlane Dunn, 68, The Gleaner has been a part of her life since she could read it, starting at around 6 years old. A few years ago, after The Gleaner became part of the Journal le Saint-François, Dunn returned from a summer away in Texas. She’d been visiting her daughter and hadn’t kept up with the news at home online or by phone. Soon after she returned, she ran into an acquaintance and asked how her parents were doing.

Dunn said her friend “just went white,” explaining that her parents had been killed in a car crash a month prior. Dunn hadn’t heard the news. “I just felt terrible,” she said. The loss of the local paper meant she didn’t hear about deaths, births, weddings, or community events.

“The Gleaner was the link that kept us all connected. So I am thoroughly over the moon with excitement that it is coming back,” Dunn said.

Since that first edition, the volunteers published further issues in August and September. On October 9, they formalized the nonprofit organization and elected a board of directors, Maynard said.

In those first three editions, members of the steering committee took on several roles to get the paper out. With experience in the nonprofit world, Muller took on administrative tasks as well as selling ads and writing stories. She has some experience writing promotional copy, but no background in journalism. Volunteers with journalism experience — Sarah Rennie and Emily Southwood — made sure the stories were polished. (“I have a tendency to bury the lede,” Muller said.)

The new board of directors will formulate a plan for more serious issues such as complaints or libel. The team also hopes that contributors will be paid for their work going forward.

“It is becoming more clear that this cannot continue as a completely volunteer endeavor,” Muller said. Hortop, for example, spent a week laying out the paper. But advertising and community fundraising has covered printing costs with funds left over, which should make payment possible, Muller said.

There are similar nonprofit community news models in Canada, said John Hinds, president of News Media Canada. Employees bought the Prince Albert Daily Herald in Saskatchewan in 2017. La Presse in Quebec is owned by a social trust and operates with a nonprofit model.

“It is certainly a trend we are seeing,” Hinds said. “I think The Gleaner is the most advanced in terms of really getting that community ownership model going.”

The board’s next steps are to facilitate The Gleaner moving to biweekly printing starting in January, along with weekly updates online. The main challenge: securing 1,500 paid subscribers to be able to move forward with this plan, Maynard said. Once the paper is up and running, the board will work towards expanding the paper’s financial model.

In the past, many small town newspapers ran printing presses and generated revenue from advertising sales, Maynard said. This is no longer the case. “The golden days of newspapers are gone.”

When asked if he thinks The Gleaner model is sustainable, Maynard is cautiously optimistic. “Ask me in a year: Did we make it?”

A final verdict on whether the Tribune could become the first legacy newspaper in the U.S. to go fully nonprofit wasn’t expected until early 2020, Nelson (vice president of business innovation) and Jennifer Napier-Pearce (editor-in chief) told me. It had received approval for the parallel Utah Journalism Foundation a few months ago — also with no questions, but that was a more straightforward request. This approval opens the doors for many more commercial legacy newspapers to seek tax-deductible status and philanthropic funding — a potential lifeline for local news outlets whose owners agree to give up control.

“We argued that our business will not change and we will continue to support the community that we serve and left it open to interpretation,” Napier-Pearce said. “We figured if they do go ahead with it, our circumstance is not going to match the circumstance of local newspapers around the country. We wanted maximum flexibility so other people could tinker with this recipe for their particular needs. Our argument is we’re already doing the work of a nonprofit. We should qualify for that tax status.”

“Without a lot of feedback from the IRS, we’re grateful that we have a pretty blank slate,” Nelson said. “We want to make sure we’re making decisions that make sense for us as an institution, make sure they are in the context of the larger national [landscape] and what this means for other papers and for journalism generally.”

(They asked me to share the donate link, which will probably become very familiar to Tribune readers once the paper figures out some infrastructure questions. The Tribune also received funding from the Google News Initiative to work on these items last month.)

The Tribune announced the news this morning, just five months after it submitted its application to the IRS. (I reached out to the IRS for comment and, update as of November 14, got the full application of the Tribune and response from the IRS.) In June, we unpacked the various hoops the application would have to jump through with Nelson and media law expert Jeff Hermes, such as:

“Are you using commercial revenue streams such as advertising or subscription fees without attempting fundraising?”

The Tribune had offered up advertising as unrelated business taxable income to the IRS, meaning that it would be outside the purview of their tax deductibility, but the IRS didn’t issue any instruction on how to treat it. Subscriptions may become tax-deductible, but Fraser said they’ll have to figure out if that status would vary between digital and print subscriptions (since a print edition involves more business operations, like printing and distribution). So for now, TBD.

But the nonprofit newspaper will be able to attract a new mix of revenue streams, reliant on philanthropic giving, smaller donations from readers and supporters, and the endowment of the separate Utah Journalism Foundation. (Nelson said earlier this year that they were aiming to raise $60 million for that. Today she said she couldn’t share anything about the amount raised thus far. UJF grants will also go to other Utah news organizations besides the Tribune.)

Reminder: “Nonprofit” doesn’t mean “no business plan.” Nonprofit journalism in general has seen an remarkable boom over the past ten years, but the outlets still need to invest in their business and fundraising operations to sustain the editorial operations.

“We’ll be forthcoming about where that is but one thing that’s really important is to stress again that the purpose of this foundation is to help sustain The Salt Lake Tribune in perpetuity but also to make sure that we’re doing as good a job as we can with promoting and supporting independent journalism in the state,” Nelson said.

The Tribune also needs to detangle itself from its business relationship with the other Salt Lake newspaper, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints-owned Deseret News. They’re currently part of a joint-operating agreement that strongly favors the Deseret News and will expire next year. “We’ll need to figure out what our relationship looks like, if any, going forward. But these are all really good things to deal with and to noodle over,” Napier-Pearce said.

With this change, Salt Lake City will be home to what must be the least commercially oriented local news scene in the country — two daily newspapers, one owned by a church, the other run as a nonprofit.

“Are you engaged in political activity?”

As part of this shift, the Tribune editorial board will officially step back from endorsing candidates, which publisher and owner Paul Huntsman had seemed thrilled to give up earlier this summer. (Yes, he is of the Utah Huntsmans.) The editorial cartoonist Pat Bagley will remain, as will the Tribune’s sports analysis and regular newsroom operations. “The integrity of our reporting and our values as a news organization won’t change, but we will engage with the community in new ways and ask for their support,” Napier-Pearce said in the announcement Monday.

She added to me: “We are very much a community newspaper, so our focus will always be on Utah. We’ve really changed the way we look at and define news just because of limited resources…It’s really going to depend on the generosity of our donors and the community coming together and see what we can do. My ultimate hope is to expand the newsroom, replace the reporters that we are sad we had to let go, and start to rebuild.” (The Tribune laid off more than a third of its newsroom last year.)

Over the summer, the Tribune held focus groups and is planning a listening tour to talk with its audience more directly, Nelson said.

But “political activity” — a no-no for 501(c)(3)s — can mean more than just election-time endorsement slates, Hermes had warned in June; this is the kind of item that can be very curiously interpreted. He emailed me his take Monday morning:

It remains possible, for example, that the subjects of a newspaper’s coverage — particularly political figures who are displeased by stories perceived as negative — could complain to the IRS that the paper’s reporting runs afoul of the candidate endorsements rule even though the paper does not make formal endorsements. It is worth noting that the “endorsements” rule is not limited to formal endorsements; rather, the rule in question prohibits “participat[ing] or interven[ing], directly or indirectly, in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” Treas.Reg. (26 C.F.R.) 1.501(c)(3)-1(c)(3)(iii). We are in untested waters with respect to how these rules apply to a nonprofit newspaper with robust political reporting. Perhaps a court would consider this “indirect intervention,” or perhaps not; it would at any rate involve a highly fact-specific inquiry based on the nature of the coverage.

(That said, while no nonprofit newspaper has engaged in “robust political reporting,” plenty of other nonprofit news outlets — The Texas Tribune, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and so on — have done plenty of work that has impacted the fates of candidates and campaigns. We’ll see.)

“Is your ownership ready for this?”

Huntsman, publisher and owner since 2016, seemed very ready in his note to readers Monday morning, referring to the market failure of local journalism: “I will not be held hostage to a broken system.”

Huntsman — part of a powerful local family, deeply embedded in the community, wealthy outside his newspaper holdings — is the most obvious sort of owner to be interested in nonprofit status. Local newspapers are currently fighting to build a profitable and commercial future, of course. But one could imagine, if their newspapers’ financials get substantially worse, that owners like John Henry in Boston, Glen Taylor in Minneapolis, Warren Buffett in Omaha, the Blethens in Seattle, or maybe even the Decherds in Dallas could see this as a path forward. It could be even more of a boon to smaller newspapers, dailies and weeklies, which are more likely to still be locally owned.

That said, don’t expect much interest from the nation’s big newspaper chains, which own an ever-growing share of the newspaper landscape.

Control of the Tribune will now go to the board of the nonprofit (separate from the board of the Utah Journalism Foundation, which will focus on fundraising) and supported by several advisory committees. There’s a placeholder board for now, Napier-Pearce said, since the approval just came through; but they hope to develop a board “that reflects who we are as Utahns. We also want experts from the industry to step forward. I don’t know exactly what the makeup is going to look like, but it will be very different six months from now,” she said.

There’s a lot to be determined. Will the new revenue enabled by nonprofit status be a game-changer or a trickle? If the mission is more squarely about journalism and community service now, does that speed up an end to print? (It’s a huge cost item in newspaper budgets, but it’s also still a huge driver of revenue.) How will the IRS respond to any challenges to the new status? Will there set off be a flood of outlets rushing to get tax-deductible funding?

The news took Media Twitter by happy surprise as well:

Congratulations to the @sltrib, which did what I honestly thought it couldn't: convince the IRS to let it convert from a for-profit to a nonprofit business https://t.co/SsuVGt2COD

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) November 4, 2019

The Salt Lake Tribune, a daily newspaper there, becomes a non-profit 501(c)3. That's a big deal. Not a commercial business owned by a foundation or school, like some newspapers are, but its own non-profit. https://t.co/aFOFkM4Zwt

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 4, 2019

Huge news in local news: @sltrib's non-profit status has been approved by the IRS https://t.co/4JhLG9rxg8

— Lenfest Institute (@lenfestinst) November 4, 2019

Back in 2012 it wasn't clear the IRS would allow nonprofit journalism to exist, and today it has endorsed a major metro daily newspaper converting to nonprofit status. That is a huge endorsement of the value of and need for nonprofit news as a core part of American democracy. /2

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) November 4, 2019

Salt Lake City's daily Tribune newspaper becomes a nonprofit — an important move into the future of local news for two reasons. 1) Ownership was enlightened. 2) IRS, notably stingy about giving nonprofit status to journalism, said OK. https://t.co/dWjK8krskR h/t @jayrosen_nyu

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) November 4, 2019

Note how the @sltrib's owner Paul Huntsman uses the term 'community institution' to describe the paper. I think that idea will be put to the test here in an interesting way. https://t.co/HLQwmJDHX4

— Jesse Holcomb (@JesseHolcomb) November 4, 2019

STOP THE PRESSES. LITERALLY, @WarrenBuffett. They did it. Congrats, Salt Lake!https://t.co/X4KbVk9Wnc

— @ErinGraceOWH (@ErinGraceOWH) November 4, 2019

I know I already tweeted this story. But I'm still so happy about it. It was fun to walk into the newsroom and see the reaction this morning.
In historic shift, The Salt Lake Tribune gets IRS approval to become a nonprofit, via @sltrib https://t.co/qqEPtauuUm

— Becky Jacobs (@ruthyjacobs) November 4, 2019

When investigative reporter Brian Collister showed it to Bland’s family and their attorney, it was the first time they’d seen it. The attorney was in shock after the clip ended.

“Where’d you get that? I’ve never seen that,” said Cannon Lambert, who represented the Blands in their federal civil rights lawsuit. “It wasn’t on anything we had. How is that possible? Where did you get that? That’s her cell phone.”

Everything was caught on camera — original trooper’s car dash cam, Bland’s phone, and the attorney’s reaction. And it was researched, reported, compiled, and edited by Collister, the CEO and chief investigative reporter of Investigative Network, a new investigative journalism nonprofit aimed at bringing more investigative collaboration to TV stations.

He had obtained the video in a records request after following the Bland case while at KXAN, the NBC affiliate in Austin. Long story short, management reportedly kept the video off air and Collister left KXAN in January 2018.

“I was having that midlife career crisis of what to do next and applied for some regular old TV jobs, halfheartedly. I thought maybe I’d reach out to some nonprofits. What I’ve seen with most nonprofits is they’re driven by former print people who have transitioned to digital,” Collister said, who spent nearly two decades in Texas TV markets. “I can’t tell you how many times I see a digital story and think it would have been a good 10-minute, 15-minute, hour-long documentary piece.”

The Sandra Bland cell phone video and Collister’s reporting around it are shell-shocking and important (and impactful), but the model he’s trying to build is worth a look, too. Local TV news is still the most consumed and trusted source of news for U.S. adults — though the industry still largely prefers competition to collaboration. Station leaders say they plan to invest more in investigative reporting, but it’s also one of the most expensive kinds of journalism out there.

Collister had watched the Texas Tribune and ProPublica grow into mega-million-dollar, impactful news outlets with their own investigative reporting. Why not combine all those powers? “My idea initially was those are 99.99 percent print/digital people [developing nonprofit newsrooms]. What if we applied the broadcast or video model to it?” he said.

So that’s what he’s trying to do, currently as the sole funder of Investigative Network. Collister said he’s met with journalism funders to no avail (yet) and has received several donations from new supporters since the Sandra Bland video first aired on WFAA and was picked up by stations and other outlets nationwide. He sees a path to profitability, built on licensing fees, donations, and collaboration, but is looking for the initial jet fuel to fully deploy the network. (The Institute for Nonprofit News, which used to be called the Investigative News Network, is this network’s fiscal sponsor while it awaits the IRS’s decision on its potential 501(c)(3) status.)

“We’ve proven what we can do and we’ve had impact — the Texas legislature has launched a full-scale investigation into what we’ve uncovered — and we haven’t had a single major donor,” Collister said. “We just need the funders to step up and help us get enough to go into orbit.”

“Not every station outlet has the ability to go out and put together a really compelling documentary video story,” Matt Goldberg, NBC’s vice president of content strategy and former assistant news director at KNBC, said. He’s on the board of Investigative Network and also Investigative Reporters and Editors. “It doesn’t matter how many people — I could build the biggest investigative team in the country, but I still want more content. If I take the approach of putting anything on, it’s going to be anything. If I put a premium on what Brian is trying to do, if it’s of substance and works with the brand I have, that’s a really win.”

At full scale, Collister envisions bureaus of investigative reporters who know how to uncover and tell a compelling story in video located in New York City, D.C., Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Austin. But they could just be a small group of reporters with a desk in the back of a TV station already out there or at a university. And he already has more investigations in progress, though he asked me not to share the topics, with timing obviously contingent on funding.

Investigative Network could be the first of its kind, relying on the work that local TV stations have been doing for ages — with a collaborative, nonprofit twist, two pieces that have seemed antithetical to the TV news world.

“Up until this very moment you had to work for a TV station run by a large corporation with a FCC license with a tower with live trucks and hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment,” Collister said. “As of today we’re going to do, thank god, what the print people figured out.”

Those funders, journalists, and yes librarians too gathered in Miami this week. Presentations largely centered on amplifying diverse local news efforts to rebuild trust in the media more broadly, with a danah boyd keynote; the staple AI + ethics panel with Julia Angwin, Craig Newmark, and others; a showcase of exemplary projects like City Bureau and Resolve Philadelphia; and the launch of the American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy effort co-led by Chalkbeat founder Elizabeth Green and Texas Tribune founder John Thornton, with $42 million in its first fund. (Green’s one-month-old son also made a cameo appearance when Thornton shared a photo to explain her absence.)

One more thing to keep in mind: The welcoming of local foundations into the journalism-funding fold is great — unless your local area doesn’t have much of a philanthropic community to speak of.

while it's great that some cities are able to find a local benefactor or a foundation that loves that place, this is predominantly going to happen in the kind of cities that are able to support the creation of wealthy people in the first place.

— Heather Bryant (@HBCompass) February 27, 2019

Here’s Knight’s summary notes of those sessions, but folks on Twitter also shared lively (and lovely) quotes from the forum. Here’s our collection of the topline thoughts:

On the role local media can play:

Are we preparing young people for citizenship the way we are trying to prepare them for, say, careers in science? #infoneeds

— Karen Rundlet (@kbmiami) February 25, 2019

Local news is a place to rebuild trust. “The shorter the distance between our neighbors and our news, the stronger our community.” #infoneeds @knightfdn

— Brian Norman (@BrianNorman13) February 26, 2019

"The way we inform ourselves is insufficient to meet the demands of the 21st Century," @ibarguen @knightfdn as he launches the Knight Media Forum in Miami. "We're here because we think one of the 3 ways forward is local news." Looking forward to great conversations. #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/Cj3dcYmiQP

— Dawn Garcia (@degarciaknight) February 26, 2019

Main focus here is local news, but Ibarguen says need to consider role of AI to solve disinformation problems and whether laws need to evolve to current landscape (eg: apply product liability law to digital products?)

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) February 26, 2019

Researcher danah boyd on disinformation, media manipulation, and why YouTube is vital for journalists to pay attention to:

At #infoneeds @zephoria points out that a lot of young people get essentially ALL their news — and do most of their search — on YouTube. Journalists do not even begin to understand this.

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) February 26, 2019

This is why journalists have to not only be discerning, but also in constant, ongoing conversation with the communities they serve. #infoneeds #newsvoices

— Alicia Bell (@aliciacbell) February 26, 2019

Google’s design assumes people will click on the result and consume content. But @zephoria shows that the headline and notification is often the end of the story, not the beginning. All frame and no content—ripe for exploitation. @knightfdn #infoneeds

— Brian Norman (@BrianNorman13) February 26, 2019

"Journalists do the work of conspiracy theorists and the far-right when they amplify the words that have been staged for them" @zephoria speaking on data voids and internet algorithms' and bad actors' influence in spreading disinformation. #InfoNeeds

— Grace Dearing (@GraceDearing) February 26, 2019

Now we get to the fun part of @zephoria’s talk on local news where she criticizes capitalism, hedge funds, and private equity’s role in decimating community-rooted media #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/xfFNdfdFGA

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 26, 2019

Resilience isn’t about deleting content; it’s about having networks of people that you can turn to and trust, danah boyd says. Real solution is thinking about our communities and realizing information bridges them. #infoneeds

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) February 26, 2019

When you are in a position of power, you are in a position to amplify. Choose to amplify messages that bring communities together, not hate. You aren’t reporting the discord; you’re amplifying it- @zephoria #Infoneeds

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 26, 2019

On emerging and existing efforts to engage and equip communities to participate in journalism:

“Community journalism won’t survive unless the community supports it.” -Steve Waldman, Report for America #infoneeds

— Alicia Bell (@aliciacbell) February 26, 2019

.@bechang8 of @city_bureau lays out 4 interrelated crises in journalism #Infoneeds pic.twitter.com/LFhAkfu8aR

— Lindsay Green-Barber (@WhimsicaLinds) February 26, 2019

Core tenets of @JournalismProj
1/market failure in local news
2/local journalism central to democracy
3/The fix is a “we the people” fix

Could not agree more. So exciting to see the scale and ambition needed to transform local news coming into fruition. @knightfdn #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/i0kchvgxlT

— Elizabeth Hansen (@ehansen02) February 26, 2019

"Funders don't always have answers, they have money," says Karen Rundlet of @knightfdn — looking to work with communities to surface solutions, which is why @soljourno approach is generative for informing communities. #infoneeds

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

“To get where I’m going I need to walk away from where I was” John Thornton quoting Winnie the Pooh on why American Journalism Project believes in creation of new news organizations rather than fixing legacy media as it announces $42M launch #infoneeds

— Burt Herman (@burtherman) February 26, 2019

.@evanasmith: “We have no competitors, only current and future collaborators.”

THAT is the new mindset leaders need to build the next news ecosystem. #infoneeds @TexasTribune @JournalismProj

— Elizabeth Hansen (@ehansen02) February 26, 2019

American Journalism Project putting in place grant process by June, to give out first in Q4 2019. Key criteria will be journalism bona fides, local support, convening community of interest, public mission #Infoneeds

— Burt Herman (@burtherman) February 26, 2019

Why local journalists need to pay attention to AI/automated decision-making:

There's no repository of information about how/where AI is being deployed in various communities. Lack of local reporters exacerbates ignorance. People need to be asking more hard questions of policymakers. @LatoyaPeterson #infoneeds

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

.@LatoyaPeterson makes the case for specialized watchdog journalism for local and community use of AI. YES! this requires a fluency and new knowledge base for local governance journalists #infoneeds

— dana coester (@poetabook) February 26, 2019

Better to use the term "automated decisionmaking" rather than AI to clarify what's going on, says @JuliaAngwin There's too much baggage around the word "intelligence" #infoneeds

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

.@JuliaAngwin: Ask of automated decision making tools – 1) what does this mean for autonomy? 2) what is the due process/method to dispute outcomes? 3) what is the disparate impact? #infoneeds #AI

— Lauren McKown (@laurenmckown) February 26, 2019

Good things to keep in mind (broadband access!):

This is a point that keeps coming up at #infoneeds: binary of nonprofit vs. for-profit isn't working anymore, "the OS is broken," and we need to move to "for profit for purpose."

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

I’m still stuck on how we create equitable access to web based technology when so many of our communities have limited (to no access) to broadband. That means many of our communities are aggressively being left behind for the future. #infoneeds

— Candice Fortman (@Cande313) February 26, 2019

This round up of academic research on the impact of local news on civic outcomes and democratic health may be of interest to those at #infoneeds. https://t.co/ubAgbyc9l8

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) February 27, 2019

Why “ethnic media” is not an additive and framing it as such is harmful:

Jennifer Preston asks @MirtaOjito why Spanish-language news media tends to have higher trust from communities they serve. One answer: place for immigrants to get basic info about snow days, flu shots, etc. Also: townhalls. Get close to community. Listen. @knightfdn #infoneeds

— Brian Norman (@BrianNorman13) February 27, 2019

Such a great point by @MirtaOjito: English-speaking media do their reporting top-down. Start with gettin info from people in position of power, then go to the community for quotes. Think about how that impacts the journalism, or what that signals to the public. #infoneeds

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 27, 2019

Misinformation fuels distrust/division, but so does missed information: people/places/priorities that are unrepresented. So is some journalism inherently more trustworthy? Hearing @city_bureau & also “bottom to top” Spanish-lang reporting from @MirtaOjito, I say yes #infoneeds

— Julie Moos (@juliemmoos) February 27, 2019

“It’s important that we stop thinking of ethnic media as a ‘nice to have,’ as something on the side. It’s a must have.” #infoneeds @knightfdn #communitymedia @Qcitymetro pic.twitter.com/JqecZjBSJ2

— Mauri Ingram (@MauriI) February 27, 2019

Only people of color reporting on their community are labeled as biased. Why have this term “ethnic media” when it’s journalism. “We are giving people a lens that the mainstream media is not covering. We are close to the communities… “ Julio Varela, @futuromedia #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/eGxxHmIkHe

— Charles Thomas (@cthomasclt) February 27, 2019

On the dynamic between funders and grantees:

As funders, we know who we know and we tend to give credibility to folks like us, Im says. We realized we needed to find the people who wouldn’t come to us. #infoneeds

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) February 27, 2019

Don’t just inform. Don’t just engage. Equip the community to do journalism and promote civic engagement- @d_holli #InfoNeeds

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 27, 2019

.@thorntonaustin on the importance of #nonprofit local news: We need to think about our local news organizations as fundamentally civic rather than commercial in nature. #infoneeds #lovelocalnews

— Anusha A (@AnushaA100) February 27, 2019

Kathy Im (@macfound): Foundations should give unrestricted funding to those closest to the ground.

The #infoneeds room: pic.twitter.com/Ygr0aGecoL

— Alicia Bell (@aliciacbell) February 27, 2019

Pretty radical statement from Kathy Im of @macfound, reflecting on power dynamics between foundations and grantees: "What does it mean to share power — and relinquish power? Letting people who are closer to the work decide…putting the resources in their hands." #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/gFKusxKTJa

— Dawn Garcia (@degarciaknight) February 27, 2019

Speaking of radical transparency – wonderful to hear John Bebow, @CenterforMI say that this is the last time someone like him should present on their work & need to amplify more diverse voices in spaces like Knight Media Forum. This is what builds trust. #Infoneeds @jwmcconnell

— Chad Lubelsky (@clubelly) February 27, 2019

Kathy Im of @macfound talking about the urgency + moral imperative of funders to share power and relinquish control and support the people closest to the work do their job was *the* highlight of this conference. Watch the video. Funders need to grapple w/ their power! #infoneeds

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) February 27, 2019

"Newsrooms are providing information to help people live their lives. We're making the case that news is a cause. And we're at the beginning of something." – @knightfdn's @kbmiami on why journalism is a public good. #infoneeds

— NewsMatch (@NewsMatch) February 27, 2019

The state of the journalism industry might be much more tattered right now if not for philanthropic dollars helping to sustain national and local news outlets like ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and others. Nonprofit news organizations have made so much progress in the past decade that now there’s even an playbook for how to make your own. But where is this money coming from, who is it going to, and how are these dollars reshaping journalism? (A piece by Julie Reynolds pointed out that the Knight Foundation has, in the past, invested in Alden Global Capital, the parent company of the “strip-mining” Digital First Media.)

A study co-published by the Shorenstein Center and Northeastern University (and funded by a couple of foundations itself) zooms in on the role played by foundations in the journalism world. Researchers Matthew Nisbet, John Wihbey, Silje Kristiansen, and Aleszu Bajak analyzed more than 30,000 grants (totaling $1.8 billion) from more than 6,500 foundations between 2010 and 2015.

Their analysis has some thought-provoking takeaways, but unsurprisingly: “Our findings suggest that many innovative projects and experiments have and continue to take place, but grantmaking remains far below what is needed.”

The study’s main findings:

— Thirty-two percent of the $1.8 billion went to industry-supporting initiatives rather than direct journalism — university programs, professional development groups, and research and technology development. Public media received 44 percent of the $1.8 billion, but it wasn’t evenly distributed across the country/stations. And national news nonprofits got 12 percent (“the leading two dozen recipients were also notable for featuring six deep-vertical news organizations that specialize in coverage of topics like the environment, and six nonprofits that have a clear ideological perspective”), while local/state news nonprofits received 5 percent of the total pool.

U.S. foundation funding for nonprofit media-related activities, 2010–2015:

U.S. foundation funding for public media by state, 2010–2015:

— Some of the 30 interviewees (including thought leaders, stakeholders, and nonprofit experts) expressed frustration with a “pack philanthropy” culture. The leading nonprofits like the Texas Tribune or ProPublica, they say, are able to attract a lot of foundation dollars in a competitive funding environment. They serve as an example for how others can do it, but they can also soak up some of the funding opportunities, and foundations can be risk-averse about funding early-stage ideas.

— The Freedom Forum was the top funder of “nonprofit media-related activities” in terms of amount of money granted, with nearly $175 million across 10 specific grants. The Knight Foundation provided about $133 million in 352 grants, the second highest amount given and the second highest number of grants (the Silicon Valley Community Foundation awarded 700 grants). (Disclosure: Knight is a funder of Nieman Lab.)

— Magazines like Harper’s, Education Week, and Mother Jones received 62 percent of all foundation money given to magazines ($80.7 million total). The funding was split between a third for Harper’s, a third for left- or right-leaning magazines, and the last third for education or other issue-based magazines.

— On the local level, Knight drove the highest proportion of funding dollars (20 percent, or $16 million) through 56 grants. The highest recipients across all foundations were the Texas Tribune, the Institute for Nonprofit News (a consortium of 150+ smaller nonprofit newsrooms), Bay Citizen (which has since merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting), Chicago Reporter/Catalyst Chicago, and MinnPost. The researchers’ breakdown:

Eleven of the top 25, and six of the top 10, focused on producing local/state public affairs coverage. Six including two of the top 5 specialized in local/state investigative reporting. Three were local/state deep vertical nonprofits, three sought to foster collaborations or increase capacity among local/state nonprofits, and two specialized in facilitating local citizen journalism and deliberation.

U.S. foundation funding for local/state news nonprofits by state, 2010–2015

You can read the full report, with its detailed analysis and more meaty charts, here.

The need to find sustainable business practices in nonprofit organizations is just as important as it is for everyone else in journalism. INN began as a group of 27 journalists working at nonprofits in 2009, who formed a network of shared knowledge on how news publishers can make smart business decisions and improve on public service journalism.

This conference was funded by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Knight Foundation (which is also a funder of Nieman Lab). It brought in speakers from WordPress, ProPublica, The Trace, and Mother Jones (and two speakers from my alma mater the University of Missouri). Topics over the two-day sprint covered everything from fundraising to storytelling techniques, big ideas and little tips. Much of it was shared online via the hashtag #INNDays2018.

Your email copy should focus on the value in your organization's work, mentioning quality content costs and reinforce that funding comes from readers/member. Make sure you add "independent media." #INNDays2018

— INN (@INN) June 13, 2018

Speaking at #INNDays2018, @kinseywilson describes @TheDailyNYT as "a profound disruption of public radio." Because media habits have change, "people have an appetite to listen to one audio story, rather than the 18 one might hear in @MorningEdition."

— Current (@currentpubmedia) June 13, 2018

Thanks for attending the Four Ps of Sponsorship Sales at #INNDays2018. It was great to participate! Sharing my presentation: https://t.co/Nt9jNfGPbZ @INN @RJIFuturesLab

— Ebony Reed (@EbonyReed) June 13, 2018

55% of nonprofit newsrooms get majority of funding from foundations. Single topic sites more dependent with 62% of revenue coming from foundations. Foundation funding remains important. #INNDays2018

— INN (@INN) June 14, 2018

Sponsorships, of course, can only carry a publisher so far. Relating this back to content and producing a product that people will eventually pay for themselves is also important. Speakers discussed how to make human connections with stories that might otherwise seem too big of a sales pitch.

Kicking off #INNDays2018, keynoter @kinseywilson: if you want people to pay you have to shift from reach & frequency to building relationship w/audience.

— Pam Maples (@pamaples) June 13, 2018

Story 1 reaction: Oh dear
Story 2 reaction: Teddy’s hair didn’t fall about because… #takemymoney#IRE18 #INNDays2018 pic.twitter.com/iG1hyxsalo

— Lucia A. Walinchus (@SoSaysLucia) June 13, 2018

Four things readers will pay for in terms of news: Business Content, Niche Content, Premium Content (e.g. NYT) and Bundled Content (both high value and lower value). @kinseywilson #AIRMedia #INNDays2018

— Daniel Lathrop (@lathropd) June 13, 2018

What news orgs have to do to build audiences, says @kinseywilson – Become essential daily habit. Have emotional attachment. Convey their support is a down payment of future value. #INNDays2018

— Lisa Gibbs (@lisagibbs954) June 13, 2018

Journalists and managers came away with some know-how on reaching, and keeping, audiences. INN will still be active over the weekend, working with investigative journalists to sharpen their skills at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference for 2018.

Major INN Index report coming this fall. Stay tuned for that. #INNDays2018

— INN (@INN) June 14, 2018

“The responsibility to maintain quality information accessible to a large part of the population is a social issue,” La Presse president Pierre-Elliott Levasseur in the announcement on the organization’s website Tuesday (thanks, Google Translate). “All business models have been evaluated in recent months. And today, after a deep reflection on the future of the company, we announce that La Presse will now fly on its own….Any profits generated by the operations, any government assistance, any money collected from donors will be devoted to La Presse’s operations in order to continue producing quality information accessible to the greatest number.”

The Desmarais family is giving La Presse CAD $50 million (USD $38 million) and will cover employee pensions through the transition. Pending a change to provincial law regulating La Presse’s ownership structure, the nonprofit’s board will soon start to take shape.

Switching from for-profit to nonprofit, though, doesn’t guarantee solvency, and the debate around the Canadian government’s support for journalism continues.

“If you keep accumulating loss, if revenue keeps falling, that’s not a sustainable basis no matter what the ownership structure is,” said Ed Greenspon, the former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail and the author of a comprehensive report last year on potential paths for the Canadian journalism industry. “It’s not a solution to the problem, but it buys a little more time for management to figure things out.”

“La Presse has been taking risks and trying new things. I can’t imagine this [decision] happening with other newspapers chains, but it demonstrates to me a willingness to rethink everything in order to survive,” said Erin Millar, CEO and editor-in-chief of Vancouver-based journalism startup Discourse Media.

“This is good news,” she added, “if La Presse is smart about what they do with this opportunity.”

When the book is written on the great Canadian newspaper upheaval there will definitely be at least a chapter on how La Presse wasn't afraid to take a chance.

— Les Perreaux (@perreaux) May 8, 2018

La Presse’s team had been exploring options for funding from the Quebec government for more than a year, Levasseur wrote in his letter, but officials were more receptive to giving money to a nonprofit than a privately owned company. (Millar said, though, that based on her conversations with federal government representatives, she doesn’t think the ownership structure was the obstacle. “My impression is that the hesitation of the federal government to come bail out a player like La Presse is related more to an unwillingness to create a subsidized press that can’t survive without the federal government’s support,” she said.)

Tablets were a big part of La Presse’s strategy. Levasseur said La Presse is read on 260,000 tablets each day and reaches 63 percent of the French-speaking adult population in Quebec each month. In 2015, La Presse derived 60 percent of its ad revenue from the tablet edition and its weekly tablet readership was nearly half a million; that fall, it stopped printing the paper on weekdays, before ending the print edition completely two years later. When the print edition ended, so did subscription fees; the tablet version has been free. (The day before La Presse announced it was going nonprofit, a Canadian businessman told reporters he was determined to buy it and restore its print edition: “The paper is not dead. Only old ideas are!” Looks like that won’t be happening.)

The Canadian government included in its latest budget $50 million over five years to help local news groups in “underserved communities.” Fifty-five percent of Canadians are in favor of additional government funding to keep local news organizations up and running, according to a poll from earlier this year.

“We heard pleas at virtually every roundtable to ease the conditions in Canada for entry of philanthropy into journalism,” Greenspon wrote in the report on Canada’s media industry last year. (Current Canadian tax law doesn’t consider journalism a charitable cause, which limits would-be donors from writing off contributions on their taxes. ) But, he noted, “we do not see philanthropic funding as a panacea.”

“Organizations like La Presse are increasingly looking at new revenue…They’re becoming creative, not necessarily innovative,” Greenspon told me Wednesday. “I think it was a very socially minded move by [the Desmarais family], who obviously want to exit their losses in the newspaper industry and [are giving La Presse] a lifeline. It doesn’t guarantee their future, but it gives them a chance.”

La Presse certainly isn’t the first newspaper publisher to try the nonprofit route. The Guardian and New York Times both launched philanthropic arms last year. The Globe and Mail is trying to follow suit: its publisher and CEO, Phillip Crawley, has asked the Canadian government to allow his organization to create a separate foundation “that would enable us to give a tax receipt to donors wanting to support quality journalism,” Crawley wrote in an email.

“I think we’re going to see other things like that. But nothing like this saves the day,” said Greenspon, if an organization still can’t make money.

Brümmer and Sam Sole, both longtime investigative reporters, had built their journalism nonprofit, amaBhungane Center for Investigative Journalism, to do focused, long-haul, groundbreaking work. The terabyte of data on the Zuma–Gupta relationship, shared with them by the editor of another independent news organization, the Daily Maverick, in a working partnership, was the gem they had been preparing for.

“When you diamond-mine, you basically mess up the resource if you go for the best stuff first,” Brümmer said. “It was clear to us that many of the stories were actually stories that needed serious [time] to work [on] following the money.”

But shortly before the team of journalists Brümmer and Sole had assembled to parse the files were set to depart for a secure reporting site — and the whistleblowers for a refuge — out of South Africa, they were scooped. Someone looped into the chain between the whistleblowers and amaBhungane had leaked the leaks out of frustration with their slow-paced timeline, Brümmer and Sole say, and the Sunday Times and City Press ran with the story in late May. The amaBhungane-Daily Maverick cohort was at least three months away from its planned first release but still scrambled to publish something within the week.

“It certainly made things difficult for us,” Brümmer said. “Eventually, we re-owned the story simply by putting out the best and most stories.”

In a country whose media faces myriad challenges — South Africa was ranked only “partly free” in the 2017 Freedom of the Press Report — amaBhungane has emerged as a critical player in some of its biggest stories. And it’s building a more sustainable revenue model to ensure it can remain one.

“I never had any intentions to work with anyone else in South Africa on the Gupta Leaks,” said Branko Brkic, the editor of the Daily Maverick, who first approached Brümmer. “Working with amaBhungane was a completely natural choice and I really didn’t waste any time pondering about it. On top of it all, they spent years investigating the Guptas — and had a massive head start compared to anyone else.”

The National Press Club of South Africa recently named the Gupta Leaks the newsmaker of the year for 2017, recognizing amaBhungane’s work. The revelations — unmasking allegations of corruption involving Zuma’s family, the Guptas’ computer business, the South African public utility company, money laundering, and more — have powered the possibility that President Zuma’s controversial leadership of the country could soon be coming to an end. He was already replaced as the head of the African National Congress party late last year by his former deputy, who ran on an anti-corruption platform.

“Politically, the climate is fractious and fraught with tensions, but so far the ruling party has not stopped major investigations — nor do they know how to even if they wanted to,” said Glenda Daniels, a media columnist for South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, associate professor of media studies at Wits University in South Africa, and a former amaBhungane staff member. “Investigative journalism is intrinsic to our democracy and amaBhungane is quite central to investigations. The Gupta Leaks are a good example of such fruitful collaboration.”

In an analysis of the South African media environment, University of Cape Town media studies professor Herman Wasserman pointed to amaBhungane’s “tireless effort” in reporting on the Gupta Leaks and pushing for government transparency. But he also noted the many challenges faced by journalists in South Africa.

The Gupta Leaks were part of an investigation that dug deeply into political figures (amaBhungane means “dung beetles” in isiZulu, one of South Africa’s official languages), sprouting from an organization that was cobbling together its funding as a nonprofit, establishing trust among publishing partners and readers alike, and tracking activity deciding freedom of information in the courts.

AmaBhungane split with the Mail & Guardian in the spring of 2016. It started running a request for donations at the end of its stories. In the first year after the split, amaBhungane raised 800,000 rand (USD $66,880) — 200,000 rand above the target.

“We are going to close this [fiscal] year [in March] with more than 22 percent of operational expenditure — somewhere between 1.9 and 2 million rand — from supporters,” Brümmer said. The goal is for the site to get a third of its support from readers by 2019. AmaBhungane has around 320 monthly recurring donors giving an average 2,000 rand per person per year. “Since our crowdfunding launch, the single donations have occurred at an average of just over one per day,” Brümmer said.

AmaBhungane still collaborates with other publishers, including the Mail & Guardian, the Daily Maverick, news24, and Sunday Times. It has a joint sign-off policy with each publication so that the legal risks of its investigations are shared. Co-publishing helps increase the legitimacy of investigations and builds reader trust in a “snowballing effect,” Brümmer said. But amaBhungane is no longer financially reliant on one major news organization to survive.

The Daily Maverick, the organization that first received the Gupta Leaks and shared the information with amaBhungane, had sought an exclusive publishing partnership, Brümmer said. He declined that offer, still reeling from the experience of separating from the Mail & Guardian. “AmaBhungane is a paragon of honesty and independence,” Brkic, the Daily Maverick’s editor, said. “The more we worked with them, the more we appreciated them. Other news organizations must understand amaBhungane’s massive role in saving South Africa’s democracy and must subscribe to a same set of unimpeachable ethics, and appreciate their fierce independence, of course.”

In May, the Daily Maverick launched its own investigative unit, Scorpio, to work alongside amaBhungane’s journalists. In its announcement of Scorpio, Daily Maverick’s editors noted:

New faces have been recruited and some of your favourite Daily Maverick journos have been seconded to work on Scorpio, which will often collaborate with others in the media, including our friends at amaBhungane. In a country that desperately needs ten more amaBhunganes, we do not think of each other as competition but rather as like-minded allies with a common goal and different setup. It is also our hope to grow the base of writers and investigative journalists through a skills transfer programme in the near future.

In addition to original reporting, amaBhungane likewise focuses on growing that base of investigative journalists in the region. It advocates for access to information and freedom of the press in South Africa’s courts. It welcomes working journalists as fellows for three months to hone their investigative skills, which has spawned dung-digging units in Lesotho, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, and Namibia.

“Our nonprofit objective has been to develop the field versus just produce,” Brümmer said. “We want to be an institute that plows back into the field.”

If this essay on making tamales in prison by inmate Gilbert Bao sounds like something you wouldn’t normally hear from an ordinary news organization, that’s what Julia Reynolds is hoping for. A veteran local reporter, Reynolds knew how news outlets in her area of California’s Central Coast often left out diverse perspectives due to logistical or language-based challenges. Now, her nonprofit site Voices of Monterey Bay has trained a group of teenagers in storytelling and government accountability. They’ve also recruited residents of a nearby prison to share their stories for the nascent organization, which Reynolds wants to keep focused on the voices (yes, plural) of the region a little more than an hour south of the Bay Area.

Reynolds has lived and worked as a journalist around Monterey Bay for the past two decades, with a stint as a Nieman Fellow in 2008-09. Her previous journalism home, the Monterey Herald, is a Digital First Media property, which means it’s been undergoing regular cuts for years; other publishers in the area are obviously feeling the heat as well. So being around teenagers and incarcerated people? For Reynolds, their attitudes were almost uplifting.

“They were inspiring in a time when people in the news business can feel very depressed and feel like things are hopeless, but this is the opposite of hopeless,” Reynolds said. “I’m a criminal justice reporter, so I’ve been working and dealing with people in prisons and I know their voices aren’t being heard. That’s true for prison staff as well. Youth are our future and they’re definitely not being heard.”

After years of freelancing and bemoaning the industry in coffee shops with other area journalists, Reynolds banded together to develop the VOMB concept with Mary Duan, the longtime editor of the local alt-weekly, and Joe Livernois, the Monterey Herald’s editor for 25 years. After coaching from the Institute for Nonprofit News, they launched VOMB in October (months ahead of schedule to take advantage of 2017’s News Match donation program), but have garnered 35,000 unique monthly visitors and 125,000 monthly pageviews so far. They’re funded by $20,000 in private donations and another $18,000 that is set to be doubled by News Match.

How do they maintain their focus on less-heard voices? Their summer workshop with a dozen high school students drew mostly teenagers from families of farm workers in Salinas, the largest city in Monterey County. (Forty four percent of jobs in the county are in agriculture.) Stories from the session have been gradually uploaded to the site throughout the fall. For the prison project, Reynolds said she is relying on people behind bars who are already skilled at writing and sharing their stories, pointing to bureaucratic red tape as an obstacle.

It’s not just the origination of stories that’s inclusive, but also distribution. High-quality translations of stories into Spanish drives 20 percent of their hits for a region with about half of the population as native speakers. (Reynolds notes that “a lot of the Latino community prefers to read in English, [so] I don’t think we’ll ever get to half our readers in Spanish.”)

The VOMB team only publishes one to two stories each week, a pace “that gives people time to read everything,” Reynolds said. The desire prompted them to restrain from pushing out too much at once, and they’re also able to dig into platforms beyond the written word. Part of that includes engaging with community members and raising money at performances in the style of Pop Up Magazine, such as Livernois presenting stand-up comedy about the region and a contributor reading an essay about her father-in-law’s assisted suicide, which she had also written about in VOMB. The scarcity can allows for things to resonate, Reynolds says.

“If you have too many good stories that come out too often, [a] magazine piles up in the corner and the reader feels really guilty,” she added. “We discovered if you just put out enough content where they can read it during the week, they feel this incredible sense of accomplishment. You actually get comments and letters to the editors.”

The slower approach also allows VOMB to dig more deeply into investigations and human-interest stories versus chasing the daily bang-ups and other stories that the traditional news organizations in the area may focus on. “We’re media–rich for being essentially a rural area — two newspapers, alt-weeklies, lots of TV news coverage, and yet none of them with few exceptions are able to dive into issues,” Reynolds said. But they’re also encountering some resistance from the longstanding organizations, even when offering content/collaboration for a low cost or for free.

Reynolds has previously reported on the impact of investment bankers in the local journalism scene. Our Ken Doctor has also explored these waters, writing in 2015:

In the Bay Area, we find a number of would-be buyers of smaller papers from Marin to Monterey and Santa Cruz. Geoffrey Dunn confirms that he has formed an acquisition group focused on the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Monterey Herald, and other Northern California papers. Dunn unsuccessfully bid to buy his hometown Sentinel (he’s a 4th-generation Santa Cruzan) when Dow Jones’ Ottaway community news group sold it in 2006.

Those are the ones we know about, with others sure to come out of the woodwork if smaller titles get loose from a bigger deal. Of course, that will be the next, big question if we see a single buyer: Will they keep all the properties and operate them, or immediately sell off some — as McClatchy did, shocking Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder, after buying all of KR in 2006?

We all know how media consolidation ends, but that’s why Reynolds and the rest of the VOMB leadership team (which isn’t taking a salary from the organization yet, but pays all its writers and freelancers) have been invigorated by the nonprofit model. Adapted from a Voice of San Diego initiative, they’re also trying to play nice with other local nonprofits by offering donors of at least a few thousand dollars a profile of a nonprofit of their choice to drum up attention for it. “It goes twice as far,” Reynolds said. “We also want to serve the nonprofit community since we’re part of it too.”

They’re working on reaching out to larger foundations now that they have proof of VOMB actually amplifying more voices. Expect more stories in Spanish, more tales from prison, and more outreach to communities across the Monterey Bay region.

“We’ve targeted some communities where we’re going to go in and immerse ourselves,” Reynolds said. “We’ll give a taste and the flavor of the area, not just writing a bunch of city council-type issues. It’s what’s going on in this place, what’s it like, what do they care about here.”

“Fiquei impressionado com a orientação pelo mercado”, disse ele, relembrando-se de uma visita ao Christian Science Monitor. “Eles não tinham a pressão para maximizar o retorno, não tinham as mesmas pressões que há em veículos comerciais, e ainda assim não pareciam tão diferentes da mídia comercial”.

Na semana passada, o Guardian e o NY Times lançaram braços filantrópicos que tentarão arrecadar dinheiro para financiar notícias sobre tópicos específicos. Vários veículos foram lançados nos últimos 10 ou 15 anos na categoria dos “sem fins lucrativos” (Texas Tribune, ProPublica, MinnPost, Marshall Project) ou decidiram se tornar não comerciais (Honolulu Civil Beat, Tulsa Frontier). Todos os textos que escrevemos sobre empreitadas sem fins lucrativos deixam claro que esses sites lidam com as mesmas pressões que os demais. Eles estão tentando construir audiências educadas e aumentar a receita com assinaturas. Preocupam-se com o tráfego. Estabelecem parcerias com veículos comerciais para certas notícias.

O modelo sem fins lucrativos tem benefícios óbvios –como a habilidade de publicar reportagens importantes que as forças de mercado são apoiariam de outra maneira. Mas também levanta novas questões e pressões.

“É um paradoxo”, disse Benson, que é o chefe de departamento e professor de Mídia, Cultura e Comunicação da NYU. “As fundações estão pedindo que a mídia não comercial seja [financeiramente] sustentável para ter um impacto. Essas duas coisas não se juntam facilmente”.

Em um novo artigo, “Podem as fundações resolver a crise do jornalismo?“, Benson analisa o papel de veículos sem fins lucrativos e que são apoiadas por fundações nos EUA hoje, explorando os benefícios e as deficiências do modelo. (O artigo completo pode ser lido aqui. Foi financiado em parte com uma doação da Ax:Son Johnson Foundation, da Suécia –sem compromissos, especificou a NYU). Falei com ele sobre suas descobertas. Nossa conversa, condensada pelo tamanho e clareza, está abaixo.

On Monday, The Guardian formally announced the creation of theguardian.org, a U.S.-based philanthropic arm formed to raise money from individuals and organizations (including think tanks and corporate foundations) looking to fund journalism on particular issues. Since its quiet launch last year, the organization has raised $1 million from the likes of Pierre Omidyar’s Humanity United, the Skoll Foundation, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to fund reporting on topics including modern-day slavery and climate change. The Guardian says it’s secured $6 million “in multi-year funding commitments,” which it hopes will support coverage of topics that would go underreported otherwise.

Are we a few years away from every journalism organization setting up a nonprofit? https://t.co/6abYDoTCZg h/t @Cingib

— Caroline Preston (@cpreston) August 28, 2017

It’s only been three years since The Guardian, spurred by its blockbuster coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations and resulting Pulitzer Prize, embarked on a global push meant to raise its profile, particularly in the U.S. The reality has been far less rosy: The Guardian, which has been a perennial money loser, has instead been forced to slash its U.S. staff and embark on a set of cost-cutting measures that have put a damper on its growth plans.

There is, however, some good news on the paid membership front. In its earnings report in July, The Guardian said that membership sales and more than 190,000 one-off contributions helped increase its overall revenue by 2.4 percent to £214.5 million ($257 million) for the year ending April 2. Foundation grant revenue increased by 65 percent year-over-year, to £3.8 million, but is still a small part of the Guardian’s overall revenue.

The Guardian’s move comes just a month after Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic. These moves could presage similar actions by other news organizations down the line. But there could also be downsides to the shift. Ruth McCambridge, editor of the Nonprofit Quarterly, has called the mixing of journalism and strategic philanthropy “scary.” Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti wondered if The Guardian, a publication still comparatively flush with cash from the Scott Trust, is really the most effective publication for donors to fund. What’s good for The Guardian could end up being not so good for smaller organizations competing for the same dollars.

Big foundations will want to fund big name-brand media (Non Profits) while small/local/regional media non-profits still struggle for funding https://t.co/yNd7YF1flv

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

Like them but so many better alternatives for donors: @guardian Sets Up a Nonprofit to Support Its US Journalism https://t.co/EEo4LFJ2K8

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

You're right. It's going to take from the little guys, while buying the big guys more time. The foundations, meantime, will love the attn. https://t.co/D30lujPTiF

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

Looking for more coming down the pike – for-profit newspapers carving out nonprofits to fund reporting. Part of a new hybrid biz model https://t.co/DD2wxRcAdw

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

When journalism literally becomes a charity case the fourth estate is under real threat. https://t.co/uhAOvQzL2u

— Neil Thackray (@neilthackray) August 28, 2017

Na 2ª feira (28.ago.2017), o Guardian anunciou formalmente a criação do theguardian.org, um braço filantrópico com base nos EUA formado para arrecadar dinheiro de indivíduos e organizações que buscam financiar certos tópicos específicos do jornalismo (incluindo “think tanks” –instituição dedicada a produzir e difundir conhecimentos e estratégias sobre assuntos vitais– e fundações corporativas). Desde o seu silencioso lançamento no ano passado, a organização arrecadou US$ 1 milhão, decorrente das curtidas da Humanity United, de Pierre Omidyar, da Fundação Skoll, e da Fundação Conrad N. Hilton para financiar relatórios sobre temas como a escravidão nos dias atuais e mudanças climáticas. O Guardian disse que garantiu US$ 6 milhões “em comprometimento de financiamentos por vários anos”, o que se espera que apoie a cobertura de tópicos que não seriam reportados de outra maneira.

Are we a few years away from every journalism organization setting up a nonprofit? https://t.co/6abYDoTCZg h/t @Cingib

— Caroline Preston (@cpreston) August 28, 2017

Passaram-se apenas 3 anos desde que o Guardian, motivado por sua cobertura de sucesso das revelações de Edward Snowden e que resultou em um Pulitzer, embarcou em uma busca global para aumentar seu status, particularmente nos EUA. Mas a realidade tem sido menos cor-de-rosa: O Guardian, que tem sido um gastador de dinheiro perene, tem sido forçado a fazer demissões em sua equipe norte-americana e embarcar em uma série de cortes de gastos que prejudicaram seus planos de crescimento.

No entanto, há boas notícias na parte de assinaturas pagas. Em seu relatório de receita de julho, o Guardian disse que as vendas de assinaturas e mais de 190 mil contribuições únicas ajudaram a aumentar sua receita geral em 2,4%, para £ 214,5 milhões (US$ 257 milhões), para o ano fiscal terminando em 2 de abril. A receita decorrente de bolsas de financiamento aumentou 65% em relação ano ano anterior, para £ 3,8 milhões, mas ainda é uma pequena parte do retorno geral do jornal.

A ação do Guardian ocorre apenas um mês depois que o coletivo Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson adquiriu uma participação majoritária de The Atlantic. Esses movimentos poderiam ser um presságio para ações similares por parte de outros veículos de notícias. Mas também podem haver lados negativos na troca. Ruth McCambridge, editora do Nonprofit Quartely, disse que a mistura de jornalismo e estratégia filantrópica era “assustadora”. O CEO do Grupo Midiático Gizmodo, Raju Narisetti, perguntou-se se o Guardian, que é um veículo com 1 considerável fluxo de caixa do Scott Trust, é realmente a publicação mais efetiva para que doadores financiem. O que é bom para o Guardian pode acabar não sendo tão bom assim para veículos menores que competem pelo mesmo dólar.

Big foundations will want to fund big name-brand media (Non Profits) while small/local/regional media non-profits still struggle for funding https://t.co/yNd7YF1flv

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

Like them but so many better alternatives for donors: @guardian Sets Up a Nonprofit to Support Its US Journalism https://t.co/EEo4LFJ2K8

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

You're right. It's going to take from the little guys, while buying the big guys more time. The foundations, meantime, will love the attn. https://t.co/D30lujPTiF

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

Looking for more coming down the pike – for-profit newspapers carving out nonprofits to fund reporting. Part of a new hybrid biz model https://t.co/DD2wxRcAdw

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

When journalism literally becomes a charity case the fourth estate is under real threat. https://t.co/uhAOvQzL2u

— Neil Thackray (@neilthackray) August 28, 2017

The next few dozen pieces, running in the Jacksonville Daily News in North Carolina, were what Brennan considers clichés of military reporting: quick announcements about the casualties of soldiers overseas — including one for a Marine who was killed at the same base where he served — and profiles of veterans from World War II.

“I was…chasing after dying veterans to tell their story before they were gone forever,” Brennan said. “With today’s technology, we don’t need to wait until my generation is dying to tell our stories.”

So he set out to cover the military and veterans differently. He had written for the Times’ At War blog several times since the thank-you note and started pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. Before he knew it, the next major piece he reported was an explosive exposé about a multi-thousand-member Facebook group called Marines United and the nude photos of female service members exchanged in a scandal that roiled the ranks and had the commandant of the Marine Corps testifying about it to Congress. It was published this March by Reveal by the Center for Investigative Reporting, but also by Brennan’s one-year-old journalism outlet focusing on the enterprise, longform, and investigative sides of the military stories, The War Horse.

“I’ve never been an editor. I’ve never been a development person for a newsroom. I’m a stubborn Marine grunt with a dream,” said the 31-year-old Brennan.

The dream of The War Horse consists of a few tentpoles: holding the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs accountable, bridging the divide between the military and civilians, and developing a community across that divide. Brennan emphasizes collaborating with more established news organizations on coverage about veterans, war, and trauma rather than competing, following the model of other single-topic sites like The Marshall Project.

“There are some military culture sites and military news sites that specifically tailor themselves to veterans…but they’re often putting veterans in one corner and the military in another corner,” Brennan said. “Accountability journalism, longform, and enterprise packages are not their bread and butter.”

There are a number of existing news outlets in the military space, some of which focus on breaking news, innovations, and wartime events. But a new tribe of feature-based news organizations has sprung up around the needs of newer generations of veterans. We’ve profiled a few at Nieman Lab: Task & Purpose grew out of a veterans-focused job site and now focuses on issues like benefits and transitions to civilian careers, as well as original feature reporting, including coverage of veterans protesting at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. War on the Rocks publishes content on national security, military lifestyle humor, and even op-eds from John McCain, Barack Obama, and 122 Republican members of the national security community (in an open letter regarding then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s suitability for the office).

According to The War Horse’s annual report, accountability journalism on military and veterans affairs comprises less than 5 percent of all news coverage. Brennan said that The War Horse is unique as a nonprofit newsroom investigating both the Department of Defense and the Department of Veteran Affairs. But they are determined to tell the complete story of veterans and military affairs, both including and beyond investigations.

“Being ‘just investigations’ sends a bad message. It pits us against them — our newsroom against the DOD and the VA. We want to publish the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Brennan said. “That sends a message of fairness and integrity of our reporting.”

It’s through these good, bad, and ugly avenues that The War Horse is trying to transcend the gaps across the government, active military, veterans, civilians, and even the journalism industry. “We’re not stories ‘by veterans, for veterans,'” he added. “We have plenty of veterans writing for us, but it goes back to bridging the military–civilian divide. It’s all part of helping make the conversation start.”

The War Horse launched with $53,300 from a Kickstarter fundraiser in early 2016 and continued to grow after its first story, a multimedia package on service members killed in action, was published that June. Over the next year, they have brought in enough donations and grants that The War Horse is working with a budget of more than $500,000 for the next 18 months. Brennan said about 75 percent of their revenue comes from large-gift philanthropy, such as the Schultz Family Foundation, the John Logan Family Foundation, and the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund. The remaining 25 percent comes from individual donors, including repeat donors from the Kickstarter. Gerry Lenfest, a veteran of the Navy and the founder of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, personally donated tens of thousands of dollars and has acted as a business mentor to the team, Brennan said.

So much support has poured in over the past few weeks that it surpassed the original budget of $250,000 they had planned on for next year. As a new nonprofit, they’re taking advantage of the overwhelming support to integrate sustainability from the outset: “We want to save 5 percent of our annual fundraising to put toward an endowment fund. It may take forever, but I want to make sure the War Horse can continue on in perpetuity,” Brennan said.

Currently staffed by only three people (editor Anna Hiatt, an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University where she taught Brennan in the master’s program; David Chrisinger as the director of writing seminars; and Brennan himself), the organization has an extensive volunteer network and paid freelancers both with and without military connections. Supporting their journalists who may be covering sensitive and controversial material is a top priority. “Marines United has taught Anna and I that we need to build a newsroom infrastructure that keeps our journalists safe. That’s not cheap,” Brennan said. “If we’re going to be publishing controversial things or if there’s negative online backlash, I want to build a newsroom that can stand behind our journalists and take care of them.”

Mental health in active military and veterans is a serious issue. It’s become a pillar of the protection Brennan pledges for both his journalists and the people that they interview. As a suicide-attempt survivor diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Brennan said he has faced “ignorant” questions from journalists who didn’t understand the impact their questioning could have.

“Even as a veteran, I’m curious about whether or not a veteran has killed someone or been in combat…But in the veteran space, it seems to be okay to hone in on the most traumatic [event when] reporting on our service,” Brennan said. The War Horse has an extensive policy for reporting on trauma listed on their website, both for transparency to potential interviewees and for guidance to other journalists. “The trauma standards are put there so we can be held to a standard, so people know what they’re getting into when they talk to us.”

But it was also journalists along the way, throughout his master’s program at Columbia in 2014-15, who helped him shape The War Horse into the single-topic, concentrated effort it has now become.

“The only thing that has made The War Horse so successful is that every journalist I’ve ever met who has told me, ‘Please let me know how I can help’ — I wasn’t afraid to take them up on that offer,” Brennan said. “The willingness to help has transcended the military–civilian divide.”

Now, The War Horse is continuing its push into telling the stories of recent-generation veterans. They recently launched a series called “Veterans Adding Value” supported by the Schultz Family Foundation to explore the transitions from military to civilian life. The first three profiles, all on female veterans, are meant to signal The War Horse’s journalistic depth beyond investigations such as Marines United.

The organization also recently launched a writing seminar series to encourage veterans to tell their own stories. The War Horse and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University hosted a coalition of military reporters, veteran advocates, educators, and 15 veterans of military operations after 9/11 for a five-day writing seminar in April. More seminars are planned at the University of California, Boulder Crest Retreat, and the Carey Institute for Global Good.

Brennan said The War Horse is always looking for more volunteers, connections, and collaborations. “Our proposition is that we’re not everybody else. But at the same time we want to be complementary, not competitive,” he said. “There’s more room for failure if you try to do everything on your own.”

But for some users, that’s about to change.

With just one lead developer, DocumentCloud holds about 60 million pages of 3.6 million documents, stored on 31 servers by 8,000 accounts. Some news organizations have uploaded more than 300,000 documents in the eight years of its existence. For a nonprofit startup with no tangible revenue in a journalism world increasingly reliant on data, documents, and cloud storage, DocumentCloud’s supporters realized this model was unsustainable.

“There was a very real possibility that DocumentCloud would have just simply gone away. It’s not now, thank god, but I think that was a significant wakeup call for everybody,” said Aron Pilhofer, a cofounder of DocumentCloud. “We need to address the sustainability question — like now — and we can’t wait any longer to do it.”

Formerly the executive editor of digital at The Guardian and interactive editor at The New York Times, Pilhofer joined Temple University as journalism innovation professor almost a year ago. Now he’s taking DocumentCloud over again as it transitions out of its long-time home at the Investigative Reporters and Editors and into an independent nonprofit that will operate in collaboration with Temple as of August 1. (There should be no interruption in service to DocumentCloud users.) The Knight Foundation (disclosure: also a Nieman Lab funder) is providing a $250,000 grant to cover the transition as DocumentCloud finds its footing.

First thing on the agenda? “We said from Day One that at some point we would ask news organizations who use DocumentCloud to support DocumentCloud. We’ve always said that. We just have never gotten around to actually doing it,” Pilhofer said. With the grant, “the singular objective that we have is to make DocumentCloud sustainable — forever.”

DocumentCloud has never been a for-profit venture. Its humble beginnings were backed by a two-year, $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant to The New York Times and ProPublica, when Pilhofer collaborated with ProPublica’s now-deputy managing editor Scott Klein to pitch the idea as the future of document-based journalism. Former Nieman Lab staffer Zach Seward described the problem the team was trying to solve in 2008, barely three weeks into Nieman Lab’s existence:

At the moment, when a reporter gets her hands on paper documents, the best she can typically do is post them online as scanned PDFs, where they often can’t be searched and will likely be forgotten by the end of the day. Worst of all, it’s a one-sided experience: The reporter drops a dead tree in a forest and has no idea if it ever makes a sound.

DocViewer, which is the technology behind DocumentCloud, promises several features that would address the current failings of the PDF model. It would allow users to run their documents through an OCR (optical character recognition) service that would enable full-text searches of otherwise impenetrable material. Then DocViewer relies on OpenCalais, a web service developed by Thomson Reuters, which can tag documents with the names of known people and places found within the text. Any reporter who has ever attempted to wade through a thick stack of paper on deadline will immediately realize how helpful this would be.

DocumentCloud signed up 20 investigative journalism outlets as a consortium of testers in 2009 and became part of IRE two years later. While the partnership was called a “win-win” by the Knight Foundation at the time, it wasn’t exactly a perfect match. Pilhofer said this was brought to his attention when he moved back to the United States from London last November.

“While IRE had been in many ways a good host for DocumentCloud — in terms of IRE being sort of the core audience — it was clear to everybody that IRE wasn’t actually the right place for DocumentCloud,” Pilhofer acknowledged. “IRE isn’t set up to run a technology platform.”

Doug Haddix, IRE executive director, said the board of directors voted unanimously in favor of the transfer. In a statement, he said:

IRE has full confidence in Aron’s leadership and technical expertise to continue enhancing DocumentCloud as a critical tool for investigative journalism. Aron and I have worked closely together to ensure a smooth transition, with no disruption in service or features for the journalists who rely on DocumentCloud.

During IRE’s stewardship, DocumentCloud has dramatically expanded the service’s technical capabilities, added numerous features and optimized it for mobile devices. Journalists have uploaded more than 3 million documents comprising an estimated 52 million pages.

Moving forward, IRE trainers will continue to promote DocumentCloud as an essential service for journalists — especially its powerful tools for deep analysis of documents.

IRE is grateful to the Knight Foundation for its financial support of DocumentCloud and its endorsement of this new home for the service.

Three people are listed on DocumentCloud’s website as IRE employees, but lead developer Ted Han will be the only staff member to carry on with the project, at least initially. Pilhofer said he personally won’t be taking a salary from the nascent nonprofit as the “bare bones operation” of DocumentCloud adjusts — and starts asking heavy users to pitch in. The team is looking to ramp up staff numbers, build out features to help reporters verify documents, and defray the costs of those 30-plus servers as DocumentCloud continues to grow globally.

“You can’t just put stuff up in a cloud, turn a key, and walk away. You need to have a team working on it to maintain it and keep going, but also to respond to changes,” Pilhofer said, though he noted DocumentCloud’s platform is still “rock solid” and secure. These changes include both technology and scale: “If we have a bunch of documents sitting in servers on S3 in Virginia and you’re trying to access a document in Australia, you might as well get a sandwich before the document is going to load for you.”

The 501(c)3 nonprofit will invite participation from students at Temple University, though it isn’t technically a program of Temple. It won’t receive distinct financial support aside from Pilhofer’s time as an in-kind donation and other resource needs as they pop up. (Remember, the goal of this move is sustainability through DocumentCloud itself.) Pilhofer will lead as executive director and the nonprofit will have board members from DocumentCloud’s past, with cofounder Scott Klein signing on, and its future, with representation from Temple.

“With so many journalists now becoming entrepreneurs, product managers, designers, technologists…[it is] an absolute gift [for Temple students] to be able to learn within a real-world laboratory like DocumentCloud, a platform used by journalists around the world every day,” said Pilhofer, who came to Temple as the first professor in a $2 million endowed chair of journalism innovation at its school of media and communication. “There are lots and lots of labs out there doing very interesting theoretical work on how technology can improve the practice of journalism. Temple will have something 1,000 times better: a production platform that has already scaled to thousands of newsrooms.”

While Knight will provide the initial funding, DocumentCloud’s long-term revenue strategy is currently two-fold. One part involves some news organizations and individual journalists contributing in a tiered subscription-like service. The details are far from finalized, but Pilhofer emphasized that it would be “insanely affordable,” especially compared to the potential expenses of developing and running one’s own journalism-focused document storage system. He also noted that DocumentCloud will always maintain the option of a free account and that news organizations will never have to pay for the documents they make public.

“When you’re talking about a journalist using DocumentCloud once a week uploading a document or two, those people are not going to be impacted at all. If they want to contribute to us, great,” he said. “But if you’re uploading 40,000 documents on a Thursday…we also think that’s fair to ask those organizations to help support what we’re trying to do here.”

The second part turns to sponsorship from other entities — he identified platforms such as Google and Facebook as possibilities, along with “big media companies” — to help the nonprofit break even.

Despite all the changes, Pilhofer wants to reassure users that DocumentCloud will stay true to its open source, transparency-in-journalism roots.

“DocumentCloud was a great platform to help journalists do a thing, but what we actually wanted to change was to make journalism more transparent, full stop…to get journalists to show their work,” he said. “DocumentCloud is one of the few platforms out there where we can tangibly make an impact on how people perceive and trust journalism.”

Last Friday, David Hencke and Mark Conrad had been appointed to run the site jointly. (The site’s former editor-in-chief Mark Watts was let go; he’d warned last month that the site would go on leaderless and “its small team of about five full-time journalists and researchers appears set to be cut back severely.”)

1/2 Changes at Exaro. @davidhencke is now Head of Exaro News. @markconradhack is Head of News. David and Mark will jointly manage the site.

— ExaroNews (@ExaroNews) July 15, 2016

2/2 Exaro update: reporters will continue to include @MikeYuille1 @FrederikaW @TimWood22 @avwinter and others. Contact details on web.

— ExaroNews (@ExaroNews) July 15, 2016

A board meeting Wednesday, however, instead led to the sudden decision to shut down the site altogether:

Hencke said: “We are absolutely devastated. We were going ahead with plans and had only just put up a story the previous day, with a lot more in the pipeline, and suddenly we are told it’s closed just like that.”

Despite the sudden closure, Hencke praised owner Jerome Booth, saying: “He has funded it very generously for years and never interfered editorially.”

Former editor Mark Watts was fired last month. He told Press Gazette this morning: “The management has made itself a laughing stock by closing just days announcing that it was ‘open for business’. To just shut it like that is an act of mindless vandalism.”

But, in a tale as old as time, despite financial support from a wealthy owner, the site couldn’t seem to find a sustainable business model, and “a number of attempts to build a business model around the coverage, such as charging for data services and events, have failed to take off,” according to The Guardian. (Anglosphere journalists may remember the similar surprise defunding of The Global Mail in Australia two years ago.)

Terrifically sad — Staff devastated as owners close investigative journalism website Exaro: https://t.co/wCkHUem7NL

— Janine Gibson (@janinegibson) July 21, 2016

Sad news: Investigative journalism website Exaro closes https://t.co/lgCQBoHizF

— Louise Ridley (@LouiseRidley) July 21, 2016

Sorry to hear. Good people trying to do their best in an impossible area. Don't give up! @MarkWatts_1 @ExaroNews

— Stefano Ambrogi (@StefanoAmbrogi1) July 21, 2016

That’s why Mississippi Today, a nonprofit site that launched in May, is trying to bring more muscle to the coverage of government and politics in the state.

The site has some boldface-name backers, led by its founder, NBC News and MSNBC chairman Andrew Lack, whose family hails from Mississippi. With an 11-person newsroom based outside Jackson, the nonpartisan site has backing from supporters on all sides of the political spectrum.

“We report the facts and we hope to dive deep into subject matter so that we can fully provide context to readers, but we leave it up to them to make their own decisions after they have read and digested the information we provide,” said Mississippi Today coeditor Dennis Moore, a former USA Today editor.

Moore and coeditor Fred Anklam Jr., also a USA Today veteran, said Mississippi Today has an operating budget of more than $1 million and is fully funded for the next two to three years as it looks to build its readership and create a sustainable business model.

The site has a solid base of support from well-known Mississippians, including former Netscape CEO James L. Barksdale, prominent trial attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, and former Mississippi governors Haley Barbour (R) and William Winter (D).

“The money to get us going was all raised before we published a word,” Anklam said. The site started a wave of fundraising on May 2, and since its launch party, it’s raised more than $100,000 in individual donations. “People are giving [anywhere from] $5 a month to $5,000 for a year, chiming in where they feel they can contribute,” he said. “It’s exciting to see the kind of support coming in.”

Mississippi Today also received $250,000 grants from the Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation. (Disclosure: Knight also supports Nieman Lab.)

In order to continue to grow, the site plans to follow the lead of The Texas Tribune, the Austin-based nonprofit that’s considered among the gold standards for nonprofit sites, by attempting to build a diverse mix of revenue streams via individual memberships, major gifts, foundation grants, site advertising, and sponsored events.

The Texas Tribune, however, has a few obvious advantages that Mississippi Today does not. Texas (population 27 million) is a lot bigger than Mississippi (population 3 million), and sponsors and advertisers want to reach the Tribune’s influential audience. There were 1,847 registered lobbyists in Texas in 2015, one group that has a professional interest in what’s happening in Austin and would be likely to read — and potentially support — the Tribune. By contrast, there were 438 registered lobbyists in Mississippi last year.

Texas also has the second-largest state economy in the U.S. It produced $1.59 trillion in economic output in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Mississippi, by comparison, had a GDP of $107.1 billion.

In 2015, the Tribune brought in $2.7 million in corporate sponsorships. So far in 2016, it’s raised $1.8 million from sponsors such as PepsiCo, which has spent $110,000 sponsoring Tribune events, and AT&T, which spent $80,000. It has nearly 40 reporters.

Of course, the Tribune has grown substantially since its launch in 2009, and since Mississippi is a smaller state, Anklam and Moore said they don’t expect to become Texas-sized anytime soon. They are optimistic, though, that they will be able to attract corporate sponsors and members: “Proportionally, we hope to do just as well,” Anklam said.

Will Norton Jr., the dean of the University of Mississippi’s journalism school and a Mississippi Today board member, said he believes there is enough interest in the state to support the site’s public interest mission.

“We have poor education in Mississippi, but this is a way for people to learn,” Norton said. “How do you bring computers and broadband connections to as many different places as possible? That’s one of the challenges for a state like ours. At least [with Mississippi Today], the decision makers will be hearing information and can pass it along.”

Mississippi Today was in development for several years. The site’s parent, Mississippi News and Information Corporation, was incorporated in October 2014 and gained nonprofit status in March 2015. Lack had been thinking about launching the site even before that (his great grandfather Jacob Alexander was the mayor of Greenville in the late 19th century) and he wanted to use his experience as a news executive to launch a news site in his home state.

Lack was hired to run NBC News last year in the wake of Brian Williams’ suspension. (He’d previously run the news division in the 1990s.) He declined multiple interview requests, but directed me to his friend John Huey, the former Time Inc. editor-in-chief.

“[The Mississippi Today team] is committed to aggressive, responsible journalism, diversity, and all of the things that aren’t present in Mississippi without them,” Huey told me. “It’s very much a passion project for Andy.”

Most of Mississippi Today’s staff members — including Anklam and Moore — have roots in the state. The site has assigned reporters to focus on topics such as state government, education, and courts and the legal system, though it also has general assignment reporters.

“A lot of it comes down to resources,” Anklam said. “We don’t have to cover local activities, such as fires, murders, and zoning — which a lot of the local media covers well. We are able to concentrate on a more focused area of coverage that allows us to dive deeper into some of these subjects.”

Mississippi Today has already shared a number of its stories with other local news outlets, allowing them to republish its original reporting. It’s in discussions with Mississippi Public Broadcasting and another local TV station in Jackson about collaborating. And it plans to work with state universities to offer students internships.

As time goes on, Mississippi Today plans to continue to experiment and add new features. Anklam said he’d also like to try more video and mobile-focused ways of storytelling.

“That’s what’s fun about it: There aren’t any rules, really,” Anklam said. “Having worked for a big corporation, you know what the parameters are, and the mission statement comes from above. [Here] we developed the mission statement. We are modifying our approaches on a week-to-week basis.”

The six-year-old site, which spent some time in The Boston Globe’s incubator program, offers a platform through which users can group FOIA requests under one overarching project, and launch a crowdfunding campaign to help cover the requests-related reporting expenses. (We wrote about the Projects feature last fall, but it’s opened up to all users as of June 3.) About 50 projects — ranging from one looking into surveillance in Chicago to another that’s trying to release genealogical and archival data — have already been created so far, and MuckRock in total has facilitated more than 22,000 public records requests.

Half of those requests have been filed in the past year, MuckRock’s cofounder Michael Morisy told me. The site has roughly doubled its revenue (as well as audience size and requests filed) each year of its existence, Morisy said, but was concerned about maintaining independence while growing the business.

“We had a lot of conversations about what was important to us, what was the way to keep our independence. We talked with peer organizations that have gone down the nonprofit road,” Morisy said. “It kept coming back to to our long-term independence.” (A lot of MuckRock users — raise your hand if you’re one of them — already assumed MuckRock was a nonprofit, he said.)

The company has gotten some support through foundations, and generates revenue through site members who pay for filing requests and requests-related services. In addition to interested individuals, MuckRock’s user base now also includes news organizations like Gawker, the International Business Times, Vice’s Motherboard, and Vocativ. The nonprofit move won’t change how MuckRock operates, but will open it up to tax-deductible donations and the option to pursue targeted grants, though “it’s important for us not to be too grant dependent”:

For our users and readers, almost nothing about the site’s operations will change. It’s the same people, doing the same work, day in and day out.

We’ve always worked to run our filing service at break even or at a modest profit so that we can reinvest in the site’s operations, and we’ll continue to do so. We believe that the site will operate best if our ongoing financial needs are covered by those who value our work and directly benefit from our services.

“FOIA requests is a low-margin business anyway,” Morisy said. “This will free us up to build a self-sustaining organization that grows in the way we want to grow.”

Some observers argue that the media themselves are responsible for the worrisome situation they find themselves in because of their many mistakes and their failure to adapt to the new world. My diagnosis is somewhat different: The media have not hit on the right economic model because they have failed to comprehend the nature of the crisis and therefore continue to react with outdated reflexes. Most debate is focused on “the death of print,” but what matters is not the medium but the message. The most important issues of quality content and the organizational structure of the media have been neglected.

In short, the question is not whether the media should be subsidized. It is rather whether they should be granted a favorable legal and tax status in recognition of their contribution to democracy — a status comparable to that long enjoyed by many other participants in the knowledge economy. Some see the interest of billionaire investors such as Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, and John Henry as the harbinger of a new golden age: Once again, newspapers will be flush with resources and staff.

But if the media of the future must depend on wealthy investors for their financing, many dangers lie ahead. It was in part the settlement of the estate of the Italian publisher Carlo Caracciolo that plunged the newspaper Libération into the crisis in which it finds itself today. That is why it is preferable for media companies to be organized as foundations rather than joint-stock companies: In a foundation, heirs cannot dispose freely of capital they inherit. The investment is irrevocable, hence permanent.

With many news outlets now mired in crisis, it has become imperative to think of new models for the media. The one I propose is based on crowdfunding and power-sharing. I hope that it may serve as a new economic and legal template for the media of the 21st century, a template that combines aspects of both a joint-stock company and a foundation. Let us call this new entity a nonprofit media organization (NMO).

To begin, it is useful to recall some mistakes of the past, starting with the experience of newspapers that have become publicly held corporations. Going public proved to be a mistake both for the newspapers themselves and for democracy. In the first five years after the Chicago Tribune went public, profits rose at the rate of 23 percent per year while gross revenue increased at a rate of only 9 percent; this performance was achieved by slashing expenditures drastically. The drive for higher profits affected not just newspapers but radio and television outlets as well (some television stations have operating margins above 50 percent), and the imperative to produce quality local news fell by the wayside.

To put it bluntly, shares of news media companies should not be publicly traded. This is particularly true in the United States, where publicly held companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to maximize profits. This legal obligation conflicts with their moral responsibility to “serve the general welfare” (as indicated in the Statement of Principles of the American Society of News Editors). Similarly, because universities have a moral responsibility to educate and engage in research, it is hard to imagine them as publicly traded profit-maximizing corporations.

In the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany, newspaper companies have experimented with a variety of innovative formulas over many years. Many nonprofit media organizations have emerged. In Germany the largest media conglomerate, Bertelsmann — number one in Europe and one of the largest media companies in the world — is owned by the Bertelsmann Foundation. This structure has in no way impeded Bertelsmann’s growth. Bertelsmann, with 110,000 employees, occupies a significant place in the media landscape in France, in Europe, and in the United States, where it is the majority shareholder in Penguin Random House, the largest publishing house in the world.

Foundation status alone does not determine how media companies are governed. Should power be strictly proportional to shares of capital? If so, what countervailing powers can exist? In a typical joint-stock company, whoever owns the most shares also has the lion’s share of the voting rights. This is a problem, because a dominant shareholder can see to it that the company serves his or her own economic or political agenda rather than the public interest.

Let’s survey some existing models of nonprofit media organizations to gain a better idea of their advantages and limitations.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports →

“I think there was definitely a difference in the sense of direction,” said Brant Houston, chair of INN’s board of directors and the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois. Denise Malan, who was director of data services for INN and Investigative Reporters and Editors, was named interim CEO.

INN’s members — which include many of the biggest names in nonprofit journalism — and others were left wondering what dispute over priorities would lead to parting ways with the only CEO INN has known:

“What I think the board was trying to do was to dictate the size and shape of the organization moving forward in a way that was, perhaps, independent from the sustainability plan which I had developed, which was focused on building a consulting practice and delivering paid services to individual organizations based on our expertise,” Davis said.

In March, INN announced that it had changed its name from the Investigative News Network to the Institute for Nonprofit News. The decision was made during a board retreat last November, and INN’s mission statement was also revised to say that the organization’s goal is “to provide education and business support services to our nonprofit member organizations and promote the value and benefit of public service and investigative journalism.”

“We definitely want to be doing more on education and best business practices,” Houston said, “We’ve only got one thing planned for the year right now,” a daylong seminar at the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. Houston explained that INN doesn’t want to replicate the efforts of other journalism organizations and instead wants to run programs that will help nonprofits, for instance, develop business best practices and grow their audiences.

Houston also emphasized the board’s desire to see INN look at more ways the organization can utilize Impaq.me, a widget developed by INN in 2012 that allows nonprofits to raise money through social sharing, and other INN projects such as Project Largo, an open-source WordPress theme it developed that underpins many nonprofit news organization’s websites.

INN’s membership is composed of more than 100 nonprofit news organizations, and though members are required to pay dues the organization is primarily supported by foundations and philanthropic contributions.

Houston wouldn’t specify where there were particular areas of disagreement between the board or whether there were any specific initiatives that it wasn’t supportive of, only saying the board was “as unanimous as it has ever been and has a strong consensus.” After a flurry of emails among INN members trying to decode the move, INN’s board issued a statement that offered little additional clarity:

We’re thankful for Kevin’s many efforts for INN and its membership. But, as several members have pointed out, we’re restricted in terms of what we can say about his departure since it is a situation that involves a confidential personnel matter.

What we can say is that decisions of this seven-member board have been unanimous and in the best interest of INN. The board consists of three officers who helped found INN in 2009 and have assisted many of you in your start-ups. It also has two well-respected long time journalism leaders who have decades in management experience, and members who are at two of our most vibrant organizations. It is a board that is experienced and deliberative.

Davis told me board members “really have never articulated to me why they made this decision or what was concerning them following that retreat and the relaunch of the site.”

INN was founded in July 2009 as the Investigative News Network; its founding principles were outlined in the Pocantico Declaration, which called for an organization “to aid and abet, in every conceivable way, individually and collectively, the work and public reach of its member news organizations, including, to the fullest extent possible, their administrative, editorial and financial wellbeing. And, more broadly, to foster the highest quality investigative journalism, and to hold those in power accountable, at the local, national and international levels.”

Davis was hired in June 2010 as its first full-time employee. (He’d most recently been chief operating officer of The Wrap.) Since then the staff has grown to 10 people with a budget of more than $3 million. Three of the members of the current seven-person board — Houston; Charles Lewis, the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop; and Laura Frank, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network — were involved in launching INN.

Houston also wouldn’t discuss how or when the decision was made to part with Davis was made, citing the confidentiality of personnel matters. But the move seemed to surprise INN staffers, members, and others involved in the nonprofit news space:

Hands down the best boss I've ever had in my entire career. It's been an honor working for you @KLJDavis http://t.co/b3JMJ1Hxnz

— // luis (@RunGomez) April 7, 2015

.@KLJDavis: soft landing wherever you end up next. An ally and advocate for nonprofit journalism – none better.

— Steve Katz (@Steve_Katz) April 8, 2015

Folks, a major change @INN, it's been a pleasure and an honor to work with @KLJDavis. Wishing him the very best. http://t.co/e1ssFhQJ6o

— Adam Schweigert (@aschweig) April 7, 2015

This was a day.

— Kaeti (@kaeti) April 8, 2015

.@KLJDavis was a huge advocate for those of us who lead nonprofit newsrooms and me personally. hugely grateful. http://t.co/znwizlHoAO

— Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) April 7, 2015

It's been a privilege working with @KLJDavis, very sad to see him go. http://t.co/1OxMEiA0j6

— Laura Bertocci (@LEBertoc) April 7, 2015

Houston said the INN board planned to work with the organization’s staff to determine priorities as the board conducts an evaluation and hires a permanent CEO over the next several months.

Moving forward, Houston said the board wanted to ensure that INN was “focusing enough that you’re not going to stretch the staff too thin and you’re not going to stretch your resources too thin. We’ve done that, but it’s one of those times to make sure you’re not stretching people in 20 different ways when you’ve got some things that really work.”

Just gonna get up tomorrow morning and keep making nonprofit news better, more sustainable. That’s what we’re gonna do. See you there.

— Adam Schweigert (@aschweig) April 8, 2015

“I got the website I wanted, I got the money I wanted, I got the staff I wanted,” Lewis told me. “I’ve got no more excuses. I’m really excited to see how it works.”

As the San Diego nonprofit site marks its 10th anniversary today with the launch of a redesigned website and a new editorial structure, Lewis said the pieces are in place for the site to see sustained growth in the coming months. After an earlier redesign didn’t work out as well as hoped, Voice is betting on membership as the key lever to sustainability — and restructuring its work to get there.

Lewis announced the changes in a post on Voice of San Diego site last November, outlining “a new process, a new deadline system, new editorial meetings and a new approach” that might not be noticeable to readers at first, but are central to rethinking how the nonprofit does its journalism, he said.

Though some of the editorial tweaks may be subtle to casual readers, what they’ll notice right away is the new website, which features a new color scheme and replaces a version of the site that Voice of San Diego unveiled with fanfare in May 2013.

This is the first time Voice had a funded effort to complete its redesign. Last year, Voice brought in $1.68 million in revenue, a 27 percent increase from 2013. And that revenue growth allowed the site to pursue the redesign and restructuring projects, Lewis said.

In March, Knight Foundation awarded a joint $1.2 million grant to Voice and MinnPost, the Minneapolis-based nonprofit, to improve their customer management systems to better allow them to attract and retain members.

A pipeline to membership

Voice of San Diego’s new site adds new pages and features while improving on things that didn’t exactly work right on the old site. There are now fewer stories displayed on the site’s homepage, and Lewis said the homepage “is mostly a poster to get people to sign up for our morning report [newsletter] and another feature to follow better storylines.”

In its last redesign, Voice of San Diego added in a Circa-like feature that let users follow certain notifications and they could receive notifications each time they visited the site. That functionality didn’t work as well as the site would’ve liked, and in the redesign users will now be able to get a daily email summing up the coverage on the topics they’re following.

Voice of San Diego has also added a “my account” page to let members see their donation history, make new donations, and get information about upcoming events.

“At the heart of it is to get more people to engage with us with their information so we can get them into the pipeline for potential membership,” Lewis said of the redesign.

Between August 1, 2013 and the end of 2014, Voice was able to convert 799 of its morning newsletter subscribers into paid members. And 45 percent of those signed up for the email newsletter and joined the membership program did so on the same day; many of them doing so at members-only events held by the site, Mary Walter-Brown, Voice’s publisher, said in an email.

“We’re doing a pretty good job of converting new subscribers,” she said. “And [that] makes it even more important for us to continue to build a database of new readers who can be conditioned to join early on.”

Voice now has about 1,970 members, and Lewis said his goal is to end 2015 with 3,000 members.

“I want to get to the bigger numbers, the 5,000 member numbers,” he continued. “I don’t want to just say someday on that.”

He continued: “It’s just a new type of pressure that I’ve felt. Okay, I got everything I wanted. I got to hire a few new reporters and a digital manager. I got this new site. I feel like in the spotlight now to really deliver.”

One key part of delivering will be getting the technology right. Helping to manage the effort for Voice was Steve Bjorg, the cofounder of a San Diego tech startup. Bjorg has donated $10,000 to Voice, but about a year ago he decided he wanted to get more involved so he began volunteering as the site’s technical adviser, working out of Voice’s office for a few hours every other week.

Bjorg told me his goal was to help manage Voice’s digital assets while also helping to balance and help prioritize what the Voice team wanted with the new site and what the contractor building it said was possible.

“I wanted to make sure the things I cared about in technology were in a more manageable state,” Bjorg said. “They don’t have somebody on staff who is directly responsible. They are a very small organization, as you know, so I thought this could set them up for more success down the road if some of these little things, which might not seem like big items, get looked at, taken care of, and just aligned better.”

Shifts in editorial process

Beyond the revamped website and new staffers, Voice needs to deliver strong journalism to continue to attract and retain readers and members. And it feels that the new editorial processes that it’s implementing alongside the new site are key to ensuring its reporting remains fresh and relevant.

The goal of the new editorial processes is to avoid having to scramble for stories to fill the site while allowing reporters to pursue stories they’re passionate about by creating a more effective planning process to give staffers the time and resources to pursue those meaningful investigative stories.

To help implement the changes, Lewis’ title was changed to CEO/editor-in-chief in order to have more of a direct role overseeing the editorial side while Walter-Brown, formerly the site’s vice president of advancement & engagement, was promoted to COO/publisher to directly oversee the business operations.

Central to the new structure is a Wednesday meeting — called, of all things, the A1 meeting — where the site’s editors will discuss what the reporters are working on and then will plan out their next week of coverage while beginning to think about what’s on the horizon in the weeks after that. Editors will then meet with individual reporters to discuss their stories. Voice is also introducing a monthly all-staff meeting where reporters and editors can pitch stories.

This being the news business, Lewis stressed flexibility to allow Voice to deal with breaking news. But he said the site has been easing itself into its new routine for the past month or so in advance of the launch. And while the staff has still been rushing to cover stories through the transition period, Lewis said he expects things to settle down after the relaunch.

With the extended editorial cycle, Voice hopes to schedule series or stories around a certain theme to carry each week. This focus will extend beyond just the main Voice site but to other partnerships it has as well, like its podcast and a regular segment it produces for the local NBC affiliate. And managing editor Sara Libby is also overseeing the development of a new Sunday product that will wrap up the week of news in San Diego.

“At the heart of it is the goal to produce a good show every week,” Lewis said. “I keep using the word show on purpose because I want it to feel like it’s 60 Minutes, or it’s This American Life, or it’s something along the lines of us thinking every week what have we developed as far as stories, and then what’s the best way to deploy it next week.”

“When I launched this project, I used everything I had ever learned as a journalist. Everything,” MacMillan told me when we met in a Philadelphia coffee shop. “It’s just unfortunate that I hadn’t learned something about economic sustainability. I’m not even kidding. I heard everyone saying that you have to start with the business first and now I get it — I just didn’t have all the knowledge.”

The site featured a mix of reporting styles. It would track gun violence statistics, but beyond the numbers of how many people had been shot, the Gun Crisis Reporting Project also covered events like community vigils in memory of people who were killed. The site also examined the societal causes of violence while also detailing the efforts community groups, the police department, and other city leaders were making to curb gun violence in Philadelphia.

Through just the beginning of the Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab program, MacMillan realized he had not spent enough time focused on building the business side of the operation and that he misunderstood how foundations and other funders look to support nonprofit journalism endeavors like the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.

In his post announcing the cessation of daily publication, MacMillan wrote that it had become “impossible” to find funding for the project, which he had bootstrapped from its start.

“We have pursued grants large and small, and investigated underwriting, partnerships and crowdsourcing, but with little success, in spite of generous and expert grant-writing support from friends and colleagues who have volunteered their time,” he wrote.

Including MacMillan, the site had four contributors, none of whom were paid. Three interns and a fellow from South Africa also worked for the Gun Crisis reporting project at different points. (The interns and fellow were actually the only ones getting paid, as they were funded through universities.)

At the outset, MacMillan had hoped to raise $500,000 to support the project for two years. The site did ask for contributions from readers, but MacMillan said that raised less than $10,000 in what were mostly small donations. In the end, though, he said he was able to run the site over its two-and-a-half year run for less than $100,000 total.

Instead, MacMillan said, they’re interested in specifics. Foundations and other potential funders want a news organization to have a detailed business plan that shows a path to sustainability and highlights exactly how their potential support fits into that plan.

“If you want to have the seed money, you need to have a theory of change — that what you’re doing is going to meet the mission of the foundation, for example, or the philanthropist, and then they want to see a very explicit explanation description of how you’re going to pay the bills at the end of that seed period,” MacMillan said. “And I didn’t have that, because I didn’t know that.”

Many of today’s news nonprofits started during or right after the recession, as plenty of journalists who lost their jobs started new ventures. So by the time MacMillan launched the Gun Crisis Reporting Project in 2012, he felt that the market for funding for new nonprofit journalism endeavors was beginning to dry up — especially in Philadelphia as a number of local news startups have closed down in recent years.

The catalyst for starting the site was a December 2011 conference on covering youth violence organized by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. MacMillan left a full-time job at Swarthmore College to take a part-time position at Temple University, which allowed him to focus the rest of his time on the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.

But it became clear by last spring that financial resources were dwindling, and MacMillan ultimately had to make the decision to stop full-time reporting. Still, MacMillan wanted to continue his work to curb gun violence, and his participation in the Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab is an extension of that effort.

Throughout the course, MacMillan worked with Dorothy Johnson-Speight, the founder of Mothers in Charge, a Philadelphia nonprofit that stresses violence prevention and youth education. The two created Moms for Peace, what they hope will be a national effort to engage mothers by developing intervention skills to curb gun violence.

The course finished up last month, and MacMillan said he’s optimistic that they’ll be able to get funding to grow Moms for Peace using the skills obtained in the Innovation Lab as well as the connections the program helped them make.

In the meantime, MacMillan is also looking for a full-time position, and last week he launched another side project: Wash West News, a hyperlocal news site covering the Washington Square West neighborhood in Philadelphia where he lives.

No matter what his next move is though, MacMillan said he’s approaching his next endeavors by applying the lessons he learned from the Gun Crisis Reporting Project.

As he told me via email: “My thought process for this new project is driven by my recent fellowship with the Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab and understanding that nothing will last without a monetization plan from launch — but it’s not yet clear how much time I will be able to afford.”

It’s also stopping its daily reporting on gun violence because it can’t find money to support it. Jim MacMillan:

After publishing every day for more than two and a half years — illuminating the epidemic of gun violence in Philadelphia and seeking solutions — the Gun Crisis Reporting Project will cease daily reporting this Friday, November 7th…

Strategic planning researchers revealed that we have had the attention of decision makers in Philadelphia, and more than a few have communicated with us directly, sometimes publicly via social media. We presented at twice at Philadelphia City Council and officials have since funded programs we endorsed and invited experts we recommended. We have advised leading local journalists and guided visiting news organizations to focus on those working to reduce violence. We have also been invited to present at many of the region’s leading colleges and universities, as well as community events.

But funding has been impossible. We have pursued grants large and small, and investigated underwriting, partnerships and crowdsourcing, but with little success, in spite of generous and expert grant-writing support from friends and colleagues who have volunteered their time.

The democratization of distribution has not been accompanied by the democratization of support. Independent journalism seems to thrive most often when philanthropists seek journalists to fulfill their ambitions — rather than the opposite — but even the former model has been known to fail gloriously.

From what I can tell, GunCrisis.org is not a high-cost operation. Philadelphia has more than its share of wealthy, civic-minded individuals. This would be a great moment for one or more of them to step up.

“The fact we are thriving now should be a moment of solace for us,” said Charlie Kravetz, general manager of WBUR. “It’s like a car accelerating and humming down the highway and seeing a brick wall at the end of the road. Just because you’re humming along doesn’t mean the brick wall isn’t there.”

This fall, the station is starting to put together the team for BizLab, a strategy and technology incubator that will focus exclusively on finding new revenue streams to make WBUR more sustainable. The project is funded by a $250,000 grant from Knight Foundation, with matching dollars from the station. Kravetz said he hopes BizLab won’t be a long-term project — that they will find viable ideas and products to ensure future stability for the station. But Kravetz told me they’ll raise additional money to operate BizLab for three to five years. “We are healthy — we are financially sound now, as a lot of big public radio stations are,” said Kravetz. “So it’s the exact moment to take advantage.”

Recent media history is filled with healthy companies whose fortunes change as traditional business models were undercut by digital technologies.

The classic public radio fundraising drive is a good example. Kravetz said 69,000 people contributed to WBUR last year, all of whom could have still listened to the station without it. It’s a timeless strategy, one that provides stations with operating dollars and listener information, while giving members something approximating a personal touchpoint with the station. But fund drives are annoying at best, inefficient at worst, taking time away from normal programming in the name of forcing listeners to give money over the phone. Given how audiences are changing — sliding away from terrestrial radio to listening to digital or time-shifted programs — that system could quickly become obsolete, Kravetz says.

“When they listen to the stream on their phone or a podcast or other platforms our content is on, they have to have a relationship with us or we will go away,” Kravetz said.

Experimenting with something like that is hard to do on a daily basis, which is why BizLab will be separated out from the day-to-day operations. They’ll examine the station’s current revenue streams — donations, grants, sponsorships — and try to find ways to adapt and amplify those methods to changes in technology. It’s not a small task; BizLab is tasked with exploring things like behavioral economics, historical patterns around giving, and the changing ways audiences consume public radio.

On a weekly basis, WBUR has half a million listeners in the Boston area, who average four hours of listening each week. How those people reach WBUR is continuing to shift, said John Davidow, executive editor of WBUR.org. “The digital audience continues to grow and, proportionally, our listening is also going digital as well,” Davidow said. Digital listening is coming through mobile more than desktop; that includes people coming to the station’s mobile site and the WBUR app, but also listening to shows cut up as podcasts in iTunes, Stitcher, and other apps. The show On Point, for example, has the largest podcast audience of any program at the station, Davidow said.

While public radio listenership may be going online, audience research shows the online audience hasn’t grown much outside core NPR fans. Untethering shows from the mothership through podcasts and other third-party platforms has the benefit of reaching new audiences, but it also creates an extra layer that distances stations from potential members. In the same way the web has flattened access to news from around the world, geography is no longer the key factor in whether you can listen to a public radio show. This creates a problem in how listeners connect (and, potentially, support) public radio. The urgency of a pledge drive loses meaning in a world of time-shifted podcasts, and online giving becomes difficult without simpler solutions for digital payment.

One of the biggest examples comes from NPR itself with the new NPR One app, which creates personalized stream of NPR shows ready at a moment’s notice on your phone. While NPR One creates a direct pipeline to shows like All Things Considered and Morning Edition, it also has the potential to further the divide between local stations and the NPR mothership. To try to alleviate that, NPR built in some localization features — users set their local station, meaning Boston listeners will see WBUR (or WGBH) branding and hear local news updates. While the app offers a “How to donate” button, all it does is send an email to users with a link directing them to give to their local station.

“We’re very mindful of having that connection to our audience, but it is obviously a challenge as more and more great content is produced for online consumption with no need for a radio antenna,” said Davidow.

Getting public radio to examine how it makes money and think about audience relationships is not an easy thing, Kravetz said. Public media, not unlike for-profit media, became very comfortable with a business model that produced a consistent revenue stream to fund its work. But nonprofit journalism has to start thinking more like a business and be open to new methods of reinventing the franchise, Kravetz said. Large grants and gifts, whether from foundations or philanthropists, shouldn’t be assumed or counted on to cover basic operating costs, he said.

“Everybody needs to understand that the foundational philanthropy — that supports great organizations that enrich our lives — should not always be given because those gifts answer the question of whether you are going to survive or not,” Kravetz said. “They should be about whether you are going to thrive.”

If Malin Burnham has his way, San Diego would have a new model for how journalism is done here. Burnham, a longtime San Diego philanthropist, and a group of supporters is interested in creating a nonprofit that would own the U-T San Diego newspaper (formerly known as the Union-Tribune). The paper would continue to run as a for-profit enterprise. He first confirmed his interest in the paper to the San Diego Reader over the weekend. If he’s successful, the U-T would have its fourth owner since 2009.

I spoke with Burnham Monday afternoon. He insisted any deal is far from guaranteed, and the next step is getting approval from the Internal Revenue Service for his plan. He said U-T’s current owner, developer Doug Manchester, has encouraged him to do that.

“We don’t have a handshake or an agreement,” Burnham said. “We feel we can go back and get an agreement.”

Manchester told Voice of San Diego in an email that a lot of the discussions were premature. “Actually no comment as we have zero deal at this time!” Manchester wrote. “I have always admired and respected all that Malin has done for our community and continues to do. If Malin gets the necessary approvals then we will talk but we are a long way from any type of transaction if any will ever materialize.”

Manchester said that he respected and appreciated Burnham’s core philosophy, which Manchester described as “community before self.”

How would this work?

Burnham envisions the paper as a blend between a traditional nonprofit and a traditional newspaper. The paper would solicit donations, but also accept advertising and subscriptions. He got most excited talking about how the paper’s profit would be distributed.

“Instead of it going to the owner for the investment, we will, in effect, reinvest it into the community,” Burnham said.

He said that nonprofit civic organizations, such as the San Diego Foundation’s Center for Civic Engagement (which Burnham helped bankroll — it also bears his name) and arts groups and others could receive grants for projects. So could biotech and medical nonprofits. “The investments could not just benefit San Diego, but the whole world,” he said.

He said the paper was much more financially sound today than it was in the last days of the Copley family’s ownership in 2009.

Burnham was less specific about how the journalism would work. He said he recognizes that print is declining while online news consumption is growing. Over time, the paper could reflect that by cutting its size and the days of the week it’s published. He says he’s bullish on the news business, though. “We think that the distribution of news will continue to be a worthy enterprise,” he said.

He also emphasized the journalism aspect was a work in progress. “We’re not experts in journalism,” he said.

Burnham also confirmed that any deal wouldn’t involve the paper’s Mission Valley real estate, which has long been considered the most valuable part of the operation. He said the paper would be tenants in the building, not owners.

What about the editorial page?

The biggest stamp Manchester has put on the paper is his aggressive editorial stances for conservative political causes and building a new Chargers stadium. Expect that to change under Burnham’s group.

He said there’d be a firewall between the nonprofit and the editorial board — something that would likely be required under IRS rules, anyway. But he said he also would expect the board to be nonpartisan and less in your face.

He expected the board would continue to endorse candidates and political initiatives but decide on a case-by-case basis, not from a particular partisan perspective. He said that the board would make decisions based on “the best interests of San Diego.” I pushed him on who would decide what the best interests of San Diego were. But Burnham kept repeating that line.

“Hopefully that editorial board would be a cross-section of the community,” he said.

What’s the timeline?

Burnham said he expected IRS approval for the venture would take three months. Nothing could happen until his group had that in hand. After that, the timeline would depend on striking a deal with Manchester.

“It all depends if Mr. Manchester is willing to sell us the paper,” Burnham said. “He has encouraged us to seek the IRS opinion. We know we’re running the risk that he might sell it to someone else in the meantime.”

Are there other places like this?

This model for journalism does exist other places, most notably along Florida’s west coast. The Tampa Bay Times is a for-profit newspaper owned by a nonprofit. It has had a reputation as one of the best newspapers in the country for decades. But recently, it’s fallen on serious financial difficulties.

Burnham said his plan isn’t modeled after the Times or any other organization. He told me he read an article about the Times’ financial distress Monday morning.

“I don’t know anything about their situation other than that it’s a newspaper owned by a nonprofit institution,” he said. “Their financial status, their business climate could be very different than ours here.”

What don’t we know

A lot.

Burnham wouldn’t disclose the names of his partners pursuing the venture. Nor would he say whether he’s talked with Manchester about a purchase price. He said all those discussions were premature. Burnham did say that community members he’s discussed the plan with have been universally supportive of the idea.

Who is this guy?

Picture in your mind the stereotype of a longtime civic leader and philanthropist from San Diego. If you guessed an older white man, who worked as a developer, was a prominent sailor, and is a coastal Republican, congratulations, you just described Malin Burnham.

Now 86 years old, Burnham won an international yacht racing competition when he was 17 and has continued sailing since. He’s chaired nine major nonprofits and cofounded 14 organizations. He’s heavily involved with the San Diego Foundation, the region’s major universities and also the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, which he endowed. He also helped bring the America’s Cup to San Diego in the late 1980s and co-owned the Padres in the 1990s.

Burnham is hardly a shrinking violet politically, either. He’s given lots of money to political causes over the years. Most recently, he donated big to Nathan Fletcher’s mayoral campaigns, an unsuccessful city tax increase ballot measure in 2010, and the successful pension reform ballot measure in 2012.

He recently criticized the local right-wing Lincoln Club as “The Lynching Club,” a play off the club’s chairman Bill Lynch, and knocked the group for its aggressive attacks on Fletcher during the mayoral campaign. In the previous mayoral campaign, Burnham said he called district attorney Bonnie Dumanis to tell her to drop out of the race so Fletcher would have a shot at advancing. (Dumanis denies this happened.) Burnham also was behind a failed attempt to put a 500-foot statue of wings on the Navy pier.

Burnham also has, without question, the best head of hair in San Diego.

The largest newspaper company in the United States is revising its job titles, bringing in some that would have seemed foreign to newsrooms not all that long ago — including content coach, community content editor, and engagement editor. Gannett is making these changes as part of a broader initiative to create “newsrooms of the future.” So what do those heading up newer digital-only news sites think about them?

Rob Wijnberg, editor of the Dutch crowdfunded De Correspondent (“The newsonomics of European crowds, funding new news”), sees real value in job titles — but wants his staff of correspondents to pick them themselves:

When I started The Correspondent, I consciously chose not to introduce traditional titles.  Instead, I let every correspondent come up with the job title that matched their personality and journalistic mission the most. Now we have job titles that seemed peculiar at first, but really fit the journalist very well, like Correspondent [for] Progress (he writes about how the world gets better every day); a Correspondent [for] Privacy and Surveillance; we even have a Correspondent [for] Peculiar People. Those titles are very important because it reinforces the mission a correspondent sets for him or herself.

Tried-and-true titles have their place in Amsterdam as well, with another twist:

We do have some traditional titles like editor-in-chief [Wijnberg] and publisher [Ernst Jan], but only because the outside world has to know who is in charge of what. Internally, those titles are less important.  The title “editor-in-chief” is even applied to all editors, because I say to them that they are editor-in-chief of their own blog (which reinforces the responsibility for their publications: they don’t write for the platform, they write for their own audience, which is very different).

This unconventional thinking about titles derived from Wijnberg’s stint at the morning daily NRC Next. There, he saw how conventional titles placed unnecessary limits on reporting:

One of the first things I did when I became editor-in-chief for NRC Next was to get rid of the newsroom titles like “foreign desk,” “economy desk,” for two reasons: (1) These desk names reflect the world as it was in the ’70s and ’80s, with the cold war at its height, when countries, borders, and “national economies” mattered a lot more than they do in a globalized world. (2) People tend to use these desk names as judicial borders: “We” only write about economy because “we” are the economy desk, “we” don’t write about that, because that’s in a foreign country, etc. In that way, it stimulates tunnel vision. I wanted non-economy journalists writing about economy, and foreign correspondents writing about Holland as well.

At two-year-old startup Quartz, reporters’ titles look fairly traditional (as do BuzzFeed’s). The beats correspond somewhat with the site’s “obsessions” identity; that’s similar to De Correspondent’s notion of news people following passions. Interestingly, it is editors’ titles that have been more flexible.

Says Gideon Lichfield, an Economist hand who helped shape Quartz:

I was global news editor until recently and that meant editor of most everything that wasn’t op-ed. Now I’m just called senior editor, but my job includes being features editor, overseer of the Daily Brief, and house style guardian. The new global news editor, Heather Landy, has a somewhat narrower job than I did because our staff has grown. Zach Seward is senior editor and creative director, and that means part product development for the site, part head of the “Things” team (interactives and data journalism), and various other things.

I’d say our titles have served more as placeholders than as descriptors. Each role, especially the more senior ones, has had to be pretty flexible to suit changing needs. That’s the nature of a small and growing outfit as much as it is the nature of a digital one. I’d say we pay more attention to the things that need to be done and figuring out who should “own” them, rather than trying to define roles. But I would assume any startup is like that.

Finally, we can look to another veteran of the traditional press, former Philadelphia Inquirer editor Robert Rosenthal, who has pioneered a groundbreaking new model with the muscular Center for Investigative Reporting. Rosenthal sees the same thing that Gannett execs see: the need to create new jobs that meet the demands of the digital world.

Nearly five years ago we came up the job of distribution editor and engagement specialists. That role has morphed for us into…one job because of our strategy. We not only distribute the content, we engage with the publisher, their audience and our audience. It’s not something I would have thought about very much when I was the editor of The Inquirer…The digital content creators are again clear titles that reflect their skills. I can remember thinking we needed new titles as we added staff and were creating jobs that did not exist in the traditional newspaper newsrooms I had spent my career in.

Coming up with the titles is, in a sense, the easy part. From his experience, Rosenthal precisely lays out the challenge that Gannett, Advance, and all new re-shapers of newsrooms face.

The first step is thinking about what you need and then creating the new jobs. Then, having the vision, commitment and strategy to make sure they succeed and that everyone in the newsroom understands what they do and their value to them. And, of course, that they have the skills to deliver.