Guest AuthorUntil the wheels fell off the newspaper business, the Fourth Estate did a pretty good job of meeting its societal obligation: casting a skeptical, disinterested eye on the workings of government.
The formula was simple. Attract readers with a well-edited, well-written package of news, entertainment and features at a reasonable price and let advertisers pitch their wares to those readers — for a price.
In the best of times, that price was high and so were newspaper profits. Even in the not-so-good times, profits kept flowing. Forward-looking newspaper publishers allocated a decent chunk of those profits to the newsroom, which generally did its constitutionally guaranteed job.
Things began to change with the arrival of TV, a brand new competitor for reader attention and advertiser dollars.
Family owned newspapers gave way to publicly owned media companies that owed a primary allegiance to stockholders. Those solid packages of news and information got softer and thinner. Pressure on newsrooms to cut budgets rose. Fewer watchdogs were out there casting that skeptical eye.
Then along came the Internet, a curiosity one day, a ubiquitous presence the next. The “business model” is broken, some say irreparably. Newspapers are tap dancing as fast as they can, but the long-term prospects are dim for most of them.
So comes now what many analysts are calling the “last best hope” to keep alive journalism and the role it plays in a democracy: nonprofit news sites.
Everyone understands the nonprofit part of that answer. They just haven’t settled on who pays — and how.
One source is the foundations that owe their existence to fortunes generated by the newspaper industry – Knight, McCormick, Gannett, for example. But rich as they are, the sum of their endowments does not equal America’s collective newsroom budgets in happier times. And those foundations, by the way, spend much of their money on non-journalistic efforts – the arts, museums, education.
That leaves other foundations – big and small – and individual philanthropy. Save for one high-profile enterprise, nonprofit news sites are barely recognized by those potential funders.
The exception is Pro Publica, a lushly funded investigative news organization that focuses on national issues. Billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and a consortium of major foundations – Knight, Ford, Carnegie, MacArthur – pay for more than 30 top-flight journalists.
Pro Publica has shown what a well-financed nonprofit effort can do. But it plays on a field that – relatively speaking – is well covered. Washington and New York have more journalists per square foot than any place on earth.
Though they are somewhat diminished, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Associated Press still have robust investigative staffs who can get along nicely without Pro Publica’s help.
The real need for investigative oversight is in America’s towns and cities, the Miamis and Fort Lauderdales and hundreds of others whose newspapers have been deeply compromised and whose investigative staffs have been decimated. If those places have mini Pro Publica’s at all, they struggle to survive.
I sit on the board of Broward Bulldog, a nonprofit whose singular purpose is to examine the workings of local government. In Vermont I helped form the Vermont Journalism Trust, a nonprofit with a similar charter. From that vantage point, I can see the magnitude of the problem.
Both organizations get by on the strength of their editors and a small group of dedicated freelancers. If properly financed they could truly fill the gaps left by their traditionally structured for-profit cohorts. But that will require a mindset shift among those who are in a position to back such enterprises. And that’s no easy task — for any of us.
For more than 200 years, advertising and subscription revenue subsidized our journalistic efforts. We’re slowly coming to grips with the new reality that the traditional model is fading.
So now we — the philanthropists, the foundations, the ordinary citizens — must decide how much we value the work that journalists do and we must decide that to keep it alive we must support it as we do art, music, culture, disease prevention and programs that grapple with social ills.
It is, after all, our last best hope.
