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News from the Future of Public Media
Can Nonprofit Funding Save Journalism?
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 4, 2008 at 7:39 PM
The February/March issue of The American Journalism Review offers a great overview of a recent question that’s been floating around the journalism and funding communities: Is it time for nonprofits to step up and compensate for the failures of for-profit journalism?
The author, Carol Guensburg, profiles a number of current and emerging nonprofit projects designed to produce investigative and issue-based reporting. She notes:
Beleaguered journalists who once clung solely to the business model of paid advertising and circulation now recognize the urgency of developing new revenue sources for labor-intensive newsgathering. For some, foundations hold increasing promise as allies in meeting the public’s information needs — beyond superficial headlines and celebrity sexploits — so long as there are safeguards for editorial independence.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is working on a new nonprofit health news service. The Center for Public Integrity continues to produce “investigative journalism in the public interest,” including a striking recent report on the Bush administration’s misinformation campaign in the lead-up to war in Iraq. Other up-and-comers include the Center for Independent Media, and ProPublica, which we blogged about earlier this year. An interesting aspect of a number of these projects is the decoupling of content from outlets—great to have the reporting, but where will it live? This question may become less pressing as online tools like RSS feeds, news aggregators and tagging create new channels for buzz, but that’s small comfort to struggling news organizations desperate to cover operating expenses.
The need for high-quality news on the local level is particularly pressing, and foundations are stepping up to the plate. Guensburg reports that the Knight Foundation is convening a meeting of community foundations in a few weeks to consider media trends and gaps in news coverage. Knight has been particularly focused on fostering journalism projects in the 26 communities where the chain once owned newspapers.
The piece goes on to examine some of the pitfalls of depending on foundations: a restricted focus on particular topics, the influence of funding fads, and pressures on editorial direction. However, such funding—through fellowships for individual journalists, underwriting for investigative series, or issue-focused support—often plays a irreplaceable role in bolstering public-interest reporting. There are no easy answers in journalism these days, as any fan of The Wire can tell you. Nonprofit reporting projects offer one complex answer to the question of how journalism can continue to serve its traditional role as the fourth estate.
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