At Slate, Jack Shafer throws cold water on the nascent movement creating shoe-leather media outlets set up as nonprofits and funded by foundations and other donors.
Independent, nonprofit local news sites are operating in San Diego, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and St. Louis, and the ProPublica organization (funded in large part by Herb and Marion Sandler, whom you may recognize as the money behind the Center for Responsible Lending and other lefty causes) finances investigative reporting and provides its work to metro dailies nationwide.
Shafer doesn’t disparage the trend altogether, noting that nonprofits have underwritten plenty of sound journalism over the years, including the defunct libertarian publication Inquiry (where Shafer once worked and P.J. O’Rourke, among others, first regularly reached a national audience), along with NPR, National Review, Mother Jones, etc.
Almost every overtly ideological publication (including JLF’s own Carolina Journal) is not a commercial venture. They get support from donors because they’re not targeting a general audience, such as a full-service newspaper or magazines, so they may have trouble generating enough advertising to keep the doors open.
Here’s Shafer’s problem:
In the current arrangement, we’re substituting one flawed business
model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally.
Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately. No matter
how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining
itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions.[snip]
Nonprofit outlets almost always measure their success in terms of
influence, not audience, because their customers are the donors who’ve
donated cash to influence politics, promote justice, or otherwise build
a better world.
Donors do not expect The Nation to extol the virtues of capitalism and free markets, for instance. And if we started advocating a dramatic expansion of eminent domain or a raft of new taxpayer incentives to businesses, our support might dry up, too.
All of which suggests that the nonprofit model may be challenged to produce down-the-middle, straight news (whether it’s really possible to expunge every agenda from journalism is another discussion), but it could be well-suited for ideological reporting and analysis.
One of the major challenges facing journalism is how mainstream media will survive the economic meltdown, which destroyed a revenue base that the advent of online advertising had threatened. Like Shafer, I’m not at all convinced that nonprofit, online sites that try to play it down the middle will work in many markets. Instead, we may see a return of the partisan press, which was the backbone of American journalism from the Founding until the dawn of the 20th century.
JLF President John Hood wrote about the demise of newspapers and the prospects for nonprofit journalism here.
