[…]Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. […]…

This brings the US closer to EU law which divides editorial from marketing communication according to who pays. Content that is disseminated and/ or paid for by a company and its agents (e.g. an advertising agency or retailer) is marketing communication not editorial. In the eyes of the FTC, bloggers paid from marketing programmes are not publishing editorial no matter how impartial or objective their content.

Focusing on who pays rather than trying to establish rules for objectivity or impartiality makes sense to me. It fits with non-profits too which as your research shows are not labelling their content editorial. It catches the race to the bottom that is content labelled editorial the purpose of which is not to inform you but to tell you what to think or what to buy.

I think we are at the botom though.

Anyway, thanks, and keep up the good work.

First, my apologies for not appending the list of 12 nonprofits. I’m attaching it here, at the bottom of of my note.

How did I pick the 12? As you guessed, it wasn’t a scientific process. I limited the list to nonprofits with a national reach (thereby excluding regionals like MinnPost, VOSD, Texas Tribune, which are great models, but different animals entirely) and then took suggestions from journalism elders, including the ones I mentioned in the piece. For example, David Westphal wrote last year about how Human Rights Watch was doing work that met or exceeded journalistic standards, so I’ve been tracking them for a while.

I thought the Monitor deserved a look precisely because of the reason you cited — we have given them a pass because of their unique history. But as it turns out, they do a pretty good job of aligning their mission and resources. The only reason they didn’t hit six of six criteria is that some of their financials are available only in print, not online. But I suspect that will change. At the same time, I think some of the other church-affiliated pubs you mention might not be so forthcoming. If you find out more, please let us know.

Lastly, I appreciate your point about judging the content. But I think that takes us right back where we started — at the Potter Stewart test. I’d love to see some kind of parsimonious, easily identifiable criterion applied to the work itself. But after nearly a year of searching, I can’t find one that is simple and also is fair and broadly applicable. So while I’m absolutely willing to be persuaded otherwise, I’m sticking with the funding and governance.

Now, here are the 12 nonprofit publishers I studied, in no particular order. My goal in studying them was to recognize best practices, not to criticize anybody for falling short on some test they didn’t know was being administered.

ProPublica
National Rifle Association
National Geographic Society
NAACP
Kaiser Family Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Council on Foreign Relations
Clean Skies Foundation
Church of Christ, Scientist
American Red Cross
American Civil Liberties Union
AARP

You mention transparency, and I’m curious of the entire field of nonprofits (12 in total) you explored. Why, for that matter, so few, if for any reason other than time? Obviously you weren’t going for any statistical relevance, and that’s not the point of such a case study approach. How did you pick those 12 in the first place, other than they “operate within the news ecosystem”?

I’m glad you skimmed more than the surface when discussing the Monitor and its relationship to the Church of Christ Scientist – that’s necessary information to fully contextualize how the Monitor operates. However, the tacit implication seems to be – and maybe I’m really over-analyzing – is that the Monitor is okay given the passage of time and their assurances of editorial independence. Thus, we give them a pass and say, “okay, you’re legit.” What about, say, the Desert News and the LDS Church? How about Freedom Magazine and the Church of Scientology? And what about the myriad outlets – print, online, broadcast – owned or otherwise connected to the Catholic church? Is there somehow less legitimacy with those? In the minds of many purist journalists, I think so, especially compared to the Monitor.

I’ll leave with what I increasingly hear regarding the “new news ecosystem” (including bloggers, nonprofit outlets, “citizen journalists” and the like): It’s time we judge the content, not the creator – or, more broadly, the church, brand or philanthropist behind the checkbook. After all, we’ve lived over the past century or so on the mantra of a wall between editorial and advertising, assuming the latter will never influence the former.