Articles by Jim Barnett

Jim Barnett writes about the nonprofit model in journalism as a volunteer for the Nieman Lab. He worked 20 years as a newspaper reporter, first at The News & Observer and the last 10 years in the Washington bureau of The Oregonian. As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in the mid-1980s, he studied under Philip Meyer, and attempted in 2005-06 to launch a nonprofit newsroom that would cover federal and state government using the principles of Meyer's seminal work, Precision Journalism. He currently works as an in-house consultant to AARP publications and as an editor at The Washington Post News Service. He also is studying nonprofit management at The George Washington University and blogs at journalismnonprofit.blogspot.com. Contact him at journalismnonprofit@gmail.com.

The news Good Housekeeping seal: What makes a nonprofit outlet legit?

By Jim Barnett /  Feb. 26  /  11 a.m.  /  14 comments

With many new news organizations launching as nonprofits and many nonprofits moving into the news business, one has to wonder: Exactly where does journalism end and something else — call it spin, opinion, or advocacy — begin? Or to phrase the question as Chuck Lewis recently did for me: If a nonprofit says it’s doing journalism, what makes it legit?

The line — if you believe there ever was one — is becoming increasingly blurred. As the traditional advertising-and-subscription model of newspapers continues to erode, other institutions — including advocacy, membership and charitable nonprofits — are leaping to fill the void. But it’s not clear that some new entrants are playing by the rules of journalism and nonprofit accountability. Or more accurately, it’s not clear that they want to.

In this uncertain environment, the question of legitimacy looms large, particularly for nonprofits. As beneficiaries of taxpayer support, nonprofits have a special duty to be absolutely transparent. If they want to call their work journalism, the material they publish must be good enough meet any test of professional standards that might reasonably be applied, from both the realms of journalism and of nonprofit management.

Trouble is, no widely accepted set of best practices or due diligence exists for journalism nonprofits. To separate journalism from what Dan Gillmor has dubbed “almost journalism,” many in the business have borrowed from Justice Potter Stewart’s standard: “I know it when I see it.” Or at least they think they do.

Keep reading »

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NPR’s Ron Schiller: “A concrete and hopeful message” can raise funds

By Jim Barnett /  Feb. 1  /  10 a.m.  /  2 comments

Ron Schiller, the new senior vice president for development at National Public Radio, doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the nation’s news media are in a state of crisis. Is the landscape changing? Absolutely. But this is no time to wallow in doom and gloom, according to Schiller. It’s an opportunity to take the case for nonprofit journalism to a broader audience of foundations and grant-making organizations with a “concrete and hopeful message” about what their philanthropy can achieve.

NPR has a long track record of success with big donors — witness Joan Kroc’s $200 million gift in 2003 — but many of its major institutional donors give because public affairs journalism already is a particular area of interest, Schiller said in an interview Thursday. But with the rapid decline of traditional, for-profit media, more nonprofits, including foundations and advocacy organizations, are having trouble getting their messages out. As a result, he said, they may be more open to the idea of NPR as a “partner in philanthropy” that can address a growing and demonstrated social need.

“There is a great opportunity to go to many, many organizations with that kind of case,” said Schiller, a former vice president at the University of Chicago who was named to his post in September. “We certainly have an opportunity to educate.”

Schiller hopes the approach will yield more gifts in the five- to nine-figure range. He concedes the approach isn’t novel; universities have been using it for decades as they take on issues such as urban education. But NPR’s new direction also would align with a broader trend in the nonprofit sector in response to the decline of traditional media. Keep reading »

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How two nonprofits saw the path to sustainability in 2009

It’s annual report time, and our friends Joel Kramer at MinnPost and John Thornton at Texas Tribune each put out their year-in-review posts this afternoon. (Thornton, who launched in November, called it his 12-week report, but whatever.) There’s a lot to consider beyond just numbers.

While each has had to focus on his own shop’s finances in a tight economy, each also has done a service in showing what a path to sustainability looks like — the hard work of building an advertising base, corporate sponsorships and grassroots support.

Just as importantly, each has explained his publication’s progress in a way that funders and readers can understand. There’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding out there, but Joel and John show how the nonprofit model is well suited to foster the kind of financial stability and support for newsrooms that we once took for granted at newspapers.

Thornton, a venture capitalist, put it this way: Read more

Jim Barnett | Jan. 25 | 3:39 p.m.

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A new convert to nonprofit journalism out west?

The start-up Bay Area News Project announced its new leadership team yesterday, as reported by the New York Times and paidContent, and it’s unfortunate that the most eye-catching bit of the news was CEO Lisa Frazier’s $400,000 salary. Yes, that’s a lot of money, and, like the news about Paul Steiger getting $570,000 to run ProPublica, it invites questions about what are appropriate salaries for a nonprofit.

But let’s set those aside for now, and let’s appreciate the news about the hiring of NewWest.net founder Jonathan Weber as editor-in-chief of BANP.

A year ago, Weber authored a thoughtful and well-argued, if withering, critique of the nonprofit model as a solution to the financial problems plaguing newspapers and journalism more generally.

Weber’s essay, entitled “The Trouble with Nonprofit Journalism,” dismisses the nonprofit model as an ill-suited to define what is newsworthy and unlikely to be sustainable. Here’s a passage: Read more

Jim Barnett | Jan. 22 | 12:01 p.m.

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The FCC’s future of media project

The Federal Communications Commission today posted its notice for public comment for its “examination of the future of media and the information needs of communities in a digital age.” It’s an ambitious undertaking, to say the least.

The notice lists 42 questions exploring topics that range from the travails of the newspaper industry to what our kids are watching when their parents aren’t around. One of the questions I liked best was No. 8:

Compared to earlier decades, are Americans more or less likely to seek and find more specialized media (i.e., that focused on a specific topic, appealing to a specific demographic group, or promoting a similar ideology or world view)? What are the positive and negative consequences of such patterns?

In my mind, this is the $64,000 question that gets at the role of mainstream media going forward. Will there be media sources that have some measure of credibility across diverse communities, like newspapers in the old days? Or more to the point, is there any role for mainstream media going forward? Read more

Jim Barnett | Jan. 21 | 2:14 p.m.

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A cautionary tale: The Fiscal Times and Washington Post

Enterprise reporting partnerships with online news organizations are in vogue at major newspapers these days, and arguably no paper has been more aggressive in pursuing them than the Washington Post. But in his ombudsman column Sunday, Andrew Alexander takes Post editors to task for a series of failures that plagued its most recent partnership, with a new organization calling itself the Fiscal Times.

The Fiscal Times is not a nonprofit, but it has a lot of the markings of one. It is backed by a wealthy philanthropist, investment banker and U.S. commerce secretary Peter G. Peterson; it is staffed by established journalists, including former Post political writer and editor Eric Pianin; and it claims to run an independent, nonpartisan, non-ideological newsroom. The main difference is that the Fiscal Times is run by a privately held company controlled by Peterson and his son Michael.

So what went wrong? Read more

Jim Barnett | Jan. 11 | 10 a.m.

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What opportunities are there in broadcast for nonprofit news?

By Jim Barnett /  Jan. 4  /  1 p.m.  /  4 comments

The AP’s Andrew Vanacore had an easily digestible story over the holidays about the problems about to befall nation’s local TV stations — and how they could spell the end of “free” TV.

Turns out, the nation’s big four TV networks are pondering ways that they can cut local affiliates out of the revenue stream by selling their signal directly to cable TV providers. Vanacore writes:

Pay-TV providers are paying the networks only for the stations the networks own. That amounts to a little less than a third of the TV audience, which means local affiliates recoup two-thirds of the fees. If a network operated purely as a cable channel and cut the affiliates out, the network could get the fees for the entire pay-TV audience.

He goes on to say: “If forced to go independent, affiliates would have to air their own programming, including local news and syndicated shows.” But I’m not so sure about the news part. Given a choice between paying the cost of producing local news and airing another segment of “Wheel of Fortune,” I don’t think there’s any doubt that they’ll do what they need to stay afloat.

The forces undermining the local broadcast model are different than those that are pummeling the newspaper advertising-and-subscription model; the relationships among networks, stations, cable companies and advertisers aren’t as easily disrupted by the Internet. But the bottom line for local civic affairs coverage is pretty much the same: The local news that broadcasters have provided as a public service — though arguably not in the same depth as newspapers — is going to get cut back even more. Call it the legacy media flu; there’s no cure except to lower expectations. Keep reading »

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Are news nonprofits doomed to reliance on big gifts? A study in fundraising — and sustainability

By Jim Barnett /  Dec. 14, 2009  /  11:30 a.m.  /  10 comments

I’ve been studying journalism nonprofits one way or another for about five years now, and I confess that in all that time, I’ve looked at their business models really as being slightly different iterations of the same species. But now, I’m not so sure.

As part of my graduate studies in nonprofit management at George Washington University, this fall I took a closer look at the finances of a dozen journalism nonprofits, keeping in mind the most pressing question for many: How can they diversify revenues and achieve some level of sustainability?

I acknowledge up front that my method was not perfect — I’ll explain at the end — but I think I’ve discovered what may be two critical distinctions within the group I studied.

First, the six nonprofits that served geographically defined communities — whether they be cities, states or regions — generally did a better job of diversifying their revenue sources than did those that attempted to speak to a national audience.

Second, among these “regionals,” there appeared to be some correlation between bigger budgets and greater diversity in revenues sources. This pattern suggested to me that there is a happy dynamic at work here — a virtuous cycle in which diversity of revenue helps create institutional heft that in turn attracts additional philanthropy in the form of major individual gifts and foundation grants. Keep reading »

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“Integrating” news and advertising

At first, I was horrified as many were at the news out of Dallas that A.H. Belo Corp. would “integrate” news and ad departments at its newspapers, including its flagship Dallas Morning News, by having some section editors at their newspapers reporting to sales managers. Would ad people control content? Yikes. I count myself among the many newsroom troops who fought wars to keep this kind of thing from happening.

But as I thought about it a little more, it occurred to me that this is really just another case of the dead-tree news business trying to catch up to what’s going on in the online world. Thanks to our new friend the algorithm, editorial and advertising content are inextricably linked in ways that were never possible with the printed page.

In this new world, online journalists might think they can publish any stories they want. But if the stories don’t have the right keywords — or, heaven forbid, if they contain words blacklisted by advertisers — they won’t sell. And if the stories don’t sell ads, the publication, however high-minded its editors, will cease to exist. There’s really not much room to escape from that reality — at least as long as the publication’s first duty is to turn a profit for its owners.

Nothing wrong with making a profit. But the close connection can preclude online publications from pursuing some topics with the same depth and vigor as did newspapers of yore — for example, homelessness, poverty, or other social ills that don’t have a natural appeal to advertisers. And if other publishers take their cue from the leadership at Belo, that might not be the case for newspapers going forward.

In my mind, this is exactly the space where the nonprofit model fills a need that grows with every cancelled newspaper subscription. In a world where algorithms supplant human judgment, it can provide a needed buffer that protects the public interest.

Jim Barnett | Dec. 4, 2009 | 2:52 p.m.

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Tell us more, Paul

A major goal of ProPublica, perhaps the nation’s highest-profile nonprofit news organization, is to create “nothing less than a new class of cultural institution in this country,” Paul Steiger, its high-profile executive editor, told the Federal Trade Commission’s conference on the future of journalism this morning.

That’s pretty lofty stuff. And it would seem to carry a lot of implications not only for how news is created, but the regard in which a news organization is held by community leaders. Does that mean it would operate like a major metropolitan opera or a symphony? Exactly how would it build that kind of image and gravitas? And what kind of fundraising would it do? How would it work with for-profit legacy media?

I left the morning session still wondering because Steiger didn’t address any of those questions with any kind of detail. Read more

Jim Barnett | Dec. 1, 2009 | 12:50 p.m.

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The FTC should give nonprofit news a closer look

You know the old saying about how we’re from the government and we’re here to help you? That’s what came to mind as I read the Federal Trade Commission’s notice for its workshop on journalism in the digital age.

The notice makes the case that “news organizations,” which it notably does not attempt to define, are suffering at the hands of aggregators and other online actors that have drained the fun and profit from news gathering. Among the solutions the FTC wants to examine are some that would seem to support nonprofits — tax treatment and greater public funding, for example.

Memo to the FTC: No thanks.

It’s not that the FTC’s proposed solution are so bad, though I don’t much like the idea of government funding non-broadcast news operations. It’s that they provide fresh fodder for misinformed critics who have come to the conclusion that nonprofits pose a threat to for-profit news sites and journalism generally.

Read more

Jim Barnett | Nov. 20, 2009 | 9 a.m.

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Defending the line between source and producer of news

[I've asked our nonprofit blogger extraordinaire Jim Barnett to respond to some of the ideas we've been exploring in our NGOs and the News series, cosponsored with Penn's Center for Global Communication Studies. Here's Jim's first take. —Josh]

Back in the 1980s, before they began full-blown advertising campaigns aimed directly at consumers, prescription drug companies used to get a lot of “earned media” time on television by shipping out video news releases, or VNRs, to local stations.

For station managers with limited budgets, VNRs were godsends. The productions were top quality, and they’d typically include interviews with doctors and other experts, as well as engaging video such as pills pouring off the assembly line. All the local anchor had to do was tape a voiceover, and — voila! — news.

VNRs were great for drug companies, too. They got direct access to consumers plus the credibility of their stories being told by local TV personalities. But did they mention the nasty (if rare) side effects or the high cost of their particular brands?

Read more

Jim Barnett | Nov. 18, 2009 | 12:10 p.m.

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California Watch’s revenue model: Charge news outlets, target donors

By Jim Barnett /  Nov. 17, 2009  /  1 p.m.  /  1 comment

ProPublica invites publishers to “Steal Our Stories.” John Thornton, founder of The Texas Tribune, asked newspapers to pay for stories, but concluded the effort was hopeless. But another new nonprofit news organization, California Watch, the Sacramento-based reporting initiative to be launched next month by the Center for Investigative Reporting, is barreling full speed into the syndication-fee model.

What makes California Watch different? Robert Rosenthal, CIR’s executive director, says California Watch has built something of a reputation even before the official launch of its website (now set for December), getting stories onto front pages across the state, and wants to leverage that position. “Our goal is not to give it away,” Rosenthal said in a telephone interview Monday.

There’s no way to know in advance whether the strategy will succeed, Rosenthal acknowledged. But that’s how it goes these days in the news business, whether nonprofit or for-profit: Every new project is so much spaghetti thrown against the wall. Whether it sticks is left to the vagaries of economics, social trends and, of course, luck.

But one thing is certain, Rosenthal says. California Watch, like so many new nonprofit news organizations, is under tremendous pressure from funders to find a model that works in the now and creates sustainability for the long haul. Keep reading »

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Chicago’s L3C newsroom

For those keeping track of such things, take note: Journalism is about to get its first low-profit, limited liability corporation company, or L3C.

The new Chicago News Cooperative, unveiled on Thursday by former Chicago Tribune managing editor Jim O’Shea, will begin life as a nonprofit, but will change over to an L3C after Jan. 1, when a new Illinois law takes effect, according to a Tribune report.

The L3C is a hybrid corporation that straddles the line between for-profit and nonprofit enterprise. Vermont last year was the first state to pass a law allowing formation of L3Cs, and Illinois this month became the most recent. Several other states are considering similar legislation, as is Congress.

The Chicago News Cooperative doesn’t appear to have investors yet. But it does have a major donor in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. And it has a paying customer in the New York Times, which is planning a beefed-up Chicago-area edition, much like the Bay Area edition it announced earlier this month. There, the Times will partner with Warren Hellman’s nonprofit Bay Area News Project.

Speculation and interest in the L3C model in journalism has run high. Read more

Jim Barnett | Oct. 26, 2009 | 9:02 a.m.

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Downie-Schudson: Who counts as a nonprofit news org?

The Len Downie/Michael Schudson report on reconstructing journalism joins the growing consensus that journalism — the kind of accountability, watchdog and investigative reporting that helps provide checks and balances in a democracy — has become a public good in the digital age. We all need it, but few are willing to pay for it in the form of a subscription.

So what to do about it? Among other things, they recommend creating a national “Fund for Local News” with fees collected by the Federal Communications Commission. I’m not so high on this idea — I’m of the school of thought that government funding can’t help but come loaded with potential for hidden political agendas and other challenges to transparency.

But they also call for clearer IRS definitions for “new or existing news organizations,” which they say will build a more robust nonprofit sector in journalism. I’m all for this. But here’s the question: What exactly is a nonprofit news organization? And who’s going to tell the NRA — the National Rifle Association or the National Restaurant Association, take your pick — that their newsletter doesn’t qualify?

This is an issue of journalistic standards, but goes quickly to the question of nonprofit governance. More and more nonprofits, both new and old, are doing journalism. Some of it is really good, and we know it when we see it. But putting a definition into the IRS code could be highly problematic.

The solution, I think, is for the broader nonprofit community to address this issue in a proactive way. Even if it can’t produce a bulletproof definition, it can identify practices and procedures that create a fairly bright line between journalism and advocacy.

At first glance, this might seem like a call to navel-gazing. But the lack of a definition is already creating problems in areas like prize eligibilty and, more importantly, in deciding who gets access to places like the Capitol and the White House. Finding a solution sooner than later will help the nonprofit sector get past questions of legitimacy and credibility and get on to doing the kind of journalism that is most endangered in the digitial age.

Jim Barnett | Oct. 19, 2009 | 3:02 p.m.

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