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 [...]

Like a lot of people who are concerned about the future of journalism in the digital age, I’m still wondering what we’re supposed to have learned from the demise of Chi-Town Daily News last month. So I called one of my favorite editors of all time, Jacqui Banaszynski, who sits on the nonprofit’s board.
Turns out [...]

A frequently misunderstood aspect of nonprofits is the idea that fundraising is somehow a tin-cup substitute for a smart business plan. That misunderstanding gained traction in some circles a couple of weeks ago when Geoff Dougherty, editor of the Chi-Town Daily News, announced that he and his staff were leaving to start a new, for-profit [...]

Like many, I was disappointed to read Friday that the editorial team behind Chi-Town Daily News was giving up on its nonprofit business model in order to launch a new, as-yet-unnamed, for-profit news site about city news. In a blog post, editor Geoff Dougherty says the reason was that CTDN simply couldn’t raise enough cash [...]

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, [...]