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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit news organizations that met for the first time this summer, is getting closer to launch: They’ve raised more than $500,000, one of the group’s leaders said today.
We first wrote about INN after their meeting in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., where the leaders of more than 20 nonprofits discussed [...]

You might expect the fundraising consultant just hired by ProPublica to be optimistic, if not ebullient, about prospects for a tech-savvy, grassroots campaign to help sustain the nonprofit financially for the long haul. But Madeline Stanionis, CEO of Watershed Co., pronounces herself “skeptical.” “I’ve never drunk the Kool-Aid,” Stanionis told me in a phone interview [...]

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 [...]

Not long after I landed my first reporting job at the Raleigh News & Observer in 1988, the publisher and primary owner, Frank Daniels Jr., walked into the newsroom one day, handed the cop reporter a speeding ticket he had just received on Interstate 40, and told the reporter to write about it for the [...]

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 [...]

Talking with journalists involved in nonprofit startups, I’ve noticed a dynamic that can be best described as a love-hate relationship with money: Many love the idea of being handed a check, but they hate the idea that it might appear to compromise their work in some way.
To these conflicted souls, I offer the example of [...]

Spot.Us, the non-profit experiment in journalism funded by readers, plans to expand beyond San Francisco by the end of summer, founder David Cohn tells me in the interview above. Seattle and Los Angeles are the most likely candidates for the site’s next iteration, and in the longer term, Spot.Us is looking to the east coast [...]

Readers may never pay for news online, but perhaps they’ll micro-sponsor it.
MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has found modest success asking readers to “micro-sponsor” the site’s most popular blog with donation’s of $10 and $25 a pop. Since the appeal began a week ago, 127 people have donated a total of $2,575, which [...]