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 [...]

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 [...]

“Ten years ago,” says Mark Katches, editorial director of California Watch, “there were 85 reporters covering the California state house; today there are fewer than 25.”
Katches sees California Watch, which officially launched yesterday after a soft launch period and months of preparation, as stepping into a “big void in doing investigative work in California.” Katches [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[UPDATE, 3:35 p.m.: As this post went up, tr.im announced that it's back in business. But the thoughts below still apply.]
I had the very-2009 experience on Sunday night of losing my URL shortener to a lack of business model. Tr.im, the Nambu Network’s intuitively named and competitively concise truncator of web addresses, announced that it [...]

As the web has sliced the general audience into niches, publishers have responded with narrower, deeper content: neighborhoods instead of cities, products instead of industries, subcultures instead of monocultures.
But when audiences get narrower, advertisers get smaller — and sadly, when your advertisers are putting up less than $5,000 or so per ad buy, a professional [...]

An unprecedented meeting of nonprofit news outlets at the Rockefeller family’s estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., last week may lead to a nationwide network for investigative journalism. But establishing that network may require navigating tensions between established groups seeking to expand their reach and a new crop of local outfits still uncertain about their long-term prospects. 
Leading [...]

MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has rolled out a new form of advertising that looks a little bit like print classifieds, a lot like Twitter, and nothing like traditional marketing on the Internet. They’re calling the service Real-Time Ads, and it’s live in the left column of the front page right now.
The service [...]

In 2007, I wrote about a sport known as Internet hunting that had been prohibited in 33 states with a national ban pending before Congress. All that, despite the fact that no one actually hunts animals over the Internet. “It’s pretty easy to outlaw something that doesn’t exist,” said a lobbyist for the NRA, which [...]

[As we mentioned earlier, the next issue of Nieman Reports is almost ready to be unveiled. On Monday, we gave you a sneak peak at one of its articles, by St. Louis Beacon editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel.
We've got one more story to share before the rest of the issue goes online at Nieman Reports' web [...]

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 [...]

I was down in Florida last week to talk about blogging at the Poynter Institute. And any tourist map will tell you that one of St. Pete’s great attractions is the chance to talk shop with Rick Edmonds — author of the Biz Blog, former publisher in the St. Petersburg Times organization, and one of [...]