Last week, Jim Barnett raised a question about nonprofit journalism: What makes it legit? How do we know if a nonprofit news outlet shares the ideals and culture of traditional journalism, and how can we make sure we don’t get fooled by advocacy groups disguised as objective journalists?
It’s a difficult question — the Internet makes [...]

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 [...]

Anne Galloway didn’t know anything about nonprofits or websites when she was laid off from Vermont’s Times Argus last January. She once believed the web was more distracting than resourceful. But a layoff has a funny way of upending your perspective, and now Galloway sits at the helm of her own nonprofit news site.
Galloway launched [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[The publishing power of the Internet has opened up new possibilities for NGOs seeking to spread their messages. But is this new access changing the kinds of messages NGOs create, or is it reinforcing old paradigms? Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths, University of London, examines how the online landscape has changed NGO communications. This is the [...]

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 [...]