A core goal of nonprofit news organizations is to create impact. Foundations and donors expect evidence of journalism’s impact in a way that the local department store never did. Jack Shafer wrote a scathing critique of the nonprofit-as-impact driver not long ago, arguing that for-profit media is better insulated against donor whims because the audience [...]

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 [...]

This summer the Associated Press made a surprise announcement at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Baltimore. As part of a six-month pilot project, the wire service was going to begin distributing content from four top nonprofit news outlets: ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. It [...]

It’s been speculated that as newspapers’ decline leaves a void in watchdog journalism, nonprofit groups would come along to fill it at least part of it in. But not all those groups are going to share a newspaper’s approach to journalism.
Last fall, the conservative Goldwater Institute hired a former newspaper reporter to “expose government [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]
Jackie Hai traces the idea for 101 Source back to two projects she worked on while [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Looks like someone at Columbia agrees with their colleague Michael Schudson’s argument that universities should get more involved in creating original journalism.
The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media — which is attached to Columbia’s Teachers College — is announcing today the beginning of The Hechinger Report, a new foundation-supported outlet for in-depth reporting [...]

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 [...]

Last week, I attended the Transparent Text symposium at IBM’s offices in Cambridge. The conference focused on text-based data storage, analysis, and visualization — awesomely nerdy stuff, in other words.
Some of the presentations would be familiar to loyal readers of this site: Amanda Michel’s distributed reporting at ProPublica, Ethan Zuckerman’s Media Cloud and “nutritional [...]

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 [...]