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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Texas Tribune lifts off this morning in Austin — there’s an election today — offering not only a slew of innovative features but also a unique content-sharing plan, by which the state’s legacy media can freely publish any content generated by the Tribune and dip into its multi-faceted information databases.
Tribune CEO and editor Evan [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Journalism nonprofits have been operating in the shadows of major metro dailies since the dawn of the newspaper age. In 1846, a handful of New York newspapers created a cooperative to pay for dispatches from the front lines of the Mexican-American War. That effort became the Associated Press, and it remains a nonprofit.
But what [...]

Texas Tribune, the just-announced, well-funded nonprofit that plans to cover Texas politics and more starting in the fall, is wasting no time building up a team and incorporating institutional memory by acquiring Texas Weekly and naming its owner and editor,  Ross Ramsey,  managing editor of the Tribune. Among other things, the acquisition buys Texas Tribune [...]

Keep an eye on Austin, Texas.
With a bankroll that includes $1 million of his own cash and contributions from a network of friends and associates, Texas venture capitalist John Thornton is launching a non-profit online journalism venture, Texas Tribune. Fund raising continues, with the goal of securing two to three years of “runway.”
In the last [...]