Seeking Sustainability: Presentation on revenue generation from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

This spring, the Knight Foundation hosted a roundtable discussion exploring a crucial issue in journalism: the sustainability of nonprofit news organizations. This week, we’re passing along some videos of the conversations that resulted (and, as always, we’d love to continue the discussion in the comments section). We posted Part 1 of the series, a talk focused on business-model viability over time, yesterday. And in today’s pair of videos, John Thornton, chairman of the excitement-inducing Texas Tribune, leads a discussion about a topic near and dear to the hearts of even, yes, nonprofit news outlets: revenue generation.

“It is nowhere in the mid-life venture capital playbook to start a nonprofit news organization,” Thornton noted; “and so none of us would be doing this if the central mission weren’t about public service.”

Thornton’s introduction is above; below is a discussion that it sparked among the nonprofit all-stars Knight brought together for the occasion — among them The Bay Citizen‘s Lisa Frazier, the Chicago News Cooperative‘s Jim O’Shea and Peter Osnos, the Texas Tribune‘s Evan Smith, Voice of San Diego‘s Scott Lewis, The Atlantic Philanthropies‘ Jack Rosenthal, Seattle CrossCut‘s David Brewster, the New Haven Independent‘s Paul Bass, California Watch‘s Mark Katches, J-Lab‘s Jan Schaffer, and the St. Louis Beacon‘s Nicole Hollway. The group discussed finance-crucial issues like publicity, community, membership incentives, collaboration, demographic measurement, branding, corporate sponsorship, and more…not from a theoretical perspective, but from the point of view of practitioners who spend their days thinking about how to keep their organizations thriving.

The conversation, by the way, is well worth watching all the way to the end: The video closes with group members discussing some of their more outlandish — and, so, intriguing — ideas for revenue-generation.

Seeking Sustainability: Discussion of revenue generation from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.