Seeking Sustainability: A Nonprofit News Roundtable

Anyone curious about the future of journalism – and how news outlets can effectively inform people in the digital age, while surviving as a business – should check out a new Knight Foundation report, Seeking Sustainability: A Nonprofit News Roundtable.

The report (accompanied by videos) summarizes one of the first roundtable discussions of its kind with 12 groundbreaking nonprofit news organizations, including California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigating Reporting; The Huffington Post Investigative Fund; Chicago News Cooperative; Voice of San Diego and The Texas Tribune.

Knight Foundation sponsored the roundtable in April, which was co-hosted by The Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego and the Knight Chair in Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. In addition to the news groups detailing their experiences, several dozen funders, academics and researchers from around the country shared their perspectives.  They touched on the issues all online news startups are experimenting with: journalism and advertising models, ways to generate revenue, interacting with and building community and technology and innovation.

Lessons learned and questions explored:

• When getting an online news enterprise off the ground, participants agreed that “structure matters.” Nontraditional media groups need to be entrepreneurial, adaptive, collaborative and flexible. Diversity of revenue and approaches to creating journalistic and community value is key to sustainability.
• A group’s success at developing strong community and media partnerships seemed to be linked more to its leadership, business model and visibility than to its initial financial support.
• Most of the startups agreed on the importance of finding partners in traditional media that can publish their work and provide support (both organizational and financial). The Texas Tribune, for example, has partnered with NPR. Public media were viewed as the most natural collaborators because they share a nonprofit, community information mission.
• In terms of creating revenue streams, memberships were considered an effective way to raise money as well as to foster engagement. Incentives or benefits to membership need to be explored, such as those offered by symphonies and public media.
• News startups, which typically have very limited tech staffing and budget, seem to find most success using existing technology rather than developing their own tools. Voice of San Diego, for example, acquired an iPhone app for a small licensing fee.

While participants agreed that nonprofit news startups face serious challenges, including financial self-sufficiency, those at the roundtable have enjoyed significant success carrying out their missions. In this sphere of journalism, optimism is reigning.

Knight funded the Lex Mundi Foundation to create a web site that provides free legal support and resources to non-profit organizations.

Lex Mundi is dedicated to linking social entrepreneurs to pro bono legal services from law firms across the country and abroad.

If you are a social entrepreneur, or your organization is working on social innovation, we hope you take advantage of the Lex Mundi network and their new site.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation.

Here are eight tips and a few examples of entrepreneurial journalism projects you can launch or replicate in your community. You can also find these and more tips on twitter: #kwchat.

Tip #1: Don't be a generalist. Create highly-specialized content that you're  an expert on.

Tip #2: Content producers must syndicate across platforms, but the RIGHT platforms.

Tip #3: Try to fund your new entrepreneurial jurno venture alone. Projects have launched for less than $10k.

Tip #4: You must create a business and marketing plan, regardless of how small your new venture is.

Tip #5: Find a few people whose opinions your trust to serve as advisers as you start your new venture.

Tip #6: "If you are passionate about your idea, find some people you trust and then go talk to people you don't know."

Tip #7: Remember, if you're going to record a demo of your product, make it good. Bad demos can doom great projects.

Tip# 8: Remember, most ideas fail. A vast majority of ideas fail. But, get to that point quickly.

Patch.com is an example of an entrepreneurial model that can be run with a low budget in any community.

Spot.us is another innovative model that includes crowdfunding and most recently a new sustainability model based on advertising through surveys.

Other journo-entrepreneur efforts include projects like WindyCitizen.com and its NowSpots advertising model and Front Porch Forum among other Knight Foundation grantees in this field.

If you are a journo-entrepreneur the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Community Information Challenge and J-Lab’s New Voices are great opportunities to launch your start-up to inform and engage communities.

For grant application tips and and other resources for freelance and entrepreneur journalists visit: knightchallenge.net. And to learn about Knight funded innovations that are ready for you to use, please visit Knight Apps.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation

Gillmor’s blog will "provide media and technology coverage that looks beyond the gloom to ways we can create better, more trustworthy content,” he said. In his first entries, Gillmor has written about Apple’s defense of its newer, sterner restrictions on app content, and expressed his skepticism with Facebook’s ever-evolving privacy policies.

A former business and technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Gillmor is the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism, by the People, for the People, which focuses on the rise of citizen media and its impact. The Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, which Knight Foundation funds and Gillmor heads, strives to get young entrepreneurs to think outside the box and produce innovative, realistic and sustainable digital media.

In it, he explains the rise of investigative nonprofits and the Knight Foundation's leadership role.

Last summer, we announced our Investigative Reporting Initiative, a $15 million effort to create and grow these nonprofit projects.

As the economics of the digital age have caused cutbacks in investigative reporting in traditional media, these groups are taking on an important role.

Here's the "future of investigative journalism" article, including Knight's role.

Here's a sidebar listing Knight grantees.

--Eric Newton, Vice President of journalism program at the Knight Foundation

With the help of a two-year, $400,000 grant, NECIR will be testing the ability of a university-based investigative reporting collaborative to sustain itself long term through funds generated through a series of multimedia journalism projects, including student workshops, paid content delivery, newsroom training and client research services.

“Investigative reporting is one of democracy's most important tools for providing citizens with the information they need to hold the powerful accountable and make informed decisions,” said NECIR Director Joe Bergantino. “Our goal is to create a national model for ensuring the long-term survival of this important type of journalism.”

Read the full press release.

The study, “The News Landscape in 2014: Transformed or Diminished? Formulating a Game Plan for Survival in the Digital Age,” is co-authored by Penelope Muse Abernathy, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication Knight Chair in Digital Media Economics and Journalism, and Richard Foster, Senior Faculty Fellow with Yale University’s School of Management.

Just one chart from the work, below, calculates total shareholder return, taking into account share price and dividends. Traditional news companies, those falling lowest, are companies like Tribune or The New York Times. Conglomerates would be companies like AOL Time Warner. Niche providers are companies like McGraw Hill.

To sustain itself in the digital age, the report says, companies must 1. Shed legacy costs as quickly as possible; 2. re-create community online in an attempt to regain pricing leverage, and 3. build new online advertising revenue streams to replace the loss of traditional print categories.

Local media is the focus of the journalism conference circuit. Estimates claim $100 billion in local-ad revenue could support local news and information projects, if it could only be successfully tapped. This follows the Knight Commission for the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy recommendation for innovation: its report says journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating.

So what’s an entrepreneur to do? First, you need a business model. Looking for just such a holy grail, the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism created the New Business Models for News Project. The project researched the best practices in the business of online journalism and released four business models that can be used by anyone in any community.

The four business models were presented and discussed last Wednesday at the New Business Models for (Local) News Conference and Hypercamp at CUNY. You can download the models at newsinnovation.com.

Ideas and experiments are springing up weekly. If you are interested in learning more about new business models for news you might also want to take a loot at:

Ideas for Micropayments

Journalism Online, LLC.

Village Soup.com an internet-age business model to transform the
traditional community newspaper business.

Printcasting, a new revenue model for "people-powered magazines."

Spot.us,  a new crowd-funding model for paying for investigative reporting.

Minnpost, is a new hybrid non-profit model  that is supported by ads, memberships and foundation support. You can also look at the Voice of San Diego.

Other non-profit experiments include St. Louis Beacon and Gotham Gazette (in NY).

News 21 and the Chauncey Bailey project pioneered public-private experiments in investigative reporting.

Other university-based news models include the investigative reporting projects at Boston University, UC Berkeley, Brandeis and Northeastern.

Other nonprofits that are doing well include Pro Publica in NY,
Center for Investigative Reporting in SF, Center for Public Integrity in DC.

These are only a few of the models that individuals, organizations and universities have been using to figure out a new way to sustain journalism.

If you think none of these projects are the right digital innovations to provide quality news and information to communities, come up with one of your own, and enter the Knight News Challenge at newschallenge.org

Back in July, we told you about the collaboration being explored between the New York Times and Knight News Challenge winner Spot.us. This morning, the fruits of that collaboration appeared in the pages of the Times, where you can read Lindsay Hoshaw's reporting on a garbage patch in the Pacific the size of Texas.

In a post at the Spot.us blog, founder David Cohn explains how the partnership came to fruition:

My hat is off to the NY Times. They interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup. I spent half a day at the Times talking with various decision makers who agreed to entertain the idea further if we drafted a pitch. Once the pitch was approved all we had to do was make it live and let them know. I am still in awe of that experience. It contrasts with everything I’ve experienced with other larger media organizations and it a testament to why the NY Times is not just the paper of record – but also leading the charge into the digital future.

In the video at the top of this post, you can view Lindsay Hoshaw's thank you to her Spot.us funders.

Big news day: The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy has released its report. National coverage from the AP, Washington Post and many others.  Friday's launch featured pledges from the leaders of the Federal Communication Commission and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as the nation's chief technology officer, to use the report to advance universal broadband access, public media innovation and open government. CPB announced its committment to innovation in a partnership with Knight Foundation on National Public Radio's  Argo Project, to bring online reporting to a dozen cities. In all, Knight Foundation's new grants advancing the report amounted to more than seven million dollars, including more than a dozen in public libraries in places such as Charlotte and Tallahassee, and new nonprofit reporting projects like the Texas Tribune.

Aspen Institute is hosting a forum to discuss the commission report here. The grassroots group Free Press wants to push ahead with the recommendations.  New America Foundation is launching new media policy fellowships to track and critique responses to the report.  Interesting also that Google's new project (to spend millions on top ideas that people vote for), contain three that are totally in line with the Knight Commission's recommendations.  You can vote for news, data and open government here.