Future of Nonprofit Journalism Friday, September 20, 2013 Pew Research Center Part 1: Economics of Nonprofit News 1 PART I: Future Prospects for Financial Sustainability Alan Murray, Pew Research Center: It was clear from the research that we did that while most of the nonprofit news organizations we were talking to -- or many of them at least -- were starting with foundation funding, the expectation was that they would diversify their revenue streams and eventually be able to wean off of that funding. What both reports seem to suggest is that the glass is either half empty or half full, however you choose to view it. I will point out that I think our survey showed that this is by nature a very optimistic bunch, so you all seem to view it as half full. I think [about] 80% of the people we surveyed were convinced that they would still be solvent in five years from now, which I’m not sure we would’ve said that at The Wall Street Journal a few years ago. [Laughter] So we might not have been correct, but Dick Tofel, let me start with you because you’re the gorilla in the room. Forty-four employees, that’s like Napoleon’s army in this crowd and get you to address what is the elephant in the room. When the Sandlers go away, is there life? Are you getting there? Are you getting where you need to get or do you have the diversified revenue to continue? Dick Tofel, ProPublica: For us, I think the answer is yes. The Sandlers started out at probably close to 95% of the funding. Last year we had them down to 38% of the funding and this year I hope we’ll get under 30%. So that is very important diversification. I do think, as we talk about foundations as we go through this, I would distinguish - because I think it’s a fundamentally important distinction between family foundations, which I think are analytically indistinguishable from wealthy individuals who give away their money through another vehicle, and institutional foundations, which is to say people whose job it is as the Knight Foundation and many others represented in the room, to give away
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Future of Nonprofit Journalism Friday, September 20, 2013 Pew Research Center Part 1: Economics of Nonprofit News
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PART I: Future Prospects for Financial Sustainability
Alan Murray, Pew Research Center:
It was clear from the research that we did that while most of the nonprofit
news organizations we were talking to -- or many of them at least -- were
starting with foundation funding, the expectation was that they would
diversify their revenue streams and eventually be able to wean off of that
funding. What both reports seem to suggest is that the glass is either half
empty or half full, however you choose to view it. I will point out that I think
our survey showed that this is by nature a very optimistic bunch, so you all
seem to view it as half full. I think [about] 80% of the people we surveyed
were convinced that they would still be solvent in five years from now, which
I’m not sure we would’ve said that at The Wall Street Journal a few years ago.
[Laughter] So we might not have been correct, but Dick Tofel, let me start
with you because you’re the gorilla in the room. Forty-four employees, that’s
like Napoleon’s army in this crowd and get you to address what is the
elephant in the room. When the Sandlers go away, is there life? Are you
getting there? Are you getting where you need to get or do you have the
diversified revenue to continue?
Dick Tofel, ProPublica:
For us, I think the answer is yes. The Sandlers started out at probably close to
95% of the funding. Last year we had them down to 38% of the funding and
this year I hope we’ll get under 30%. So that is very important diversification.
I do think, as we talk about foundations as we go through this, I would
distinguish - because I think it’s a fundamentally important distinction
between family foundations, which I think are analytically indistinguishable
from wealthy individuals who give away their money through another vehicle,
and institutional foundations, which is to say people whose job it is as the
Knight Foundation and many others represented in the room, to give away
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money that was originally somebody else’s. Those lead you to very different
places.
Murray: In what sense?
Tofel: Well, the behavior of an
institutional foundation
[unintelligible] - and I used
to work in one - are quick to
remind you they cannot fund
you for 20 years in a row.
They could a little bit, but they probably shouldn’t and it’s not their job to
send a general operating support check to the same place for 20 years in a row.
If they were going to do that, why would they need the people to run the
place? The idea is that they should be a little bit more of the cutting edge.
They should be a little bit more venture capital. High net worth individuals, or
whatever euphemism you want to use - people often support the same cause
for a long, long time. Last point, diversification of revenues I would think of
and again, analytically in two different ways. One is how much is one going to
diversify away from philanthropy all together and how much is one going to
diversify within philanthropy to arrange a different source?
Murray: Good. We should definitely come back to that, but let me go to John Thornton
because Dick Tofel’s comments made me wonder if you’re prepared to
support the Texas Tribune forever or you’re trying to create a sustainable
model so it doesn’t have to depend on your contributions.
John Thornton, Texas Tribune, Austin Ventures:
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When Captain Sullenberger flew the
jet into the Hudson, there was a line
that came after in the telling of the
story and at some point he said to his
co-pilot, “My airplane,” and when I
put my second million dollars in I said,
“Evan, your airplane. So you’re it.” So
the answer is, “I’m done,” but that’s, I
think, great news for the Tribune - in the sense that that has been the ideal all
along, is that we would, over time, diversify to the point that major
philanthropy, which we define as any gift over $5,000, would be sort of gravy
and would be used for new initiatives rather than to keep the lights on. We’re
not there. We’re still about a third reliant on major philanthropy.
Murray: So you’re distinguishing major philanthropy from member small donors…
Thornton: $5,000 and up. The accounts don’t let us treat it that way but we think
anything $5,000 and up we wish we could not run that through our income
statement. We think of that as equity investment, and so we’d like to just not
think about that as anything but investment in the business. We don’t think
about it as sustainable revenue.
Murray: You’re comfortable with that, Emily? You’re going to get there?
Emily Ramshaw, Texas Tribune:
I think the goal for us obviously is to move more toward earned revenue and
it’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning. I think from an editorial
standpoint - talking about foundations for a second, our goal is obviously to
wean ourselves as much as we can off of major philanthropy and off of
foundation money because it’s - well to put it bluntly, there are strings
attached often. When you think about foundation dollars, the foundation
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money that we get generally comes with some kind of editorial responsibility
and that’s either a responsibly for a deliverable, that’s a responsibility to build
a particular data interactive, it’s a responsibility to write X number of stories
on a particular subject policy vertical. So I think generally speaking, the goal
for us is to move as much toward earned revenue as humanly possible because
there are no strings attached.
Murray: That makes you sound like the bad guy salesman. You attach strings to your
grants? [Laughter]
Elspeth Revere, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation:
Sometimes. [Laughter] Generally, we don’t actually. Not with our journalism
grants. Generally, as much as possible, we make them general operating
support grants. Of course, we do require reports.
Murray: You want out at some point?
Revere: Inevitably we reach a point where we have to move on but we don’t go into -
in our media work, we actually don’t think about this as having a time limit.
There are areas of our work where we do. This is not one. Will we go 20 years
with a grant? We have gone almost that long with some organizations. There
are some places we’ve been supporting for 20 - 25 years. POV [PBS
documentaries] comes to mind as a place we’ve supported for I think 25 years.
Murray: Dan, you? Will you do 20 - 25 years?
Dan Green, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
It’s possible. Particularly because with certain foundations like ours that have
specific objectives that are well beyond journalism but are about informing,
engaging even much more for knowledge building on certain issues.
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Murray: It sort of then starts to sounds like the strings that Emily was talking about.
[Laughter]
D. Green: Yes, there are strings. So the strings are which is
why funding organizations that actually embrace
the notion that they’re responsible for informing
and engaging certain audiences on certain issues,
those are things where if that’s the best alternative
for a certain foundation with certain goals, you’ll
keep doing it.
Murray: All right. Joel, how many employees do you have
now?
Joel Kramer, MinnPost:
I always find that a hard question because we have so many different types of
part time contract/freelance, but I’d say it’s in the range of 20 - 22 full time
equivalents.
Murray: Yes, and are you getting towards sustainable business model?
Kramer: We’re getting towards it. We’re not fully there for a couple of reasons. One,
my wife and I work and don’t take a salary and eventually that will have to be
replaced by somebody who does. Secondly, we haven’t built the kind of
reserves that I would call - what’s required for a stable organization. I do want
to go back to something very interesting I think that between what Dick said
and what John said, which relates to this definition of what is sustainable. If
you used the model that John used, that any gifts over $5,000 are not part of
your operations, then you are really trying to achieve a kind of sustainability
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that the vast majority of non-traffic cultural institutions for example in the
United States - I don’t know if they aspire to it but none of them [crosstalk].
The orchestras, public radio, the museums. They all get large numbers of
$5,000 annual gifts as part of their operations. So I’m not saying that’s not a
desirable goal…
Murray: But you think it’s not realistic?
Kramer: No. It may not be unrealistic for the Texas Tribune…
[Male]: Aspirational.
Kramer: What I’m saying is that the definitions matter because that is a kind of
sustainability that almost resembles being in a for- profit, whereas what Dick
was talking about, diversification within philanthropy, we get half our
donations from people who give $1,000 or more, but we get half from smaller
gifts. Well, is that philanthropy? Some people call it philanthropy, some
people call it membership, but we’re not really giving a lot back. I think of it
as just smaller version of philanthropy, smaller donors. So I think the question
of what kind of sustainability you’re after matters. What MinnPost is after and
aspires to and is making progress on, but is not there is to not be dependent on
foundations for more than say, 10% or 15% of our budget but within the rest,
we are agnostic as to whether we make the money from “true earned income”
by nonprofit standards like advertising versus whether we get it from donors.
Murray: Do you have a goal for donations versus earning?
Kramer: Right now we get about 25% of our money from advertising and sponsorship,
but we would like to get that higher, but we are comfortable with the fact that
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most of our money is philanthropy - most of our money comes from
individuals.
Murray: Let’s hear from some of the small guys, and for purposes of this discussion,
big is anybody with a double digit number of full time employees but we’ve
got three people right here at the end of the table who are well below that
standard. Which of you would like to talk about how it’s going? Susan?
Susan Mernit, Oakland Local:
So we spend about 30% of our income from ads as well and that kind of
earned income is super important to us because part of our mission is to help
local small business but the place where we don’t have the resources to really
do everything we’d like to is really in individual philanthropy and family
foundations. So we’ve done well with national grants to support journalism
projects but the kind of team - we have two people who basically are full time
and a lot of freelancers, it’s been really hard too…
Murray: Two people total at Oakland…?
Mernit: Yes. A lot of freelancers and volunteers and it's been really hard to find the
resources both to build up a really competent ad team and then to really work
on the board development and the kind of giving that I think some of you have
really excelled at.
Murray: Based on our survey, that’s not just a problem for those small organizations,
that’s a problem for the big organizations. I think the majority of people said
that they didn’t have either the time or the resources to build up the business
side of the business. Brian, how many employees?
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Brian Wheeler, Charlottesville Tomorrow:
We have four employees and I wish
foundation money was a bigger problem
for me. [Laughter]
Murray: Somebody here can help you with that.
Wheeler: You know, the two grants in our budget this year haven’t come through yet, so
most of our support comes from individual donors. For us, the threshold is
$1,000. So $1,000 up is a major donor and that’s more than 50% of our
revenue. We also have underwriting on the website and that’s about 14%.
Murray: You call it underwriting, not advertising?
Wheeler: I’ll call it whatever it takes to get it. [Laughter] It doesn’t matter to me what
we call it.
Murray: Dylan?
Dylan Smith, LION, TucsonSentinel.com:
Call it what you want -
advertising, sponsorship,
just as long as there’s
exchange for a check on
something on the website,
that terminology doesn’t
matter so much. We have
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one full time employee, essentially me, and the rest a team of freelancers just
to ensure that we remain as flexible as possible as our income ebbs and flows.
I certainly like to have more people dedicated full-time and just depends on
the… On election night, we’ve got the biggest news team in town and other
times it’s me plugging away all by myself.
Murray: So how does that work on election night? Do you have volunteers?
Smith: Volunteers and some really good freelancers and we just could go out and
kick some ass.
Murray: So who wants to talk about this
balance between resources devoted to
content and resources devoted to
developing the business, which was a
consistent theme in the surveys that we
did? Yes, Kevin.
Kevin Davis, Investigative News Network:
So [Investigative News Network], as you know, has 86 members now of the
172. So we’re about 50% and we see some stratification obviously, too. One
of adages I like to sort of say is that if you give a reporter $100,000, they’re
going to spend $99,000 on the reporting. So we spent a lot of time educating
nonprofits on how to bifurcate the business side from the editorial side, but the
fact is that - I don’t know how to say this any other way, but the reason why a
lot of these folks got into the nonprofit is to keep investigative journalism
going, but the reason why they are nonprofit is because they are mission
driven organizations, not revenue driven organizations. So the IRS and the
thinking of charity and the way that works is such that their expectation is that
philanthropy remains a very big part of the mix and we see that as well. So on
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one hand, we’re seeing more resources being put towards the business side but
the fact is that the content still remains the biggest push within most of the
smaller organizations because they feel like the business is saying they do
after hours. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just something that…
Murray: It is what it is.
Davis: Yes.
Murray: Now some of that, in our survey - Chris, let me put you on the spot - some of
that in our survey they said came from the donors, that the donors wanted
most of the money to go to the mission as Kevin put it and not to overhead
or…
Chris Daggett, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation:
Unfortunately, some of the statistics that people rely on for good philanthropy
is the least amount of money as possible going into administration or to the
organization itself. We try adage to frankly, give most of our money to
general operating support because we’re trying to give people as much
flexibility as possible. To me, the organizational side and what we call the
technical assistance side, helping organizations develop whether it’s fund
raising capability or organizational development or whatever it happens to be
is as or more important than the other things that they’re doing, to be honest
with you.
Murray: So how do we change that here today? That’s a consistent theme. It seems to
be pretty general agreement. If someone ran the table once and argued with
the notion, but pretty general agreement that all of you need to be spending a
greater share of your funding on developing the business. Yes? Feather.
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Feather Houstoun, Wyncote Foundation:
I just want to draw a distinction here because this is a very - has a bit of a
clinical feel to it. I’ve now been sort of up close and personal with about five
of these and they all seem to start with people who come out of legacy
journalism of one kind or another where no matter where they are, the
community they’re in, and I suspect some of these are that way too - in legacy
journalism, everybody had classifieds, groceries, and car dealers and so the
business model was fairly simple. When you get into the kind of work that
people are doing now, you’re dealing with different funder communities and
donor communities, different expectations in the constituencies that you’re
aiming at, but I think the thing that’s been the most striking to me across the
ones we’ve seen is how hugely different the entrepreneurial impulses of the
leadership is. So when you talk sort of clinically about what proportion of
your business should be here versus there…
Murray: They’re doing what their passion is.
Houstoun: They’re following or they just don’t have the entrepreneurial bone in their
body. It’s a big part I think of why we’re having this conversation, but without
it in the DNA of the organization, they’re never going to make it. So I just
think it’s a little bit more idiosyncratic to the organization. If we see an
organization that is doing all the right things about figuring out how to
diversify revenue, we wouldn’t be looking at what that proportion is because
we can see them doing it. If they can’t produce even a plan to think about it
after three or four years, you know you’ve got a problem.
Murray: You’re right. Let me say, if anybody wants to jump into this discussion, just
take your name card and turn it sideways. I think it will stand upside. Jeff’s
testing it. It works. [Laughter] But first I want to go to Ruth.
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Ruth McCambridge, Nonprofit Quarterly:
You know, I think this is
interesting because I think
that the categorizations of
things get mixed up here. We
want to talk about business,
but we are in a nonprofit
setting and therefore the
definitions of things are a
little bit different. So I think
that when people look at this
level of donor issue, it really has to do with independence. So in our shop,
what we do is we categorize all individual donors without strings attached as
payments. It’s earned revenue. Somebody’s paying because they like what
we’re producing. We’re not charging anything because that doesn’t work in
this environment, but we consider these to be voluntary payments. It’s earned
revenue. We consider the same of any underwriting or sponsorship we have
because we have to earn that by the quality of our work. What we don’t want
to do is to exchange editorial, our editorial judgment for the money. That’s
essentially what it is. We don’t want to exchange the focus of our content or
the quality of our content for money.
Murray: How about the quantity?
McCambridge: And the quantity. We don’t want to have to do that, but I think the question is
we want the quantity because we want the impact. The quantity, once we get it
and we have the impact, it produces income in voluntary payments if we work
it right but getting to where it works right and where people have the
expectation to pay for it actually takes capital. I don’t think that we’ve gotten
to the place yet in this field where we understand how much capital it takes to
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build up a good, strong set of individual donors and how much capital it takes
to build up sponsorships, but I feel like our business model has to include -
these are our strategic advantages as nonprofits. We can use volunteers as part
of our structures and we can take volunteering money.
Murray: Jeff and then Margaret.
Jeff Jarvis, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism (CUNY):
Quick question first to Amy. Do we have any sense of the 172 sites what their
total reach is?
Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center:
Total reach in terms of audience?
Jarvis: Total reach. People. Audience.
Mitchell: I don’t think so. I think [crosstalk]
[Male]: Measured in…?
Jarvis: Just people. Unique.
Mitchell: In terms of unique? Well, because one - and hopefully we’ll talk about our
content partnerships where the work that these organizations are doing, it’s
being carried in the daily newspaper or in others that have a wider audience
reach.
Jarvis: I’d like to know that, but the reason I asked is we have a lot of brain power
around the table being excluded. Talking about something that I think - we’re
talking about a nation of 300+ million people, the 172 sites isn’t a lot. We
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have to remember that those sites fit in an ecosystem and there’s a choice -
Feather’s absolutely right. Journalists do not think like entrepreneurs that’s
why he chose [unintelligible] entrepreneurial journalism and some of them
can’t be taught but some of them can be and some of them get the passion for
it. You people have Elizabeth Green down the table who started not for profit
and she’s a great sales person. The question comes at some point is why are
you for profit? Why are you not for profit? So I think it’s a bit of a red herring
to make the whole organization of the thought around just not for profit.
There’s a question of sustainability. There’s a question of value. There’s a
question of the business skills necessary to do administration and marketing
and selling whether it’s advertisers or users.
Murray: Presumably these issues are no less pressing for the ones that are organized as
for-profits?
Jarvis: I get in trouble with my granola colleagues when I refused to allow my
students to do not for profit but that’s because the discipline of learning the
business is higher at the forefront. At the end of the day it’s a tax decision.
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Murray: I do think it’s a bit of a journalist blind spot. I remember after 911 when I
went to South Brunswick for the first time where all the business people and
the Wall Street Journal works. Who the hell are these people? We thought we
were The Wall Street Journal and there were these thousands of people
making phone calls and taking orders and doing all these things but Elizabeth,
you’ve got such a big buildup there, I feel like I should give you the
opportunity to say something if you like and then we’ll come over to Margaret.
Elizabeth Green, Education News Colorado:
Okay. Well, I was going to say that I actually - so we’re an organization now.
We merged to nonprofit education news sites and local communities and now
we have - I just calculated - we will have 12.5 full time employees by the end
of the year. So I guess we’re big but I feel pretty small.
Murray: Yes. By our criteria, you’re big.
E. Green: I was going to say that from my perspective, I think our funders here, what
these reports say and they tell us, “Please invest in your business side,” and
the question that I’m asking myself more often is exactly what constitutes a
business side? My understanding of that has gotten a lot sharper over time but
to me, that’s where the conversation should go. Not what’s the percentage but
really, what do we mean when we say that for our [crosstalk]?
Murray: You mean what are the different
ways that you can monetize your
site?
E. Green: No. I mean what are the specific
functions and roles? So I think
we have a pretty good idea of
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how we should be monetizing and we’re doing it and we can invest in that
going forward, but beyond just investing in earned revenue creation, there are
other elements that constitute business that are important, that get that done,
that I didn’t count in that column. So, marketing and distribution and
engagement and operations. These are all things that, pretty much, we need to
build from scratch.
Murray: Is there a model that would be applicable to the organization sitting around
this table? Are you all so different that there is no model that would apply to
each? Margaret, speaking of mergers, you’re merging with the local public
station aren’t you …?
Margaret Freivogel, St. Louis Beacon:
Right. Yes. St. Louis Public Radio. It’s on track to happen. I wanted to pick
up a little bit on what Feather said about how you get entrepreneurial bones in
the bodies of these journalists, and a little bit on what Jeff said. I think that
there are different ways that you can infuse an organization with an
entrepreneurial spirit. Some people have it naturally. You can specifically
bring someone into the organization that can do that or you can partner with
someone who has those skills, and it’s part of the rationale behind the
partnership that’s coming up [with] the merger between The Beacon and St.
Louis Public Radio, but I think there’s a…
Murray: Because they know how to do it. They know [crosstalk].
Freivogel: Well, they have certain established - they’ve got a big base of small donors.
We have a great base of large donors. There’s some complementary business
things, and we were either going to have to build those things on the business
side for ourselves or partner with someone and on the news side. They were
either going to have to build a much bigger newsroom or partner with
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someone who had it. So that’s a good match there, but I think there’s an issue
of size here. Getting [into] a little bit of what Jeff said, the point is it’s not
really are you for-profit or nonprofit. It’s are you doing the mission of public
service? Which is why the nonprofit sector came up, because that was falling
out of a lot of what the for-profit sector was doing. I looked at the numbers in
these studies and so many of the organizations are very small and producing
content very sporadically. So that’s a problem both on the business side for
getting the necessary resources and skills as entrepreneurs, and it’s a problem
on the impact side, and I think that’s a central problem that all of us have to
think about. If we’re really going to fill the gap that we saw opening up, it
takes some size to do it.
Murray: Eric, you’ve been making grants in this area for how long?
Eric Newton, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation:
Twelve years, I guess. One thing I wanted to say was inspired by what Jeff
just said, which is: this is all so new. You’re also
new as a large group. We really don’t have the kind
of measurements that the legacy media have been
developing, in some cases for a century, and so we
can’t even say how many people consume your stuff.
We can say how many people look at your websites,
but until you know exactly how many people
consume your stuff and doing things like what Dick
is doing with tagging at ProPublica to try to get a
sense of the overall audience, then it’s hard for us to sell this to other funders
because your 172 [nonprofit news outlets] might be [generating] $50 million.
It might be. It might be more, or as many people [unintelligible] or it might
not be, it might be way more people than go to the symphony, but until we
know, it’s harder to make the argument to foundations and individuals that
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don’t traditionally fund media. So I think that it may sound basic, but I think
it’s really a big deal.
Murray: That’s one more thing you don’t have the money to spend on, right?
[Female]: Right.
Murray: And technology. Technology is another issue that maybe we’ll talk about a
little bit after the break, but Steve, let me get you in here.
Steve Beatty, The Lens:
Sure. I’m one of the legacy guys that Feather talked about that was not put on
this planet to manage money. John talked about equity investment and I’m
like, “Equity investment…”
[Laughter] I have look [to] that up
later to make sure I’m down with it.
I’ve got the journalism part down
pretty good. We have a lot of
employees now, and one of them is a
non-journalist. It’s our development
director. I thought, “Oh great, I’ve
hired the one person who’s going to
go out and raise all my money. I’m
done with that. I’m going to go take
care of the journalism.” [Laughter]
Through some programs and some
tough love and Kevin Davis and
some partners at INN [Investigative News Network], I’ve realized my
journalism days are over. I’ve got to be a business person. Yeah. [Laughter]
It’s been tough, but it’s absolutely critical, and I’ve recently hired a half-time
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19
person to do some more outreach and marketing events and [to] steal plenty of
ideas from Emily’s organization in putting on events that we can sell
sponsorships against. One thing I wanted to bring up, though: our friends at
the end of the table [said] it doesn’t matter what the check is for, whether it’s
advertising or sponsorships. I don’t know how you square that with your
accountant. Whether there’s some taxable income that you get from true
advertising versus what we’d like to call underwriting.
[Male]: I only do underwriting, but if I’m talking to a small-business person who
wants to get the word out about their business, even though I’m only going to
take something that is not is a call-to-action ad, I’m going to speak to him in
his own terms and call that an ad because that’s what’s going to make that sale.
But that doesn’t mean it is going to be advertising in the IRS sense.
Murray: You’re probably not going to take your accountant with you on the sales call.
[Laughter]
[Male]: Exactly.
Murray: Penny?
Penny Abernathy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:
Let me [speak] half as a journalist and half on the other side. When I made the
transition, I figured out … what was in common between the two, and it is
that you need to ask the question: Who’s your primary customer? You cannot
go for funding, you cannot go for sponsorship, unless you have a clear notion
of who your primary customer is… whether you’re going for a grant or
whether you’re looking at hiring a vice president of development or somebody
who’s going to go out and raise the sponsorship. The second thing I wanted to
[mention] was a point that’s come back to me several times as I’ve been doing
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20
a book on for-profit community news
organizations over the last four/five
years, and that is that we have been
basically de facto geographic
monopolies, and we still operate in
isolation of one another. What hit me
as I looked around [at everybody]
that [is] here and at the report is how
small and how isolated everyone is.
And I was reminded of that
wonderful quote from [unintelligible]
in his book in 2009 that, “The key to sustainability is learning how to take
advantage of the economics of networking in this age,” and so I think there’s
both a way to think about pulling everything together on the nonprofit side,
but also merging it better with the for-profit side, too, going forward.
Murray: Rose, you wanted to say something about that?
Rose Hoban, North Carolina Health News:
[Unintelligible] I wanted to point out that because we are in these little
ecosystems, really, where you are, in many ways, is going to determine how
you do. I’ll talk later about some of
the difficulties I’ve had with other
editors and publishers in North
Carolina, getting them to accept the
model that I’m doing. Since I’m
doing a state-based model, you need
to reach out to them and if they’re
like, ‘it’s hard to do,’ then you kind
of end up relying on donors, because
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21
you can’t get the business side to kind of…
Murray: But is there a serious scale problem here? … Maybe what you really need to
be doing is go out there and look for partners, either in other locales or within
your market, that you can reach the kind of scale that lets you do what you
need to do to build up these business skills? …
Smith: I get so tired of the idea that we need to scale things. Every one of the
communities that we are in is so very different and has different needs,
different holes to be filled, or [a] different situation where you can actually get
some revenue developed that there’s not going to be one model. There’s not
going to be one template [to] fill in the blanks: ‘do this, do this, do this…’
Murray: Patch is not the answer.
Smith: Well, we’ve seen the answer to whether Patch is the answer. The bloom is off
that rose.
Murray: Brian, do you agree with that?
Wheeler: Small is beautiful. We don’t feel the need to get bigger in the respect of
getting outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, but a point I would make is that
many of the nonprofits in this room are highly networked to each other.
We’ve been meeting for the past three years in Chicago at Block By Block –
at that conference. We’re now part of the LION [Local Independent Online
News] publisher’s group, and we’ll be meeting again in Chicago next month.
So that’s been a really important vehicle for us to not feel isolated. In the daily
work we do, we’re small; [we] have big impact in our community but we have
learned a lot – I’ve learned a lot going to conferences, thanks to Knight,
through the CJET [Community Journalism Executive Training] program, and
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22
learning best practices and bringing those back to Charlottesville. So I think
there is a lot of activity going on that we need to recognize and thank people
for convening us.
Murray: Dick, you’ve had that nametag up for a while.
Tofel: Yeah. I just wanted to introduce a little caveat to all of this stuff about how
there is no fundamental difference between ‘nonprofit’ and ‘for-profit.’ There
are a number of actually quite important differences and here’s one of them,
which I just think we need to bear in mind. As you build a nonprofit,
[unintelligible] was one of the very best business reporters I ever worked with,
as you’ll know better than anybody, right? There are ways that great for-
profits have been built that involve running losses for considerable periods of
time that are economically rational because you are building enterprise value.
Right? When Twitter lost a gazillion dollars – I don’t know how much they
have lost over their first number of years – nobody at Twitter lost a minute’s
sleep about it because they knew they would get to where they got to this
week, which is ‘we have enterprise value.’ The thing is worth $1 billion or $2
billion or however many billion and it’s all good. Nonprofits have no
enterprise value. There is no way to realize it and because of that, top-line
growth counts for nothing. Bottom-line growth is all that matters. Now, you
can do top-line growth as long as it will, in relatively due course, lead to
bottom-line growth, or if you have very patient investors who are willing to
lose a lot of money and never get it back - donors - you can do that too, but
this is a fundamental distinction and I think people (as I did) who spent their
first 20 years or 30 years or whatever, in the for profit media, can sometimes
miss about how you build a nonprofit business.
Murray: That’s a good point. We’re going to go to Elspeth, Kevin, Ruth, and
Joel…Then we’re going to take a break. So I urge you to be very quick and
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23
then we’re going to get some coffee and then we’re going to come back and
talk about - we’ll leave the business behind because we’ve solved it and we’ll
talk about engagement. Elspeth?
Revere: I have been noting with great delight the distribution partnerships that many of
the groups around the table and others have been engaged in. Lots of them
with other nonprofits but some with for-profit organizations. I note it [with]
delight, although I sort of hide it from our legal counsel at the foundation
because I’m not sure how that would be taken, but I’ve also thought about -
maybe somebody just wants to talk to me about this at the break - but I’ve also
thought about the fact that the nonprofits will not, at least in the foreseeable
future, be reimbursed the cost of producing that information. So one of the
things that comes to my mind sitting and listening to this is that a resource
those for-profit organizations have is marketing, PR, human resources, all of
those business things, and they’re probably underutilized right now, whereas
the nonprofits are giving them great content at very, very little cost if any cost
at all. So I’m wondering whether there’s any possibility of trying to make
some deals there.
Murray: Good. I got the timing wrong. We have more time…I’m not going to let you
take a break as quickly….
[Male]: That’s great, Alan, because I want to interrupt. [Crosstalk] [Laughter] The
News 21 Project at Arizona State has all these content partners like what
you’re talking about. They trade the stories for business intelligence of who’s
reading them. So they know what their overall aggregate audience is. So the
news organizations in that instance are not getting charged any money, but
they have to come up with something in return for the content.
Murray: Kevin?
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Davis: So one of the other wrinkles here, of course, is investigative journalism and
also journalism that serves underserviced communities and communities that
frankly are not monetizable
directly, right? So one of the
things that we talk about a lot
is if you’re in a market, if you
look at even at INN’s
distribution, we tend to be not
where the news
[unintelligible] are, although
we’re getting increasingly
there, but we tend to be in
markets that support this journalism. So one of the things I’ve said, and this is
with the greatest respect to the larger organizations in the room, if only
[unintelligible], ProPublica, and Texas Tribune survive, we will have failed.
Right? That really truthfully, I think the need is to makes sure that
communities throughout the United States, often in underserved and very poor
communities, also have viable models.
Murray: Which happens to be what you’re doing?
Davis: We’re trying. So when we look at this and we say, “Which business models
fit?” it really does depend on the market - we’ve said this many different ways
- it does depend on the market. And frankly, sometimes a journalist - an
example would be Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation – does six
reports a year. And when they do their reports, their traffic spikes for about a
week and it’s great stuff – in-depth stuff, business stuff – but they’re not
equipped to have ongoing conversations with their communities. So they have
to, by necessity, distribute their content out, and the value proposition for
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25
what they produce is very, very different than when you’re producing content
in ongoing basis. So it’s very important, I think, that we don’t lose sight that
not every type of nonprofit has the same market opportunity or the same
commercial opportunity or the same revenue opportunity.
Murray: The result of that, how do you address that?
Davis: We have to convince more people that, frankly, I still think the philanthropy
needs to be in the mix and we need to understand it. To Jeff’s point, there is
an ecosystem here, and … certain content will need to be subsidized if we
believe it's important. And it is unrealistic and frankly, not necessarily – I
wouldn't say it’s disingenuous – but not every nonprofit’s going to be self-
sustainable.
Murray: How many of the organizations - and I’ll come back to you, Rose - but how
many of the organizations represented here in the room – just a quick show of
hands - believe that the majority of the journalism you do is investigative
journalism. Raise your hand. So it’s close to half, maybe a little over half. I
think our survey showed of the 93 of us, twenty-something?
Mitchell: A little less than half, yes.1
Murray: Yes. Ruth?
McCambridge: I actually had a very similar thought to Kevin. One of the things that I thought
was really fascinating about the Knight report is that it begins to actually set
up visual patterns of revenue models for particular kinds of journalism groups.
I think that is it gets to Kevin’s point, that we’re not all going to look the same.
1 Note: The Pew Research report found that 21% of nonprofit news outlets focused on investigative reporting.
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26
Some of us are going to be very attractive to advertisers and some of us will
not be at all attractive to advertisers. Some of us are going to be great at
attracting corporate sponsors and others of us won’t. So the question is, what
types of organizations can attract what kind of revenue and with what kind of
effort and tools? Actually, one of the things that excited me about coming to
this meeting today was looking at these two reports and beginning to see these
patterns of business models. That’s in fact what we need as nonprofit news
sites to be able to move forward. I do think that we have some extra tools to
work with, which is what I was trying to say before. We have some extra tools
because we are nonprofits and we should make…
Murray: Such as?
McCambridge: Particularly, we have the ability to ask for and receive tax deductible
donations and to say to people, “We’re dependent on you because we are a
nonprofit. We’re not enriching ourselves through that.” That’s a very powerful
tool. Secondly, that we can - we’re attractive to volunteers because we’re not
enriching ourselves through volunteer activity either. So it looks like a
common project for a volunteer. These two things also are somewhat
connected because they are civic benefits that we get from being nonprofits.
In fact, Wikipedia found - recently, they did a very, very big fundraising
project – and they found that the rates of giving amongst the people who
actually put their hands to the editing was much higher than the rates of giving
among people who just consumed a product. That says something about
engagement that I think we really need to listen to. So for us smaller people
who are likely to use volunteers and maybe are not going to get as much big
donor money, this is in fact an incredibly important piece of information. A
realm that we need to work.
Murray: Because donors become consumers, committed consumers?
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27
McCambridge: Well, active volunteers can become donors, and they also will attract a bunch
of consumers because they themselves are networked. So it’s a business
model of a type that I think we need to explore, but I think there are a number
of these kinds of business models around the work that we’re doing that we
haven’t quite surfaced so we can see them yet.
Murray: So we’re going to do John, then Vincent, then Rose, but before we do, we
haven’t really talked about events at all. Has anybody around the table making
significant revenue from events? Emily?
Ramshaw: I mean, I think that from the very beginning, [at] the Tribune, this was, I think,
the biggest eye-opener to me – that this many people actually want to be in a
room together at 7:30 in the morning for a breakfast policy hearing on water,
for example. You can have a sellout crowd. I know I was going to talk about
this a little bit in the community engagement side, but what’s been fascinating
– and I think I saw it in the Knight report that a ton of you were starting to do
this – is just how much money can be made around sponsorships and
attendance of these events.
Murray: Yes. It’s a little bizarre because the audience is so much smaller, and yet often
the dollars are bigger. Anybody else want to say anything about events before
we go? Emily, did you want to get in on that?
Emily Bell, Tow Center for Digital Journalism (Columbia University):
Yes. Just my background, I [was with the] Guardian for a long time where
actually, that sense of community is much more easily fostered when you can
offer something, which is - and this is statement of the obvious, which is
bandwidth-restricted and that’s not putting [unintelligible]. It’s rather offering
people live experience. If you look at just [unintelligible] of attendance across
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28
everything, the more you have to [unintelligible] ubiquity of information, the
more people want to actually kind of have excuses to meet each other and it’s
such an obvious observation. It still feels like it’s hardly worth saying, but at
the same time I think it’s just one of those societal trends with news because it
convenes so well; has always seen the kind of conference businesses
[unintelligible]. It’s been sort of something that people want to keep away
from because it felt like a different type of business model, but it seems to me
like a very obvious concrete way of taking your reach and impact and turning
it to money.
Murray: So you think there’s an opportunity that has not been fully tapped by the folks
in this room?
Bell: You know, I really do. I think that as I say, if you were in the middle of New
York City, it’s always hard to get people to come to an event but actually
everywhere else, that idea that you can convene and meet as you do more
shopping online, as …everything else becomes a frictionless experience.
Murray: I think Tina Brown just coined a new phrase for this sort of activity as she got
booted out the door at the Daily Beast. She was going off to do ‘theatrical
journalism.’ So maybe more theatrical journalism is what we need. John?
Ramshaw: I was just going to say quickly, there’s a cost associated with this, obviously. I
think John probably knows this better than I do, but I think last year we spent
almost $200,000 putting on these events and ended up bringing in almost $1
million but … not everybody's in Austin. So we were spending money going
all over the state to try to sort of engage folks and bring them in. So it’s not
cost-neutral … there are a lot of bodies involved in putting on [a] production
of this nature and to make a sizeable revenue dent.
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29
Murray: Hard for the small guys, you think? No, Rose? You don’t -? You disagree?
Hoban: Impossible.
Murray: Oh, not hard, impossible?
Hoban: I don’t have the capacity. I just don’t have the capacity. Unless I can find
someone who’s a volunteer coordinator to do the whole event, I’m a one-
person shop with a bunch of freelancers like Dylan [Smith].
Murray: Jeff disagrees. [Crosstalk] It’s a “cooties” reaction. [Laughter]
Jarvis: No, no. Not at all. I spare my cooties for the most important moments. No. I
think that we found – when we did research on business models – we found
that there are a lot of [unintelligible] that are doing them well. Brownstoner in
Brooklyn is a key example. Brooklyn-based. There are a lot of local blogs that
do this and find value in not only using it as a way to get content, [but also to]
bring people together – sponsors, vendors, all kinds of things.
Murray: Susan, you have something to say on that?
Mernit: I didn’t raise my hand originally because [of] the part about making
significant money - I couldn’t say yes. I think part of it is about knowing your
market and your audience. We’re in Oakland, which is a poor community. I
look at Berkeley with envy. We’ve had over 2,500 people come to our events
in the past year. We convene events all the time and we sell out every time.
We’re great at it.
Murray: But no revenue?
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30
Mernit: Well, revenue, yes. We’re in a community where we have to charge, [on]
average, $15 or less for an event, have a sliding scale for people who truly
cannot afford to pay, which people do not
use heavily. Most people who can, they pay.
If we clear $300 on a $1,000 event, we’ve
done really well. So we really use it as a
marketing outreach and community
engagement tool. From a profit perspective,
it’s not cost-effective, but we love events
and we’re super-committed to them as engagement, but the $150 conference -
for our particular market, we would have to change our market to make that
really work.
Murray: Okay. John and Vincent, then Tom, then Rose. I guess that wasn’t your - your
comment was a non-event [comment]. So you still want in here?
Hoban: Well, I’m trying to do a statewide media organization. So I’m trying to build
readership all over the state, so where do I do it? My state’s 450 miles in one
direction. So no one place to do it. I have big readerships in two of the major
markets, but I….
Murray: I’d pick the mountains or the beach.
Hoban: Yes. Exactly.
Murray: John?
Thornton: I think one of the things that knits a bunch of the really smart things that have
been said here together is this coming back to the notion of equity investors
versus revenue, coming back to the notion that Dick was talking about in
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31
terms of the difference between building a for-profit and nonprofit enterprise,
and the willingness and forethought required on behalf of - and I’m going to
call them investors not donors, just my sales shoes on - to fund for our losses.
And that, to me, is the difference between equity and revenue. So all of these
things are incredibly important at a tactical level. Some of them at a strategic
level. In my mind, the most important thing that needs to be done is the
consciousness-raising of a new generation of equity investors in these things.
Because… the reason you can’t [unintelligible] is because you didn’t raise the
equity upfront. I’m not saying that in any imaginable scenario you would have,
but it requires that level of forward investment to go get the events person.
Murray: So how do we do that? How do we raise the consciousness of…?
Kramer: I don’t know. I don’t know but it’s really on my mind, because in ’08-’09
there was this sort of blip of conversation about informing communities or
nonprofit journalism, or whatever you want to call it, as a category of
philanthropy. That sort of fizzled when people realized that newspapers
weren’t just going to go away entirely, and so I don’t know the answer. But
it’s damned important, and I just want to make sure everybody understands. I
think bringing donors into this ecosystem is more important today, not less
important, even though we’re pedaling like hell trying not to be dependent
upon them
Murray: I’m going to come back to you, Joel, but I want to focus on the people we
haven’t heard from yet, which is Vincent, Tom, Steve.
Vincent Stehle, Media Impact Funders:
To look in on the foundation piece of this with a little bit more nuance, I think
there was some sweeping statements about what foundations are like, and
what good is a generalization if it doesn’t sweep? But certainly, there are
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32
foundations on one end who are the large, very heavily-staffed types of
organizations, and the others that are vest-pocket financial instruments on the
behalf of a particular donor that’s very personal. And then there’s a lot of in-
between - thousands of in-between, where particularly it might be lightly
staffed but a strategic group of trustees that are doing this. So I think many of
us were - a few of us were lucky enough to be with the Tow family last night
at the Tow Foundation event celebrating 25 years of grant-making. They’re
well known in this room because the [of] the Tow centers at CUNY [City
University of New York] and Columbia [University], but they’re like a lot of
other funders that mainly do other things and they do a little bit of media,
which is important. You might not know of the [unintelligible] Foundation in
Silicon Valley, which does mostly social innovation work, social
entrepreneurs, but they also do some important work supporting David
Bornstein’s work at the Solutions Journalism Network. And then, according to
the upcoming data from the Foundation Center, 3,698 other foundations …
are supporting some aspect of media. So it’s not just a handful of usual
suspects who are staffed and then all of the rest of these are individuals who
are just individual donors. There’s a lot of nuance in between, and I think
that’s evident from your own data which says that 26 of the respondents had
75% - 100% of their income from foundation grants; 25 had between 25% and
75%; and 35 didn’t give an answer. So only 14 had less than 25% in
foundation funding.2
So I think there’s a lot of work here that could be done to
really develop that set of relationships and understand that better.
Murray: Yes. Tom?
2 Note: The precise numbers found in the report were 24 outlets (76%-100%); 23 outlets (26%-75%); and 13 outlets (0%-25%). Thirty-three did
not respond to the question.
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33
Tom Glaisyer, Democracy Fund:
I may go back a little bit to the question of theatrical journalism or event-
based stuff. For me, if we abstract it back, journalism used to adhere to the
page, the printed page. Now can we make it adhere to something else, to
events, which clearly [unintelligible] has had great success at and seems quite
recently to be a struggle for [a] one-person organization across a whole state.
That sort of brings me to sort of the [unintelligible] of saying where the
journalistic institution sits within its greater ecosystem and what it is capable
of doing. …Just one example, the Zocalo Public Square folks, who sort of
lead with the event-based journalism, the site is somewhat of a secondary
thing to that and we’ve just got used to the printed page as the starting point
and I just wonder if we can’t just think a lot more broadly about where it goes
to maximize how we present the value proposition of the hard work that goes
into creating this public [unintelligible] good.
Murray: Steve?
Steve Waldman, Daily Bridge Media:
One quick point on the - we’ve talked about the business side and most people
are treating that as synonymous with revenue, but there’s also the marketing
side and when we talk about business or even non-editorial, it’s
[unintelligible]. And also, we haven’t talked about technology, and I’m
mentioning that because one of the things it might be interesting to tease out at
some point is there’s a certain amount of work that is done by a local that is
inherently local. There’s just no way around. There’s no way of sharing
services. It just has to be done by a local group. But then there’s other
functions that could be shared - that could be shared either among other
groups in a network way, it could be shared if there were a shared services
organization of some sort that [is] providing services - INN does some of this
- but in the for-profit world, if a mogul was looking at a whole set of
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34
fragmented businesses, one of the things they would look at is whether or not
there are certain economics of scale that could be achieved in that case by
buying them all up. But that’s not the only way of achieving economies of
scale.
Murray: So can you put a little meat on those bones? What are some of the - because I
think it would be useful particularly for the foundations here - what are some
of the kind of shared services that you think could be outsourced…?
Waldman: Well, I bet others will have more specifics, but for instance, everyone’s talked
about development capacity, the ability to develop membership models.
That’s an actual expertise. It’s not just a matter of labor. There’s some
knowledge to that. If there were people that small groups could tap into, there
may be software that they could tap into. There may be technology aspects
that others have probably have specific ideas.
Murray: Joel and then Amy.
Kramer: Yes. I’m going to follow up on that, but first, I want to say I think the insight
that there are many different kinds of organizations in this ecosystem with
many inherently different business models because they have different
missions – like the difference between an investigative site that writes maybe
eight stories a year and relies on other media to distribute it versus sites like
MinnPost that are trying to build their own audience through volume and then
sell that audience through sponsorship and advertising – and they’re radically
different. One of the challenges is you bring together groups of people like
this, and I know Kevin has this challenge in the variety he has in INN and I
think you got this problem in this room. You bring all these people together
and they are not in the same business and they don’t have the same models
and they don’t have the same needs. Then, if you do have advice for certain
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35
subsets, they don’t have the resources to carry them out. So the suggestion
that I would make - we haven’t really…
Murray: It sounds like the suggestion is, “Go home.” [Laughter]
Kramer: No, no. No, that’s not it. You haven’t asked for solutions, but one thing that
could be done I believe is to divide this ecosystem into subgroups that actually
have a common pattern and interest and treat them as separate groups and then
have the - whether it’s the foundation world or they’re wealthy donors or
whoever, I think the foundations that care about journalism could be the
leaders in doing this - invest in two things: One is the centralized services that
Steve is talking about but then secondly, invest enough in the organizations
that they will have the capacity on their end to make use of the services they
provide to us.
Murray: I’m going to go to Amy first, but let’s use Joel, your comments, and Steve,
your comments, as a kind of a pivot to use the 15 minutes or so that we have
before the break to talk about, “Okay, what are the solutions that can come out
of this conversation we’re having here today?” Amy?
Mitchell: Yes. I think what I was going to add - well, actually lead into that
conversation too, which is spinning off what Steve said, but going back to
what we heard very early on in this conversation which was at least a number
of the funders in the room saying they might be in it for 20 years or more, and
then Eric saying, “You got to show us that you’ve got some reach impact.”
But we also know from our research that the majority of these nonprofits,
even if they’re all very different, have a staff of less than five. So how do you
show that you’re reaching audience and how do you become able to think
about actually where you could go for revenue in your community versus
somebody else’s community? Which then leads to the question of whether
Future of Nonprofit Journalism Friday, September 20, 2013 Pew Research Center Part 1: Economics of Nonprofit News
36
there are some non-monetary ways that these foundations can really offer
support in a long term that would have even more lasting impact or help for
your organization, whether it’s consulting on business strategy or developing
technology platforms or whatever the case may be that could really be
something that would bring help beyond just some dollars in the bank.
Murray: Okay. Solutions. Andy, we haven’t heard from you. I’m sure that’s because
you’ve been sitting there formulating the answer to this question, right? Do
you have anything to [add]? What would help you?
Andy Hall, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism:
Well, absolutely. The idea of consulting and offering access to expertise is
very valuable, and we are in fact doing a lot of that through INN. [For] the
upcoming CJET training, we’ll be breaking into groups under a coach and
we’ll be working with some similarity situated centers, let’s say. So I think
there is some recognition of that and Joel and I, our organizations, are
collaborating on some work and we have a keen understanding of how
different the goals of our organizations are. I think one thing we haven’t
talked about regarding what could be shared is data, obviously, and the
collaborations that we’ve done through INN and through other networks have
been very successful. If the data has been made available journalistically –
and I’m sure there would be business side applications for the sharing of data
– donor development strategies, and even potential sharing of those donors,
potential donors and the developmental strategies to work on the revenue.
Murray: Molly?
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Molly de Aguiar, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation:
Well, I can speak to what we’re doing in New Jersey, because we’re a New
Jersey-focused foundation. We don’t attempt to try to treat all of the news and
information entities in New
Jersey, the ecosystem, as
the same. So what we do
instead is we fund an
initiative at Montclair State
University called Center for
Cooperative Media, and
their job is to listen to the
ecosystem and understand
what the needs are and then
provide the services,
whether it’s training - business training, we did CJET recently, data
journalism training, pooled insurance pool liability [crosstalk]. Right. So they
also set with Repost. Us, a content-sharing network. So there are probably 20
different news organizations in New Jersey that are all sharing content freely
with one another.
Murray: Is this happening in any [other] places? Any of you? Yes, Kevin?
Davis: Yes. I think that New Jersey actually is really in many respects in the lead
now as far as how a statewide thing can work, and great work there. Yes, it’s
happening all over the place. You’ve got LION in the room. You’ve got INN
in the room. There’s a number of these networks that are really sort of like
these hubs that can then bring out - the idea then, of course, being the
investments - this is not a pitch - investment through us can have - your dollar
investment can have a multiplication effect. Just for example, get to another
point. On the technology front, INN did a survey about a year and a half ago
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38
when we looked at internally at the INN members and we found that less than
6% of their budgets were being spent on technology. Could you imagine if
you were in a newspaper or a TV - only spending 6% on getting signal out?
So we invested in a very simple WordPress stack, and we now have over 45
organizations worldwide [and] 22 member organizations, and the next step is
to integrate [unintelligible] into the WordPress stack. So, like Voice of San
Diego, we can actually identify people who are coming in and actually move
them along the conversion funnel. Here’s the shared resources. It’s open
source. It’s on GitHub. Anybody can use it. You don’t have to be an INN
member. So those investments are happening in the back office…and it’s just
a question of propagating them.
Murray: Technology is a big issue that we haven’t talked about much. I know we’ll
probably talk about it some when we get to the engagement point. Our
research shows one of the most fascinating things going on in the new space
these days is the fact that people are actually reading more than they used to
because they have these smartphones in their pocket and they walk around and
can dip in on a regular basis. And yet I think the Knight study showed there
were only three of the 18 that had actually developed mobile apps, and it’s a
huge expense. I spent the last five/six years of my life running digital
operations for The Wall Street Journal. The amount of money we were
spending on technology was frightening because you’re developing for the
iPhone, you’re developing for the Android, you’re developing for the tablets
and that’s for the external-facing technology. There’s also the internal
technology. Brian. What can we do to help you?
Wheeler: Give me some programmers. On the technology front, on my wish list is
mobile applications. We’ve started building our database and geo-tagging all
of our content, but the dream of developing a mobile app that will present that
attractively is a reach for us. With four staff focused on getting the product out,
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39
we can’t do that kind of development on our own or even manage a team or
pay for a team that could do it. Now, we jumped on the Armstrong CMS
platform and we’re probably one of the smaller shops that’s using Armstrong.
But this idea of having a toolkit and blending in CRM so that we can keep
track of subscribers and donors in a sophisticated system – we’re thrilled with
Armstrong, but I want to be able to take it to the next level, follow what the
Texas Tribute is doing, but I need somebody that can come in to our shop or
be available to us and make that happen. I’ve got a local technology team
working with the Armstrong platform, but we don’t have time to go back and
sort of figure out: Are we branching too far away in our customizations? What
has Texas Tribune done that we can just grab and implement? That takes a
warm body with a lot of smarts figuring out those platforms.
Murray: Did you want to say something? Did you want to add to that, Susan?
Mernit: Yes. I want to say, though, that I think it’s really important that people use
technology smartly and use open source. So we moved from Drupal to
WordPress, one of the most supported platforms. We didn’t choose the
smaller platform for fewer developers. We migrated to WordPress and our
mobile traffic went up from 2% to 12% because we are now an attractive
reading experience on a smartphone, even without a mobile app. We saw this
incredible surge. So I think it’s really a mistake to think that you have to go
from a [unintelligible] face that’s not mobile-friendly to an app. We would
love to have an app. I would love to have an iPad tablet [app], but I also think-
I think what’s lacking is education, because we found a great solution at very
low cost.
Murray: Elspeth then Elizabeth then Steve.
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40
Revere: Yes. The comment about needing programmers really resonated with me
because I’m hearing it from everybody in every field that I work in. The
nonprofit sector just is not competitive for programmers. That said, I think
what you just said about using technology smartly is important, and I would
hope that not every group would need their own programmer, but - so that’s
really kind of a challenge, I think, for my colleagues and me in the foundation
world to figure out, how we can get some of these needs met. Because I do
hear it everywhere I go.
Murray: Chris, did you want to-?
Daggett: In New Jersey, one of the other things we’re doing right now is we’re - many
of you have probably heard of a tiny little station, a station called WFMU. It is
a hole-in-the wall station with a worldwide following. It’s pretty amazing, the
work that they’ve done, but we’ve just funded them to build something called,
for lack of a better name right now, the Audience Engine, which we anticipate
they’ll be able to complete in a relatively short period of time, as in 12 months
or so, and it’s going [unintelligible] to publish everywhere. We have a lot of
high hopes that we can help you out enormously in that open source. We’re
going to make it available everywhere, and then we will - they will probably
develop a for-profit side, which is the training side, where they can come and
actually help you put that in place, but it’s been tried for many years
apparently…
Murray: Steve, [unintelligible], are you going to go out of New Jersey?
Daggett: Absolutely. We’ll take it anywhere, I think, in the end, because the whole idea
here is to enable the entire ecosystem, not just in New Jersey, but elsewhere.
Murray: Okay. Elizabeth?
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41
E. Green: So I believe in collaboration; that’s why we’re a merger and that’s why we’re
starting two new bureaus in the next three months, but it’s challenging. So I
think it has to be - I agree with what people have said – it has to be sort of
domain specific. So we all cover education, we’re all local, we’re doing
similar things, but there are challenges in doing it that we have to attend to,
like if we’re going to have a distribution manager, an engagement manager
working in four different communities all across the country, what does that
look like? What services can be offered and what can’t? So I think we’re
going to learn a lot from that. My second point is that I also believe in
collaboration by looking outside, like, “So what can we do?” solutions. I think
we can look outside of our sector. That’s where I found - I mean, I found a lot
of good ideas in, but also out. So in my case, just being [an] education reporter
and studying how do charter schools go from tiny mom & pops to, “Oh, we
need to create charter management or organizations networked or backend
support?” So I look a lot at them for guidance for our industry and I think
there’s [a] way to coordinate that knowledge-sharing and then two, I also look
to the technology companies. In New York City, our new distribution and
engagement person and I went to a tech start up, Birchbox, which you
wouldn't think has anything to do with journalism. They sell beauty products,
but we met for an hour with their social media team and learned more than we
could’ve learned, I think, in a year, talking to each other about social media
here in this room. So they have to invest in that. They’re way ahead of us and
it just occurred to me while I was sitting in that conference room if I could
bring five of my colleagues into this meeting, doesn’t Birchbox get a
corporate responsibility pat on the back? Don’t we all learn a ton? So
unfortunately, I pitched it to Birchbox, [where] my friend is an early co-
founder and they said no, but I think the foundation’s [crosstalk].
Murray: Steve?
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42
Beatty: Yes. Following up on what Joel and Andy were talking about, we all have
very different missions, and it’s best that we find like-minded people to carry
these out. I agree with that, but I also think there’s an incredible benefit to
being in rooms with people that have widely different missions. At CJET last
year we were put in a room with for-profit and nonprofit people and I thought,
“Aww man, I’m going to have to sit here and listen to them talk about equity
investments,” and things like that from the for-profit side. [Laughter] I found
that it was fascinating to have some of them in the for-profit world look at us
and say, “You have that much money to do what?” and you’re squandering it.
It was a slap in the face for me, and a good one. So even though we should get
together with likeminded people, I think we shouldn’t discount the fact that
the people running for-profit or micro sites shouldn’t be attractive to people
running statewide organizations and Dylan’s group, LION, is a daily reminder
of that on Facebook, with the posts that I see from various organizations. So
we shouldn’t discount different people.
Murray: So we have three very sage observers of the newspaper industry who’ve been
sitting quietly for the last hour and I think we should now make them talk and
then we’ll take our break. Rem, Jane, Rick, in that order.
Rem Rieder, USA Today:
First of all, I’m really glad to be here. [Unintelligible] people doing this stuff
because I found the whole rise of nonprofits to be one of the most interesting
stories in the field in recent years. The other thing that really struck me – I
wrote a couple of columns about hyper-local [news outlets] and some of these
sites represented in the room – is that for them to keep going – and many of
their great examples like Dylan – [unintelligible] I guess really depends on
one person or two people working around the clock, seven days a week. I
guess my hope would be, I guess, as this all evolves, that we see ways to keep
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43
that kind of passion and mission, but do it in a way that’s kind of more
sustainable both for the organization and the people. That maybe it’s - you can
actually live a little bit of a life, because to me - I love the work that the
ProPublicas of the world are doing but to me – it’s the best tradition of
journalism, the Andy Halls of the world. People [who] just care so much
about it are willing to dedicate their lives to it. I’d love to see that kind of
evolution with support of foundations, shared services, a lot of what we’re
talking about – to take it to the next step.
Murray: So Andy Hall is now a type? [Laughter] Jane.
Jane McDonnell, Online News Association:
It kind of feels to me like what I’m hearing in this room is dissolution of
everything that we’re seeing here [in] the Online News Association, and
especially over the past five years. Things are moving so quickly and I
actually have sympathy for everyone who’s trying to keep up with it and
trying to help. I’ll tell you that the evolution as we’ve seen it, which will be no
surprise to anyone, is all of our programming at our conference which is
probably where we have the biggest bulk attendance and the biggest eyes and
ears has just evolved - not just evolved, but just stampeded into business needs
and demands and technology needs and demands. The journalism is of course
important, and it’s the end game, but the big thing right now is: How do I
sustain? Once I figure that out, how do I keep moving at the speed that we
need to move to get news out and move it out accurately? So it seems to me -
I’ve been hearing a lot of great suggestions around the table and I know we’re
going to be talking about some of those later on, but it does seem to me that
the only way that we’re going to address all this is that we need to move as
quickly as we possibly can. I think part of our role as journalists has always
been to sit back and analyze, and what I’ve really felt like in the last five years
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44
especially is that the faster we can move to help folks, the better off we’re all
going to be.
Murray: This conversation sounds very similar to what you hear from the for-profits?
McDonnell: Yes.
Murray: I see. Absolutely. Rick. You get the final word before we go off to caffeine so
make the most of it.
Rick Edmonds: Thank you so much. So I’ll try to be quick. I have three thoughts. Having been
to a lot of these kinds of meetings to sort of [see a] rising level of confidence
and knowledge of good practice that’s in this room – I think that’s a big
change from three or four years ago where people in this business felt like
kind of lonesome pioneers. I would say from a newspaper business angle, in
[the] newspaper business, which I have as my particular focus, it’s been
alluded to, but I think a new factor is how eager newspapers are for
collaboration and for good material. That’s at least - I think that’s a win-win
and it’s certainly [a] way to get some distribution for…
Murray: How many of those organizations are represented around the table syndicate?
Well, I was going to ask that question next. How many of you make money
from syndication?
Edmonds: You can do it either way. You can do it and make some money or you can do
it basically to extend the reach of the good work you do.
Murray: Okay. Audiences, what we’re going to come back to - we’re going to leave
business behind having solved all of those issues…
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45
Edmonds: One more if I could…
Murray: Oh yes, go ahead.
Edmonds: I was interested in reading the Knight report that this particular report was not
going to address quantity and quality said – or tried to measure that and that’s
understandable, but I still think that’s a huge lingering issue here; is exactly
how much important resources gone away from newspapers, magazines, and
to some extent television? Are there ways to go from 170 organizations to –
somebody said 1,500? That might be a next step.
Murray: It is. I mean, if you look at the gap, Amy, what’s the drop off over the last
three decades?
Mitchell: [Unintelligible]…
Murray: No, I’m talking about the drop off in newsroom employment.
Mitchell: [Unintelligible]
Murray: So, the most optimistic - this gets to your point, I think, earlier - the most
optimistic assessment of what this nonprofit sector can do is a tiny, tiny, tiny
piece of [those] lost resources. I think that’s part of the point here you’re
making. Ten-minute break, then we’ll come back and we’ll get to great
journalism and audience engagement.
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PART II: Innovations in Engaging the Audience
Alan Murray, Pew Research Center:
This is the good part. We’re going to talk about the journalism. We’re going
to talk about how to build audiences. I don’t think any of you really got in this
for the money and if you did get in for the money, you made a big, big
mistake. So let’s talk about the journalism, how to engage audiences, how to
grow audiences. We talked some in the last session about syndication and I
know there are some people who want to talk about syndication but we’re at
this interesting moment in terms of technology where you have to decide how
much of your resources are going to be spent trying to go through – trying to
partner up or go through traditional media outlets, how much of it would be
taking advantage of the ability that digital gives you to go directly to your
consumers and I think we should
try and get into that and talk
about it a little bit, but let’s stick
with syndication first for just a
minute because, Brian, I know
you had something you wanted
to say about it.
Brian Wheeler, Charlottesville Tomorrow:
Thank you. We partner with a lot of the for-profit media which makes us a
little unusual among our peers but they all came to us. For four years, we were
covering local government and then the local media started knocking on our
doors looking for content. I picked up the newspaper this morning.
Charlottesville Tomorrow has two stories on the front page and I got in the
car, turned on the radio. My senior reporter is on a one-hour program talking
about the stories he’s written. So we’re partnering with radio, we’re partnering
with the [alt] weekly, the daily and one of the things in our syndication is that
I don’t want any money for it. We give this content to them because I want to
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2
be an equal partner with those media properties. I don’t want them to tell me
which stories we can or shouldn’t be writing and instead, what I want is in-
kind support for marketing, for printing. They print our voter guides. We do a
16-to-20-page voter guide on just the board of supervisors, on just city council
and so they print that for us. The in-kind support we get adds up to more than
we would ever get if they paid us per story.
Murray: Brian, those stories that are in the paper this morning, are those exclusively to
the paper?
Wheeler: Yes. Well, they’re exclusive to them as a media partner. They’re on our
website…
Murray: They are on your website? So you can distribute them digitally any way you
want to?
Wheeler: Sure.
Murray: So it’s not holding back your digital development?
Wheeler: No. In fact, we feed directly to the newspaper’s website via RSS, all the
headlines that are partner stories so the headline goes on their site
automatically. The link back is to us so all the eyeballs come to our website if
you’re looking at it online but we get in the print product which gets us to
thousands more people than whatever come to our website.
Murray: Jeff?
Jeff Jarvis, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism (CUNY): [I totally
respect] [Unintelligible] what [Molly] mentioned before with the Repost
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[data] that we’ve had. I’ve been thinking for years about the notion of an
embeddable article. [I thought]
‘why isn’t [an] article
embeddable like a YouTube
video?’ And I was about to go
build it at CUNY [City
University of New York], when
Debbie Galant found it. And it
exists – really well-thought-
through – at Repost. So your
article becomes embeddable like
a video. It travels with your brand, your revenue, your analytics and your
links. You keep the SEO. They’ve found that 98% of the audience is
incremental from originator to embedder and the click-through rate – here’s
the beautiful part – the click-through rate from a complete article which you
think would be zero because they’ve read it all, the opposite, it’s 5% to 7%
because they’re saying, “Oh, I like this.” They’re highly qualified clicks-
through.
Murray: Hey, wait, I want to make sure I understand it. Why would the local
newspaper in Charlottesville put an embeddable article on its site if the
revenue is [crosstalk]…
Jarvis: Funny you should ask.
Murray: …if the revenue is going to Brian?
Jarvis: Funny you should ask. Well, because they get more [unintelligible]. So the
way this works in New Jersey is with [unintelligible] Commons, it became the
basis of a content and audience sharing network.
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Murray: And revenue sharing?
Jarvis: Not yet. That’s next I hope – what I [unintelligible] agreed into the
calculation. So what happens is NJ Spotlight is doing great work. NJ.com
said, “We love your work. We would like to bring more audience to it.” So
they got Spotlight to join Repost. Spotlight’s stuff is now embeddable.
NJ.com brings tons of audience when they promote it. Yes, right now, it’s
Spotlight’s ad there but what I know is going to happen is the publisher of
NJ.com is going to come along and say, “You know what? I can improve the
revenue for both of you guys. Why don’t you let me just do that and we’ll
share revenue then?” That’s the next stage and NJ becomes for-profit.
Spotlight’s in there…
[Male]: Is it metered? If it’s metered, they get money out of it that way.
Jarvis: Right now, it’s just your ad appears there. Obviously, that’s – a Baristanet
post that appears in the South Jersey blog 200 miles away – that’s not such a
viable ad if it’s for a hairdresser so that’s where an ad network needs to come
in but it’s a first important step that you have all these big and small profit or
not-for-profit media entities now sharing content, sharing audience. It’s also
the basis then for doing collaborative projects and more. It’s a kumbaya
moment.
Murray: Anybody else have interesting syndication content sharing arrangement? So
that’s Susan?
Susan Mernit, Oakland Local:
So we both distribute our content and we take other people’s content. So like
Brian, we have an active partnership with KQED [a public television station
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5
in San Francisco], New America Media, SFGate. We push our content out on
Yahoo! News where we have a regional and local partnership but we’ve also
started taking content from other players so we now publish content from the
Oakland Post which is a historically black paper and they run our stories both
in paper and on their website and from a small group called the East Bay
Citizen. It’s like a local Politico. So we’re very interested in how we can be a
platform to both push content to other people and to manage some of our
editorial costs by working with reputable third parties.
Murray: Rose?
Rose Hoban, North Carolina Health News:
I just wanted to think that the common thread that Brian [Wheeler] and – I’m
sorry, I missed your name – had – from New Jersey down there had was that
the time lag. So Brian was going for four years and then started to get the
sharing with the other people. He’s talking about you have years and then the
next step, the next step. I just wanted to point that out yet again that you have
to build the brand, your brand and then other people start to come. No?
Well…
Jarvis: No. In fact, a new site can now get
audience faster from being embedded
on the big sites and so this becomes the
basis of why I think that in New Jersey,
the ecosystem is set up with what we –
when we modeled the ecosystem at
CUNY, we saw four legs to the stool
what I’ll call [unclear] businesses, new
news organizations, networks and
public media and we have all four of
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those in New Jersey now. So now what is a fertile ground so that news sites
that start can come in will be better supported because they can more quickly
get audience and get exposure and join in revenue-sharing opportunities and
those kinds of things so before you started alone on your own, yes, it was a
longer build. Now, we want this collaborative infrastructure there in the
ecosystem and really treat it like that. New Jersey was one of the most
screwed up media networks in the country – media markets in the country. We
think there’s an opportunity to make New Jersey a model but the model
through this ecosystem view.
Murray: Anybody taking an opposite approach saying, “We don’t want to do
sponsorships that we have the tools we need to build the audience ourselves”?