A not-so-brutal week
for American journalism
By Jon Allsop
In May—following sharp drops in circulation and ad revenue—the Salt
Lake Tribune, a 148-year-old newspaper in Salt Lake City, Utah,
announced its intention to become a nonprofit. The Tribune’s
argument—that, as a civic good in its community, it already does the work
of a nonprofit—was simple; nonetheless, its application to the Internal
Revenue Service, under the “educational purposes” rubric, was expected to meet with regulatory hurdles. A
verdict wasn’t due until next year, so it was a surprise when the IRS contacted
the paper last week and approved its request, with no strings attached. (The IRS already
approved the establishment of the Utah Journalism Foundation, a
separate nonprofit that will help fund the Tribune and
other outlets.) Other local papers are owned by nonprofits—the Lenfest
Institute for Journalism owns the Inquirer and the Daily
News, in Philadelphia; the Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay
Times, in Florida—but until now, no legacy daily had become a nonprofit
in and of itself.
Nonprofit status, it seems, will open doors for the Tribune without
closing too many others. The paper will now have to stay
out of politics—a curiosity, given that it is owned by Paul Huntsman, scion
of the Huntsman business empire, whose brother, Jon Huntsman, Jr., was
governor of Utah, ran as a Republican candidate for president, and served
as US ambassador to China and (until very recently) Russia. That may be no
great loss, though: in May, Paul Huntsman told the New York Times that he was
actually “looking forward to getting out of the endorsement
business.”
More importantly, nonprofit status will enable the Tribune to
diversify its revenue streams, allowing it to seek donations and
philanthropic funding while still making money off of advertising and
subscriptions. (Going forward, the latter may even be tax deductible.) The
paper plans to rebuild an editorial staff that has been diminished by
rounds of layoffs, the most recent of which, last year, cut the newsroom by more than a third.
And there’s a broader context at stake here, too: as Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt wrote yesterday,
the Tribune’s move “opens the doors for many more commercial
legacy newspapers to seek tax-deductible status and philanthropic funding—a
potential lifeline for local news outlets whose owners agree to give up
control.”
It’s important to stress that nonprofit status isn’t a silver bullet. Nonetheless,
the Tribune’s nonprofit conversion represents inventive new
thinking in a local-news landscape that desperately needs it. As Schmidt
notes, important local papers are increasingly owned by big corporate
chains whose intentions, in many cases, are the opposite of philanthropic.
(Before Huntsman bought it, the Tribune was owned by
Digital First Media, a hedge fund-backed publisher that has a particularly sharp reputation for newsroom cuts.)
The biggest such chain, Gannett, is in the process of being swallowed by the second biggest,
GateHouse, which is also backed by private equity. Layoffs seem sure to follow.
Smart people have been working on potential solutions to our industry
hellscape for a while now; nonetheless, we seem to have seen a flourishing
of late. Ken Doctor, who writes regularly for Nieman Lab, announced late last month that he’s founding a new company,
called Lookout, that he says will draw on the best practices he’s observed
as an industry analyst to create a scalable new model for local news.
Doctor will be supported by the Knight Foundation and the Google News
Initiative. The latter announced recently that it will hand Lookout and
33 other projects $5.8 million (in total)
under the aegis of an “innovation challenge”; the Tribune is
among the beneficiaries, with Google funding a “playbook” for other news
organizations seeking to transition to nonprofit status. The Google News
Initiative is also supporting The Compass Experiment, a project, run by
McClatchy, that will open three “lab” newsrooms. It already launched
Mahoning Matters, a news site in Youngstown, Ohio, that aims to fill part
of the gap left by The Vindicator, a storied local paper that closed to national anger in the summer.
This week, CJR’s Mathew Ingram is leading a series of discussions on Galley, CJR’s app, about alternative models for
local news. He talked yesterday with Mandy Jenkins, general manager of
The Compass Experiment, and with Chris Horne of The Devil Strip,
an arts and culture publication in Akron, Ohio, that is transitioning to
become a cooperative owned by readers, staff, and contributors. (Anyone
with an Ohio address can buy in.) “Most of the inspiration for how we're
designing our co-op has come from looking at co-op microbreweries in the US
and co-op pubs in the UK,” Horne told Ingram. “It matters deeply that the
product is good and that they can build community that's reciprocal instead
of a business that's mostly transactional.”
There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of big companies who
claim to want to fix local journalism; more broadly, philanthropy is not
always a sustainable business model, and more inventive fixes aren’t
commonly feasible at scale. Nonetheless, innovation is clearly welcome, and
the Tribune’s new model, in particular, could help similarly
situated papers out of a hole. Jennifer Napier-Pearce, the paper’s editor,
told Nieman Lab’s Schmidt that it could have tailored its appeal to the IRS
much more closely to its own, specific circumstances, but intentionally
kept things broad: “We wanted maximum flexibility so other people could
tinker with this recipe for their particular needs.”
Below, more on local news:
· Coming
attractions: Over on Galley, Ingram has interviews
lined up with Elizabeth Hansen, who runs the News Sustainability and
Business Models program at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center; Mari Cohen, a
senior editor at South Side Weekly, a nonprofit outlet in
Chicago; Emily Ramshaw, of the Texas Tribune; Jim Brady, from Spirited
Media; and Teresa Gorman, of the Democracy Fund. You can follow their
conversations here. (ICYMI, Cohen wrote recently for CJR that “Chicago
is America’s news lab.”)
· Lawmakers
on the case, I: In June, CJR’s Andrew McCormick tracked two bills in Congress aimed at helping the news
industry: one would give outlets a temporary “safe harbor” from
antitrust rules, to boost their negotiating power; the other would make it
easier for news organizations to seek nonprofit status. (In light of the
IRS’s surprisingly permissive ruling on the Tribune, it’s not
immediately clear whether this is still needed.)
· Reasons
to be skeptical: Following the announcement of The Compass
Experiment, in March, Emily Bell wrote for CJR that tech companies such as Google “care
about journalism in the same way I care about clean water and aircraft
safety—deeply and often—but this does not qualify me to be involved in its
development. Facebook, Apple, and Google do things that journalists should
be investigating, not profiting from.”
· Community
mistrust: In new research for CJR and the Tow Center for Digital
Journalism, Andrea Wenzel and Letrell Deshan Crittenden assess how to make suburban news more inclusive.
“As funders seek to intervene in the collapse of local news, we must explore
whether and how these interventions center the marginalized people so often
overlooked by legacy newsrooms,” they write.
Other notable stories:
· Yesterday,
impeachment investigators in the House began publishing witness testimony.
In her deposition, Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine
who was ousted amid a smear campaign, said that Gordon Sondland, the US
ambassador to the European Union, advised her to tweet praise of Trump to regain his favor.
(She did not.) Sean Hannity, of Fox News, also cropped up in her testimony;
as Erik Wemple notes in the Washington Post, Hannity keeps featuring in official documents about
Trump-era scandals, including the Mueller memos that were just published by
BuzzFeed and CNN.
· For
CJR, Tiffany Stevens spoke with journalists about the challenges of preserving their work.
“Articles frequently disappear when online publications shutter or
restructure,” Stevens writes. “The internet is more like an Etch-a-Sketch
than a stone engraving—over time, some marks endure, but the rest are swept
from the canvas.”
· The
National Association of Hispanic Journalists is launching palabra., a new
platform that will commission and publish stories, from freelance members,
“that have been disregarded in larger news outlets based on the ideology
that Latino news is only a minority issue, and not a human issue.” The site
goes live here at 9am EST today.
· And
to distinguish itself from Facebook (the app), Facebook (the company) is rebranding as FACEBOOK. Good luck enforcing
that.
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