The Models: Not-for-Profit News

Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by in Not-For-Profit

A number of promising not-for-profit news organizations, providing both national and local coverage, have launched recently. We want to show the level of resources that might be available in a given market to augment local news gathering efforts. Researching the available charitable money in a market, we picked a hypothetical bottom line of $3 million and built one possible organization to augment journalism in the market. Note: all models assume the local daily newspaper has gone away.

View the Not-for-Profit business model as a Google Document here. (To make changes to this document, simply click File>>Create a copy or File>>Export.)

Or, download it as an Excel file here.

Click here to see the other models. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)

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7 Responses to “The Models: Not-for-Profit News”

  1. Paul Bradshaw

    17. Aug, 2009

    Curious why the web development costs are the same every year. My experience is that there’s a large up-front cost of setup etc.

  2. Matthew Sollars

    17. Aug, 2009

    Paul – Putting together a post to answer some questions about our assumptions shortly.

    Here’s the short reply to this question:
    We have on-staff developers built into our New News Organization and Not-for-Profit models, in addition to the development line item in the budget. So, yes, we anticipate that future businesses will continuously spend to update themselves.

    You may be right that we don’t have enough front-end investment. Put your figure into our model and share it with us as a Google Doc. We’d love to see it.

    Thanks,
    Matt

  3. Jim Barnett

    17. Aug, 2009

    Matthew —

    Looking at the ad revenues, seems like there is a rapid and ultimately deep dependence on ad revenues by Year 3. Was there any debate as to 1) whether that rate of increase is possible and 2) whether that level of dependence is desirable for a nonprofit and would defeat the purpose?

    Thanks

  4. Jen Handler

    17. Mar, 2010

    This is actually a comment on the hyper local model… is it safe to assume self provisioning will work? It looks like all revenue comes from self provisioned ads, without any assist… hmm

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