Not-For-Profit
Next Steps: What We Heard, What We Need
Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
At the end of our New Business Models for (Local) News Conference last week we asked a question we’ve been asking since our first go-round three years ago: What’s next? What do we, as practitioners of journalism, need to do to help sustain journalism in this new age?
It seems there is still a simple two-word answer: More training.
Sure, responses were all over the map (the full list is posted below the jump) and I’ll get to some of those in a moment. But, the most common request at root is for more help understanding our new media environment.
Some of the independent, hyperlocal startups (dare I call them bloggers?) in the audience said they could use help with everything from basic research and editing practices to selling and analyzing ads to understanding business finance. They also want to build a stronger indy-web community that, at a minimum, would be a forum to share best and worst practices.
The churched journalists in the room asked for some of the same instruction: editing for the web, learning the basics of graphics, and web literacy (tweeting, texting and blogging). But, like the indy’s, the guys inside established media organizations need help with the business side (see Jeff’s post on getting “theah from heah”).
Folks want to see programs for bringing business students into media management (much as we tried to do last summer). A few more suggestions:
- Future conferences organized around specific revenue opportunities – some people also want to have a conference organized around verticals and niche sites.
- Research into what kinds of advertising small businesses need.
- Strategies for making that advertising more valuable.
- Looking at what impact greater bandwidth and mobile devices will have on journalism and advertising.
One veteran journalist told me someone should create a not-for-profit, possibly based in a university, that offers free business consulting services to journalism startups. He said the consultancy could cultivate a thousand test cases for our business models – a much better approach, he says, than getting funding for a lab to test them out in one area (which was another suggestion from the panel).
Finally, here are two of my favorites: training for small communities that have lost their papers and a conference aimed at media in Africa and other parts of the world. It is important to keep these areas, so often left out of the conversation, in our minds.
As I said, there are a lot more topics below the fold. We’ll be doing more work on some or most of these suggestions in the coming weeks and months. Do you have more? Send them along!
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Livestream: NewBiz Conference
Posted on 11. Nov, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Our third annual summit on the future of news is getting started. Today it’s all about local. We’ll be tweeting all day, too. Hit us up with questions and comments, the hashtag is #newbiz. Conference details and schedule are here.
UPDATE: For those of you who are wondering, here is a link to the models that are being discussed this morning.
And, here’s the livestream for your viewing pleasure:
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Counting on Membership, Redrawing our Not-for-Profit Model
Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
We’ve heard a fair bit of criticism in recent weeks that the revenue estimates (mostly in advertising) in some of our for-profit models were far too high. So, we are surprised to hear from Jim Barnett that the membership projections in our not-for-profit model are too low.
By his lights, a not-for-profit like the one we envision (not unlike the real-life MinnPost), could reasonably generate more than $700,000 in membership revenues by year three, compared to the $547,000 we had estimated. Barnett, a journalist who is studying not-for-profit management at The George Washington University, was kind enough to plug his own assumptions into our model. His revision is available as an Excel download here.
Barnett started with a slightly higher number of member-donors in year one, taking the number of MinnPost members in its first 14 months and translating that to cover just 12 months. His calculations include some members not included in MinnPosts’s annual report (which was our source), arriving at a first year membership estimate of $298,000, roughly $25,000 more than our model.
But the real differences start to show up in years two and three as the news organization matures and puts roots deep into the community. Barnett estimates that by year three the not-for-profit should aim for a five-fold increase in the total number of members, to 4,157 from 762.
Barnett, who is studying not-for-profit management at George Washington University, says his assumptions draw on studies of membership efforts at mature not-for-profits. Typically, a robust membership drive will result in a pyramid where the majority of donors are at the lower contribution levels. Rather than extrapolating membership based on a conversion of estimated unique visitors (as in our model), Barnett has drawn a picture of what a healthy membership pyramid for a metropolitan news organization should look like in three years. Even with his more robust assumptions, however, Barnett’s organization still converts just one percent of estimated unique visitors. Indeed, the lowest rung accounts for much of the growth in Barnett’s model while membership at higher levels grows more slowly and actually decreases in the highest.
While there isn’t a defined statistical correlation between the top and bottom of the pyramid, Barnett says there is a relationship.
“It’s a social process, people see what leaders in the community and their peers are giving and say they want to be a part of that,” Barnett says. “People start small and work their way up. Not every body will move up the ladder, not everybody who moves up will go to the top, but the end game as a not-for-profit is to make this a part of people’s lives. When there’s a socialization to it, that’s when you start getting the reinforcing numbers at the lower end.”
More and more journalists, casting about for ways to preserve their livelihood, have been drawn to the not-for-profit model. The Voice of San Diego announced last week that it will provide advice and support to an offshoot in nearby Orange County and Spot.Us has launched a franchise in Los Angeles. But, as Barnett makes clear in a post on ProPublica’s effort to start finding alternatives to foundation grants, launching a not-for-profit cannot be a “tin-cup substitute” for journalists who balk at running a business.
“A lot of these organizations get the grant money but then struggle to make it on their own, he says. “That’s what this is about, how to go from being hatched to going out in the wild to survive.”
Want to add your own assumptions to our models? Go right ahead! And, please, shoot them back to us. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)
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Chi-Town Daily News Aims to Profit
Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The Chi-Town Daily News, the not-for-profit out of Chicago that launched four years ago, announced today that it will become a for-profit venture. Editor Geoff Dougherty announced the move in a post on the site, which has received funding from the Knight Foundation and a host of other supporters.
Dougherty explains the move:
We’ve concluded that, as a nonprofit, we cannot raise the money we need to build a truly robust local news organization that provides comprehensive local coverage.
The Daily News needs $1 million to $2 million per year to do a great job of covering a city as sprawling and complex as Chicago. And despite hundreds of phone calls and letters to foundations, corporations and individual donors over the past four years, we’ve never come close to that.
Last year, we raised about $300,000. This year, due to the economic downturn, it was unclear whether we would be able to maintain that level of revenue, let alone move quickly to expand our coverage.
Jim Barnett, former Washington correspondent at The Oregonian who is now studying not-for-profit journalism models at George Washington University, thinks other news start-ups may follow the Chi-Town Daily News example and use not-for-profit status to prove an editorial concept before launching a for-profit venture.
“I do think more will follow this path, but not this quickly, and, I think, out of strength rather than necessity,” says Barnett, who blogs his research here and at the Nieman Journalism Lab. “I think other nonprofits with ambitious revenue goals will consider hybrid strategies — perhaps launching for-profit operations that help supplement their resources, much as Minnesota Public Radio did before spinning them off. But the strength of the nonprofit model would remain — that is, it puts the needs of the newsroom ahead of the investor.”
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Community Training in the Ecosystem
Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
One function that runs throughout the entire ecosystem is the role of community training — both in editorial coverage and ad sales.
The New News Organization plays an important role here as an outlet for experienced, professional journalists to train local bloggers and citizen journalists how to cover their communities with more depth, detail and accuracy. That training would then help the NNO expand its daily coverage of education, local politics, crime, business, sports, entertainment and nightlife. (See our post from yesterday on the staffing breakdown for the NNO.)
Mike Reicher, a CUNY J-School grad student, wrote about his experience at The Local this summer recruiting experienced journalists to train budding community reporters and photographers.
Also, in our interviews with several not-for-profit news sites, we found experienced investigative journalists like Trent Seibert of Texas Watchdog training everyday people around the country how to properly cover their communities. Doing so has allowed Trent and his colleagues to raise more money for their investigative news site, which will play a vital role in the future of journalism.
And as local coverage grows, there will also be opportunities for professional training in citizen sales. In the larger framework, business-to-business services like a white label email and online marketing training service — or even in-person training sessions — could provide viable revenue opportunities for a new news organization. Those services also represents the kind of broader community outreach people like Steve Buttry have been calling for in various places and in response to some of our models. As a result, citizen sales training could help independent local bloggers grow their ad revenues without the need to hire a full-time sales person.
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Advertising in a Sustainable Not-for-Profit Model
Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback to our models, both online and out in Aspen, since we made them public yesterday. Some of the best comments have come from Jim Barnett, who questioned some of the results in our not-for-profit model both in the comments and later in a piece on theNieman Lab site.
He asks whether our model for the growth of advertising revenues–to 49% of all revenues by year three from 18% in year one–is possible or desirable at a lean not-for-profit new organization. First, to determine whether such growth is possible we looked to Joel Kramer, CEO at MinnPost.com. Kramer told David Westphal in a piece at OJR in October that he hopes 70% of MinnPost’s revenues will come from advertising by 2011.
Here’s the paragraph from the OJR piece:
Q. What was your hope, what is your hope on the mix of advertising and contributed revenue?
A. When we started we said our hope was, by 2011, 70 percent advertising, 30 percent membership. Right now it’s running about 50-50, maybe a little higher on the membership side. It’s pure guesswork because it’s a new model. The key is to get to a sustainable model by 2011. There are a lot of reasons to become optimistic, but the advertising side really needs to get better.
Kramer has since been hard at work developing display ad business (MinnPost was charging a $15 cpm earlier this summer) and new advertising units, including a Twitter-like service that he thinks could be a new form of classifieds for local news.
Our model only has 49% of revenues coming from advertising in the third year. Still, it’s a fair point to wonder whether not-for-profits should join the scramble for advertising and sponsorships when for-profits are having such a hard time of it themselves. Kramer himself comments on Barnett’s post to say our model appears to overestimate potential advertising and underestimate membership revenues. He also does a good job of answering Barnett on the pressures such a lean organization faces in separating business from editorial.
Again, we’d love to play that scenario out in our Google doc to see if those differences amount to a wash. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)
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Thank You and Keep ‘em Coming
Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
So far we received a lot of interesting responses since the FOCAS conference kicked off yesterday and we look forward to reading more as we continue to break down our individual models.
This project is all about interactivity and we wouldn’t have moved past the theoretical phase without your input. That goes for our 113 survey participants and the 13 sites we profiled as well.
Keep the comments coming and give your own figures a shot using one of our spreadsheets. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)
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The Assumptions Behind Our Models
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Some points about the assumptions baked into our models:
We settled on a $12 cpm as a conservative benchmark, based on feedback from a number of news organizations, large and small. Indeed, we commonly heard a range of $15 to $20 cpm. In terms of for-profit startups that replicate what we are calling the New News Organization, San Diego News Network is charging between $8-$10 cpm right now and they anticipate the rate will go higher once the economy recovers. For smaller startups and hyperlocals, we calculated a cpm from the time-based advertising rates. Here is a list of the folks who participated in our survey. Hopefully running through these two lists will answer some of your questions about where our numbers come from. Bottomline, we have data from a lot of sites that have been aggregated into the models.
Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog asks why the development costs for our Not-for-Profit model is not higher in the first year? 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. Perhaps we haven’t factored in enough of a front-end development cost.
Bradshaw also questions one of our conclusions, that this new news organization can actually be as profitable as we postulate. He writes on Online Journalism blog:
Also, I’m somewhat baffled by the projected margins of 29% by year 3 – those are the sorts of margins news organizations enjoyed during the ‘print bubble’© and led to the sort of debts and shareholders that have been just as problematic as advertisers.
It’s important to separate profit margins from revenues. The news organization we envision is much smaller, with $20 million in annual revenues, compared to the hundreds of millions in revenues enjoyed by print newspapers today. Of course, the new organization’s costs are smaller, too, hence the profit margins. That means those margins don’t require the huge capital investments made by newspapers in the past. The new online news organization will necessarily be more agile and flexible.
A point for some of those folks who think our assumptions are overly optimistic. Our goal was to project what happens when the daily newspaper in a large city has gone away. That’s the context for our numbers: what will advertisers do when they need to go to an online-only publication? In all of these cases, we are testing hypothetical models. That’s why we’ve posted the spreadsheets online. We’re asking you to put in your own assumptions and share them with us, please put your versions in the comments. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)
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FOCAS: Live from Aspen
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
The CUNY New Business Models for News Project, funded by the Knight Foundation, is presenting its work at the Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communication and Society today. (You can read about our project here and dig into the new models here.)
Below is Jeff Jarvis’ presentation, which he made using new software from Prezi. Just click within the screen and advance to the next slide.
Click here to see the presentation in full-screen.
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The Models: Not-for-Profit News
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
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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Video Volunteers Brings Citizen Media to Disadvantaged Communities
Posted on 04. Aug, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Imagine if citizens in low-income neighborhoods around the U.S. were given the necessary cameras, software and training to make short videos about important issues in their communities. Say, cultural, socioeconomic and political issues not covered by their local newspapers or television networks.
That is what Jessica Mayberry, co-founder of the global social media network Video Volunteers, has brought to underdeveloped and underreported communities in India. Her organization trains everyday citizens how to cover newsworthy subjects like local government inefficiencies, health and class divisions.
Most of the training is performed through workshops, where aspiring community producers are taught how to perform research, create story outlines, use the equipment and software, and then go out and shoot. The successful ones are then compensated by the organization for their work. Since 2006, Video Volunteers has trained 150 community producers in 350 villages with the help of other nonprofit organizations.
A live video screening in India
“What we’re seeking to demonstrate is look, you can produce topical videos,” says Jessica, a New York native who spawned the idea for Video Volunteers with her partner, Stalin K., in 2003. “What matters is that you’re from that local region, you know the issues there, and you have the communication skills to get the best stories out.”
The idea behind using video to tell those stories — apart from its visceral impact — is that many of the targeted communities have low literacy rates, she says, which keeps newspapers and magazines at a distance. Her organization’s work has resulted in a heightened awareness among audiences of how their communities function.
“Some of our community producers did a story a while back on the closing of a water treatment plant in their region,” says Jessica. “A lot of people got sick, and after the producers started to record what was going on, the local government came to one of the community screenings and told everyone, ‘No, no, no. We’re going to reopen the plant.’
“The purpose wasn’t to bring fresh water to India, but to empower local people with the communication and information tools to solve these problems on their own.”
One of the organization’s initial challenges was finding the money needed to buy cameras, computers and the right software. Fortunately in 2008 Video Volunteers won $275,000 in the annual Knight Foundation News Challenge, which awards several million dollars a year for innovative ideas that bring new “platforms, tools and services” “to community news, conversations, information distribution and visualization.”
Their other challenge has been keeping morale up among the community producers they train. Very often the effort put in outweighs the compensation — just like with most journalism (or advocacy) in America.
“It’s a tough job,” says Jessica. “They love it because of they attention they get, and producing videos is far more interesting than what they were doing before. But, they work really late at night and they feel they’re not getting paid enough, especially knowing that they have this very monetizable skill. If we were a bricklaying organization, they would know exactly how much they should get paid for their work and that pay would be far more concrete.”
Now as Video Volunteers extends its reach to other communities around the world, Jessica hopes to see her current model pick up enough momentum to sustain itself.
“The thing we need to figure out is how to do this in a way that’s permanent and ongoing,” she says. “What we’re trying to figure out is: what’s the lowest cost model to keep this going? How do we equip tens of thousands of marginalized people around the world with the necessary tools to tell their own stories?”
Video Volunteers co-founder Jessica Mayberry
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Not-for-Profit News Deep in the Heart of Texas
Posted on 27. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The wave of not-for-profit start-ups looking to cover local and statewide news continued to grow last week with the announcement that the Texas Tribune acquired the Texas Weekly, a subscription newsletter devoted to Texas politics and government. As newspapers continue to struggle and advertising revenues fall, it seems like new news organizations are finding it easier to get off the ground without having to worry about making a profit in the bottomline (MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, and the St. Louis Beacon are three examples that leap to mind). In our research so far, we’ve come across successful for-profit news start ups less frequently.
As Neiman Lab noted, the deal gives the Tribune, which is set to launch this fall, a team of experienced reporters and an archive of content dating back to 1984.
The Tribune’s founder, venture capitalist John Thornton, told Alan Mutter last week why he thinks the not-for-profit model is the only avenue for quality, public-service journalism:
“In 2006, we looked at the challenges being faced by newspapers and how guys like us could make a profit,” he said. “The for-profit conclusion was to buy lead-generation businesses and that has worked out for us.”
But…
“I was reminded of something my pastor said when I was a kid growing up,” he explained. “If you mix politics and religion, the pastor said, you get politics. The same thing seems to be true in journalism. If you mix journalism and business, you get business. That’s when I realized serious journalism is never going to be a really good business again.”
Thornton told our own Jeff Jarvis last month that raising enough money through donations to cover state government should be a cakewalk, and might even lead to an increase in reporters on the beat.
Dance companies in Texas raise $20mm a year. . . . If journalism philanthropy, 10 years from now, were the size of dance, we’d put 150 reporters on statewide issues and could literally change the way state government operates. Think about that: an extra 20 at the capital; a couple each for all the agencies and the school board; 20 on the border. You almost can’t spend that much money responsibly. I don’t need opera. I don’t need visual arts. Don’t need symphony. Just give me dance, and I’ll change state government.
But, the starting budget will be closer to one ball than the entire dance season. Thornton tells Mutter the Tribune will run on a budget of $2 million and support a staff of 15 reporters. They won’t cover the waterfront of the state government, but they will be able to focus on the energy industry, the border with Mexico, and how demographic change is transforming the state’s politics. As Andrew Donohue, the editor of Voice of San Diego, another not-for-profit newsroom, noted in a chat with us last week, for a start up focusing on getting just a few things right in the beginning works best anyway.
Finally, here is a surely meaningless, though still interesting, indication of the Tribune’s anticipated Web 2.0-ness: even though it won’t even begin publishing for a while yet, it already claims more Facebook followers than any other newspaper in the state.
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News Innovators on the Frontline: Voice of San Diego
Posted on 24. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
As metro newspapers have faced an ugly year of decline and collapse, media observers have pointed to a number of not-for-profit efforts around the country that might fill the void. The Voice of San Diego is a notable example of a new breed of news organizations already taking up the slack, which is more than simply a theoretical discussion since the Union-Tribune was recently sold and endured a hefty round of layoffs.
The Economist, in a story on the future of the news business, called Voice of San Diego a “small, scrappy news website,” praising them for covering “nitty-gritty issues such as water, crime and health care—the sort of stories that local newspapers used to cover extensively.” That coverage has included an award-winning series on local redevelopment projects gone wrong. Founded in 2004, the Voice now employs 11 reporters, supported by a combination of foundation support (including the Knight Foundation, which is also funding this project), individual donations, and advertising. Their readership has grown too, peaking this spring at just over 60,000 unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast. We spoke to Voice editor Andrew Donohue earlier this week.
Voice of San Diego Editor Andrew Donohue
What is the key to the success you guys have enjoyed that others coming behind should know?
I think a really important thing is to have people from outside of journalism on your board. There’s a natural tendency to try to put a bunch of journalists on your board, in actuality that’s what you know as a journalist. We have people who’ve run start ups, who’ve done venture capital, people who’ve had to know how to run smart agile and small companies and learned to adapt to changing technologies really quickly. That’s a huge plus for us. They challenge you to think in ways you probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
Another one is to be incredibly focused on what you’re covering and to know you’re personality from the start. So many people, if they’ve come from a big newspaper, want to try to be everything to everybody. They want to be that general interest, department store kind of publication. Inevitably, if you start something like this you’re going to have a small staff and you need to be incredibly focused and just be the best at something rather than being okay at a lot of things.
When you know your personality you can make news decisions a lot easier. Everyday you have to balance what you cover and decide if you’re going to chase that story or ignore it, put your head down and keep going on a longer-term project that you know you have and that you know no one else has. Or are you going to be one of eight reporters at a press conference?
I’m glad you mentioned the importance of being focused. You’ve written about the luxury your reporters enjoy in not worrying about being a general-interest paper of record, that they “learn how to let the small stuff slide in order to go after the more ambitious stories.” But, what happens if the San Diego Union-Tribune folds? That would take away your ability to lean on that paper of record and go after the high-impact stories, right?
You’ve asked a question that we’ve thought through a hundred times. First, my hope would be that even if the UT did cease to exist, there still would be other publications to do that day-to-day coverage.
Second, I think a lot of that information is being distributed directly by a lot of these organizations now. You have the fire department and police department with their own Twitter feeds and websites. For a long time reporters have served as the police blotter and simply transcribed that back to the public. A lot of the time people don’t need a reporter translating that stuff. So I’m hoping that the barriers to distribution being lower some of this stuff can be communicated to people without a middleman. The idea is that we would be there to fact check and go after the more interesting and necessary stories in-depth.
There will be an ecosystem to replace a lot of that, but what you’re going to see are a lot more but smaller publications.
But, do you envision an expansion of the Voice of San Diego to take up some of that slack? Which gaps would you fill?
We’re envisioning that anyways. We think there is some really interesting and intelligent ways of doing arts and sports coverage that haven’t been done by traditional media through blogs and building communities around readers.
We would certainly like to have a dedicated investigative team. We wouldn’t mind doubling back on some of the things we already cover. We have one full-time political reporter and a region certainly needs more than just one of those. So we’d certainly double back on things like politics, education, housing, and the economy. There are a lot of things we still don’t cover like health care. We have a lot of business stories here that aren’t always told.
So, how do you plan to pay for that expansion and build something that is sustainable without relying on foundation support?
Knight has always been clear that they are not a long-term solution. But, if you look at public broadcasting they still do get funding from foundations. So, we believe we are sustainable. But we don’t ever want to have to rely on only one or two revenue streams.
We’re starting to dream up a lot of different ways to monetize different things. We’re laying the foundation for a syndication service. Another is an obituary section with different levels of service that you would pay different amounts for. We’re also looking at producing reports or content for people very specifically.
None of those are in play right now, as far as getting money, or have any of the rules built around them, but that’s what we’re incubating.
Can you tell me more about the syndication idea?
With the contraction of the last six months, not only in print but also in radio and television, we’ve seen a drastic increase in the desire to partner with us. At the start we were overjoyed to have a partnership with say the NBC affiliate because we had access to a whole new audience that we wanted to get to our site and to magnify the impact of our stories.
The more that that’s happened, the more people have asked us to partner, we’ve realized that the quid pro quo, the trade off, isn’t as great for us now that we’ve done a pretty good job of getting into those markets.
The trade-off for our content no longer is just publicity and we can’t continue providing free content to a bunch of for-profit companies without exploring a way to get some of that money back. Also, if there is going to be a void in the media world we also have an obligation as a non-profit to fill it with public service reporting and high quality news.
Also, part of our metamorphosis is understanding that we’re not a website. A website is the main way that we distribute our information right now, but that’s not in our mission and that’s not our identity. As soon as we’re okay with that, then we’re okay with syndicating our content and then we understand there’s a lot of ways to engage people. For some people that may be the website, for others that’s us putting on on a forum about housing or the economy or post-election analysis.
Those other outlets cut both ways. Yes, they’re great exposure and allow us to fundraise, but they also allow us to get our stories out.
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Chi-Town Daily Discloses Costs for Donations
Posted on 23. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
The Chicago-based Chi-Town Daily News, a nonprofit metro news site that launched in December 2005, has set up a new kind of tip jar this month. As a way to pull in more funding, the site now tells readers the value of every article they read before requesting donations to support its ongoing coverage.
“Reader donations allow us to hire talented full-time journalists to cover key beats like housing, the environment and Chicago’s community college system, and to train volunteer neighborhood reporters,” the site denotes.
Individual stories on the site cost between $250-$1,000 to produce, depending on the word length. A typical story is worth about $350.
“It’s completely based on cost per word,” says Geoff Dougherty, the Chi-Town Daily News’ editor and CEO. “We took our expenditures for the last fiscal year and divided them by the number of words that we published over the same period.”
“In addition to boosting our donations, we’re offering people a really useful window into the cost of producing public affairs news,” he adds.
Donations from readers go to the organization’s general overhead — rent and utilities, “the occasional computer,” and paying the website’s seven-member staff, which includes a community organizer, three beat reporters, and two part-time editors.
Plenty of nonprofit news organizations like NPR have asked for donations from their audiences over the years, but Chi-Town Daily News is one of the first to breakdown its costs on a story-to-story basis. Their model resembles the one developed by Spot.Us, which asks for readers to cover the costs of investigative stories — like the origins of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — before the fact.
“If you look at NPR, they often talk about how much it costs to run a news station,” says Geoff. “But there’s never been a specific breakdown of costs. We thought this might be a good way to get readers more engaged in the funding of news.”
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News Innovators on the Frontline: Texas Watchdog
Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Two and half years ago, Trent Seibert, of Texas Watchdog, saw the potential for a local online investigative news outlet. Having worked in both journalism — at The Tennessean and The Denver Post – as well government accountability — at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research — Trent had all the right credentials.
Fortunately, a chance meeting with some like-minded funders at a journalism conference in 2006 brought him enough start-up money to launch Texas Watchdog, a nonprofit news site in Houston covering local and state government corruption and waste. The Watchdog’s first story went online in August 2008. Since then the three-member team has divided up the work needed to run an investigative news outlet. All three tackle the editorial work: reporting, editing and assigning stories to freelancers. In addition, Trent handles their public affairs and “carnival barking,” while his colleagues, Jennifer Peebles and Lee Ann O’Neal, manage the site’s databases and bookkeeping.
Texas Watchdog recently joined 25 other nonprofit news organizations at the Pocantico Estate in New York to lay the foundation for an investigative news network.
How did Texas Watchdog get started?
When the Sam Adams Alliance gave us our start-up money, part of the deal was that if we were to make this work, we would have to be in a place with a big enough market for this kind of journalism, a place where we can sustain the work we do. There are only a few places in the U.S. to do that, and I hate to say that because I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time and I love Nashville. But you need to be in a state with a big media market, and that means California, New York, or Texas. These are the places where America’s ideas come from, for good or for bad. So, we ended up picking Houston, Texas, as a place to launch this idea.
In part we thought it was a great market down here, because it’s a big city that wasn’t drenched in media. There was room for us. And Houston has more than it’s share of billionaires, so we thought we might be able to knock on a door and make a 501(c)(3) work.
How do you keep new revenue coming in?
We’re real new, and this whole concept is real new. We don’t have a big benefactor yet. So, a big chunk of our revenue comes from running educational programs that teach people about journalism. Half of our time is doing investigative and enterprise journalism here in Texas. The other half is us, at different times, going around the country and getting revenue by teaching individual groups — whether civic groups, public policy groups or blogging groups — how to do, for lack of a better term, journalism. We teach them how to file a public records request. We teach them how to look at their city halls and their schools.
With the decline of newspapers, they’re getting less information than ever before, so we’re able to give them the tools to find that information themselves. We’ve been able to cobble together a budget, between our initial grant money and creating revenue this way, to get us to the end of the year.
What do your freelancers get out of that?
Well, I can’t tell you exactly how much we pay them. But I will say that we pay our freelancers very well. I know how it feels to be in that boat. I worked at a newspaper once that paid something like 50 bucks for a freelance front-page story. It made me want to walk into the publisher’s office and beat her like a baby seal. It was embarrassing. Good writing deserves good money. Although, keep in mind, our medical benefits amount to a couple of Band Aids and some Aspirin. We’re not in a good position there yet, but hopefully we’ll be there in the next few years.
Sounds good, maybe I’ll swing by Houston in the near future. Do you see any opportunities to expand in other ways?
If you look at New York City as an example, The Village Voice used to be the one waving its fists in the face of City Hall and at the same time doing great media and music coverage. Alternative weeklies have all gone down hill since those days. So, I wouldn’t mind expanding to other areas of coverage some day. But that’s really down the road. Right now our bread and butter is doing the investigative journalism that major metros just don’t have the time and budget to cover anymore. And the local-er, the better for me. If I could find corruption on the sewer commission, brother, I would work on that all day.
What about working in conjunction with other local news outlets?
We get picked up by other news outlets fairly often. But it’s weird. We’re here to help supplement what’s missing in journalism in Houston, but at the end of the day we’re a competitor. We’ve been all over this great story about the Houston airport, with these bizarre companies operating in secret, and nobody’s picked up on it yet. But that doesn’t shock me, because we did the same thing when I was in Denver. When I was working with The Denver Post, our competitor was the Rocky Mountain News, and when they broke something really good that we didn’t have, we tried to make every excuse in the world to convince our editors, “aw, that’s not a real story. We knew that all along.”
Click below to hear an audio clip from our interview with Trent Seibert.
The Texas Watchdog Team
