Integrity makes a comeback

Non-profit journalism a promising new trend

By: Nick Halter

Posted: 2/21/08

David Simon, the executive producer of HBO's hit drama "The Wire," worked as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote a column in The Washington Post in January outlining the struggles newspapers face today. He used his former newspaper as an example:

"So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk."

The Baltimore Sun is not alone. Newspapers across the country are buying out reporters and editors every day. Their most important craft, reporting on politics and social issues, has been replaced with sensationalized crime stories, sports columns and, of course, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton gossip.

This column is not a "boo-hoo, poor journalists" piece. It is, what I see, a light on the horizon. These important topics that have been cut out of many daily newspapers have a chance to be explored again. Non-profit journalism could become a strong voice for such subjects.

Several non-profit newspapers are in their early stages in markets across the country. They are funded by foundations and individual donors. Their reporters are given more time to scratch and claw at stories that are important to readers. Of course, there are concerns with where funding is coming from for these publications, but don't worry, I will get to that.

But first, take a typical newspaper today. It has to feed its advertisers. To do that, it has to attract readers. So a good story to have on the front page is one about, say, a crack addict who murders three people in a poor neighborhood. It sucks a reader right in.

But what good does that do? Wouldn't a more beneficial story be one that digs deep down into the underlying social problems of its community - finding out why there is a crack problem and why so many people are killed as a result of it?

That kind of reporting takes time and money. It's much easier to run the story about the murdering crack addict because it relies on police reports and witness accounts. It doesn't take more than a day to pull something like that together. But to send a reporter out to study the streets, make connections with people, research the trends and pressure the police for answers - that takes more. Charles Lewis notes this in the Columbia Journalism Review.

"Few news organizations, in fact, support such expensive curiosity anymore," he wrote. "With the institutional commitment to investigative reporting on the decline, reporters have formed their own non-profit organizations in recent years in which to do their work."

The question is, how can a non-profit be unbiased when it is receiving its funding from a foundation that likely has its own political agenda?

Barbara Hall, former vice-president of National Public Radio, the largest non-profit news organization, worked on the fundraising side of the station. She noted in Carol Guensburg's article in the American Journalism Review that there has been a trend of donors wanting to support certain specific issues and topics. Will this lead to biased coverage?

The article goes on to show non-profits, just as normal newspapers, can be influenced by its donors. But is that any different than a traditional newspaper being influenced by an advertiser? NPR, for example, has a strong firewall between its editorial and fundraising departments.

The advantage for non-profits is that they can be much more transparent in revealing where their influence could come from. The key is to disclose your donors.

A nearby example of non-profit news is MinnPost, launched in November and based in the Twin Cities.

If you click on the "About" link at the top of the screen on the group's Web site, you find that it tells you who donated money for the operation. It also goes even further than a for-profit newspaper would. The editor, Joel Kramer, former editor, publisher and president of the Star Tribune, wrote on that page that he has donated to the Democratic party in Minnesota and the United States and admits he is liberal-minded. How many newspaper editors do that?

I'm not saying this should be the end of for-profit newspapers. I honestly don't know what I would do without the Washington Post and New York Times. But as a St. Paul native, I have seen my local paper, The Pioneer Press, suffer from huge losses. As a result, the paper that arrives at my family's doorstep gets thinner and thinner what seems like every day. And as Simon noted in his column for The Post, newspapers are cutting some of the most important coverage they can offer.

Non-profit newspapers offer readers that coverage. They offer more in-depth pieces that impact people, allowing them to make better choices and satisfy the role of a newspaper in a democracy. You can get things from these organizations you might not be able to get elsewhere.

Just make sure you know who is funding the publication.

Halter is a senior print journalism major and editor in chief of The Spectator.