The Rise of non-profit journalism

Pulitzer progress for non-profit news | Dan Kennedy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

As I was driving to work on Monday morning, I listened to the podcast of a radio documentary on Magnetar, a hedge fund whose sharp dealings in mortgage-backed securities cost investors billions of dollars and may have been a major contributor to the near-collapse of the financial markets.

The story, I suspect, will be one of the few pieces of journalism in 2010 that I'll remember when the year draws to a close. And it was largely the work of ProPublica, a nonprofit news organisation.

Later that afternoon, we learned that an article published in the New York Times Magazine last August on the suspicious deaths of elderly patients at a New Orleans nursing home following Hurricane Katrina was the recipient of a Pulitzer prize, American journalism's most prestigious award.

The story, a riveting account of the life-and-death decisions made by healthcare workers at a facility cut off and under siege, was one of the few pieces of journalism published in 2009 that I remember all these months later. And it was written by Sheri Fink of ProPublica.

For good measure, a series on the oversight of nursing care in California that was published by the Los Angeles Times was a finalist for a Pulitzer in public service. It, too, was the work of ProPublica journalists.

At a time when the long-term viability of commercial journalism remains uncertain at best, the success of ProPublica is a heartening sign that non-profits can pick up at least some of the slack.

Yes, traditional, for-profit newspapers both large (the Washington Post won four awards, the New York Times two plus the ProPublica collaboration) and small (the Bristol Herald Courier of Virginia took the coveted public-service prize) dominated Monday's Pulitzer announcements.

But for ProPublica to produce so much important journalism just two years after its founding is strikingly good news.

"To have a reporter get an award in investigative and another a finalist in public service, those are at the top of the list of categories for the kind of work we do," ProPublica editor-in-chief Paul Steiger told Joe Strupp of Media Matters for America. "It suggests that our non-partisan, non-profit model can serve a role in this time of expanding change in the media."

Some observers argue that there isn't enough money on God's green earth for the news business as a whole to switch from the for-profit to the non-profit model. The media consultant Alan Mutter recently wrote on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, that "it would take $88bn – or nearly a third of all the $307.7bn donated to charity in 2008 – to fund the reporting still being done at America's seriously straitened newspapers."

But as New York University media scholar Clay Shirky has suggested, there is no single solution to the news crisis. Instead, a variety of experiments – for-profit, non-profit and volunteer-driven – should be attempted in order to replace at least some of the public-interest journalism that was once the purview of newspapers.

Even today, when we are still at the beginning of this road, non-profit journalism is having a much deeper effect than is generally supposed.

At the macro level, National Public Radio and public radio stations in general (where ProPublica's Magnetar story was heard) constitute our most vital broadcast news medium, serving tens of millions of listeners every week. (Non-profit television news is less successful, although the stolid PBS NewsHour has its admirers, and the documentary series Frontline occasionally forces everyone to sit up and take notice.)

At the local level, non-profit news sites such as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost (serving Minneapolis-St. Paul) and the New Haven Independent have emerged as serious alternatives to the financially strapped newspapers that serve those cities.

ProPublica has hardly been perfect. The project endured some well-deserved mockery last fall when it was revealed that Steiger, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, had received a $570,000 salary in 2008. One suspects that is not what the funders expected their money to be used for.

Then, too, non-profits are sometimes accused of serving the agendas of the foundations that fund them, though that hardly seems any more pernicious than the fear of offending advertisers that pervades most newsrooms.

According to the results of a survey released on Monday by the Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism, executives at newspapers and broadcast stations are deeply pessimistic about the future of their business. "Fewer than half of all those surveyed are confident their operations will survive another 10 years – absent significant new sources of revenue," according to the report. "Nearly a third believe their operations are at risk in just five years or less."

In such an environment, the rise of non-profit journalism, though hardly a cure-all, is something to be celebrated.