Abstract
In early 2019, more than 2,000 people working in media lost their jobs. What was even more depressing than the staff reductions themselves were the companies at which they occurred: specifically, BuzzFeed, Vice, and HuffPost. These were supposed to be journalism’s success stories—until these layoffs unfolded, news industry stakeholders had portrayed these companies as the ones that finally figured out how to make a for-profit, advertising-dependent revenue model work in today’s saturated, digital media environment. The layoffs revealed that this perception reflected wishful thinking more than it did reality.
It is against this backdrop of economic uncertainty that many within journalism have begun pursuing alternative models of news production. One model that has grown increasingly popular within the news media environment, and consequently increasingly interesting to journalism researchers, is the news nonprofit. Indeed, 2018 brought not one but two books about the topic: Journalism Without Profit (Oxford University Press) by Temple University Assistant Professor Magda Konieczna, and The Rise of NonProfit Investigative Journalism in the United States (Routledge) by Monash University Adjunct Senior Lecturer Bill Birnbauer. Both offer measured, insightful analyses of what news nonprofits have set out to do, how they came to be, their strengths, their limitations, and their likely impact on both the profession and the public.
So what exactly are news nonprofits? Unlike traditional newsrooms, which depend on advertising and subscriptions to survive, news nonprofits depend on foundation grants, wealthy benefactors, and individual donors. The more well-known news nonprofits include Mother Jones, The Marshall Project, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Although news nonprofits tend to be small in terms of staffing and narrow in terms of scope (The Marshall Project, for example, focuses solely on the US criminal justice system), they often partner with larger publications so their work can reach a wider audience. They also frequently win prestigious journalism prizes and have been responsible for a number of important and impactful projects. For instance, ProPublica, one of the most famous news nonprofit in the United States, recently won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the Central American gang MS-13. These stories were jointly published with New York magazine, Newsday, and the New York Times Magazine.
Many news industry stakeholders have expressed excitement surrounding the initial growth and success of news nonprofits, yet they also wonder about their long-term sustainability. This question looms large over both books (indeed, it is presented as the central question of Birnbauer’s), though it thankfully does not prevent each author from investigating similarly pressing questions about the role of news nonprofits within the wider news media landscape. Both authors ultimately conclude that it is too soon to say whether or not news nonprofits are here to stay, and it is a testament to the thoroughness and thoughtfulness in which the authors describe their other findings that this conclusion feels both expected and strangely tangential to the more compelling issues Konieczna and Birnbauer bring to the fore.
Birnbauer’s book, which draws from a deep dive into previous research about nonprofit journalism, as well as case studies of the Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica, Mother Jones, and Center for Public Integrity, overflows with valuable—and often surprising—information about news nonprofits. For instance, news nonprofits often present themselves as attempts to fill the void of investigative journalism caused by the newspaper crisis that began early 2000s and continues today. Yet, according to Birnbauer, news publishers never really invested in investigative journalism to begin with. Furthermore, many editors actually went out of their way to keep their investigative reporters’ jobs secure even as the rest of their newsrooms underwent tremendous cuts. So although the news industry did indeed contract in reaction to economic turmoil, the notion that investigative journalism specifically suffered more losses than any other kind of news is a false one often perpetuated by the nonprofits themselves. As Michael Schudson points out in his forward to the book, “The very existence of many of the nonprofits owes much to a misunderstanding.” In short, Birnbauer’s book does not function so much as a typical, argument-driven text as it does a de facto encyclopedia for all things related to nonprofit journalism.
Konieczna’s book reads more like a traditional academic argument. Her driving question is, How are news nonprofits changing or challenging journalistic norms? Her answer, based on rigorous ethnographic case studies of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, MinnPost, and (again) the Center for Public Integrity, is much less than one might expect. On the contrary, the editorial processes and journalistic conventions pursued within news nonprofits are actually quite similar to those found in more traditional newsrooms. Konieczna thus concludes that the people behind news nonprofits are not necessarily trying to reinvent journalism by altering its practices, but instead to repair it by addressing a specific reporting deficit. She describes this phenomenon as field repair, a term she defines as, “working to fix journalism from within—as distinct from those actions taken by organizations that feel that the principles on which the news is built are broken and that it’s time to replace journalism with something else.”
According to Konieczna, there are a number of reasons why the emergence of news nonprofits has not been accompanied by more dramatic shifts in news production practices. First, many of the people who now work in news nonprofits previously worked for more conventional news organizations. The more significant reason is because news nonprofits often partner with more conventional news organizations, which would be less willing to do so if news nonprofits approached news production in dramatically different ways than those to which they were accustomed. As a result, the norms of conventional journalism shape and constrict what the nonprofits are able to do, compelling them to be aware of and even mimic mainstream news and affecting everything from their structure to their funding and, especially, their everyday operations.
So although Journalism Without Profit begins as a story about the rise of a particular model of journalism, it ultimately reveals itself to be about the implications of inter-organizational collaboration.
In short, each of these books tackle the same topic, yet they venture down different analytical paths, making them complementary and valuable resources for those interested in how journalism is—and is not—changing.
