Diane Rehm: Assessing Non-Profit Journalism

Jul 19, 2010

Diane Rehm’s NPR hour today focused on not-for-profit journalism models. I participated in the discussion with Diane and:

  • Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity. He was Vice President of News for National Public Radio, as well as an NPR foreign affairs correspondent and London bureau chief from 1978-1997. He was also Senior Vice President of News at American Public Media / Minnesota Public Radio from 1998-2006. He co-edited “Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism.”
  • Steve Engelberg, managing editor, ProPublica. He’s the former managing editor of The Oregonian in Portland. Before joining The Oregonian, Mr. Engelberg worked for The New York Times for 18 years, including stints in Washington, D.C., and Warsaw, Poland, as well as in New York.
  • Evan Smith, CEO and Editor in Chief of The Texas Tribune. He spent nearly 18 years at Texas Monthly as the magazine’s president and editor in chief. On his watch, Texas Monthly was nominated for sixteen National Magazine Awards, and twice was awarded the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
Good talk, and great call-ins and evolving comments on the website. Of course, the NPR model itself came up, though we could only touch on the potential impact it can have on new, local journalism.
Most significant, I think, is the passion you can hear from those practicing the new, non-profit journalism. Freed from the visegrip of industry worry, they are doing the journalism, and you can hear the optimism in their voices. My issue here can still be summed up in one word: scale. That’s the issue before us, even as journalism re-invents itself intriguingly.

Posted by Ken Doctor | Filed Under 5Spot, Daily Newspaper Companies, For Journalists' Jobs, It's Back to the Future, Innovation, New York Times, News and Democracy, The Digital Dozen Will Dominate, The Old News World is Gone- Get Over It

2 Responses to “Diane Rehm: Assessing Non-Profit Journalism”

  1. Barb says:
    July 22, 2010 at 9:10 am

    Hi there.
    You write:
    “My issue here can still be summed up in one word: scale. That’s the issue before us…”
    Can you explain more about that?
    Thanks.

  2. Ken Doctor says:
    July 26, 2010 at 5:13 pm

    Barb: Sure. The passion and outstanding journalism being done by new news websites is impressive. The scale problem is this: we’re talking about dozen, or two dozen, journalists working in new groups, while 12-15,000 daily journalists have lost jobs over the last five years.

    I like to ask those running these new news sites what they would do if they had 50 or 100 journalists, rather than a dozen or so. While some have managed staffs far larger than that, they almost all say that the proving out the value proposition of their new news staffs is job one and that doubling or quintupling those staffs isn’t immediately on their radar screens. Given how hard they are working, that makes complete sense. Yet, we, in communities throughout the country are today getting far less journalism — far less news — than we were five years ago.

    We need solutions — and the early tests are promising — that scale and produce lots more high-quality journalism in our communities. And the sooner the better.

    Ken

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