Nonprofit News and Comment

MEDIA

“Foundation Says It Regrets Payment to Disgraced Journalist.” By Jennifer Schuessler. New York Times. February 14, 2013. The Knight Foundation says that it regrets paying a $20,000 honorarium to Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist whose appearance at a Knight conference in Miami on Tuesday drew sharp criticism on Twitter and elsewhere. “In retrospect, as a foundation that has long stood for quality journalism, paying a speaker’s fee was inappropriate,” the foundation said in a statement posted on its blog. “Controversial speakers should have platforms, but Knight Foundation should not have put itself into a position tantamount to rewarding people who have violated the basic tenets of journalism. We regret our mistake.” The foundation noted that it began discussing the appearance with Mr. Lehrer before he resigned last summer from The New Yorker after revelations that he had recycled past work in blog posts and fabricated quotations in his best-selling book “Imagine.” While the fee is not unusual for high-profile speakers, the statement continued, “it was simply not something Knight Foundation, given our values, should have paid.” The Knight Foundation, whose assets totaled nearly $2.2 billion in 2011, is dedicated to supporting “transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts,” according to its mission statement. The media critic Jim Romenesko noted on his blog that the $20,000 it paid to Mr. Lehrer, who spoke at a “media learning seminar” for community foundations, was as much as it gave the Miami-Dade Public Library in 2011 “to encourage creative writing among the communities teens” and slightly less than the $25,000 it gave to the Minnesota State Fair “for a participatory public art experience called the giant sing-along.”

MEDIA

“At WFMU, Loyal Fans Step in to Save the Day.” By Andy Battaglia. Wall Street Journal. January 10, 2013. Jersey City’s WFMU is hosting a benefit in Brooklyn this weekend. Fundraisers are typical for the proudly listener-supported station—as is the record fair, a near-religious experience for the area’s analog audiophiles—but this one is uncommon for its cause: $250,000 in losses from damage incurred as a result of Hurricane Sandy. The storm silenced WFMU, which is housed just two blocks from the Hudson River, but not for long. When power went out in the studio building, the station’s music obsessives went to work from other locations. Damages were estimated at $250,000, an imposing sum for a famously idiosyncratic operation run largely by volunteers. But WFMU righted itself, all things considered, with alacrity. Thanks to its listener-supported culture, borne from a tradition of pledge drives aided by vaunted local bands (Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth) and talk-radio-friendly comedians (Tom Scharpling, Patton Oswalt), the station raised the money it needed most urgently online in just three weeks. “FMU is a fantastic, beautiful radio station, one of the best in the country if not the world,” said Jon Spencer, whose band performed on-air at the station just days before Sandy. “We need more stations like FMU, which has turned me on to all sorts of crazy ideas and sounds and new things.” That sense of community has carried over to every aspect of the enterprise. “Insurance didn’t give us any money and all these other institutions that we hoped might give gave us nothing, but it was hard to be angry when so many I wasn’t expecting did,” Mr. Freeman said. “It was our community that came through. It was the only thing we had.”

MEDIA

“How Punch Protected the Times.” By Joe Nocera. New York Times. October 1, 2012. In 1969, shares of The New York Times Company began to be listed on the American Stock Exchange. The driving force behind the listing was the company’s chairman and chief executive, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who was then 43 and had been at the helm for six years. Eager to expand the company, he needed a listed stock that the company could use to make deals. But a listed stock had to have voting rights. And that conflicted with another of Sulzberger’s goals: to ensure that his family, which had owned the paper since 1896, would remain in control of the company and its flagship newspaper. Since the 1950s, the company had given stock to favored employees and others, stock that could be bought and sold but had no voting rights. The solution was to give that stock — Class A shares, they were called — some voting rights, but not enough to threaten the family’s control. The Class B shares, held largely in a family trust, still gave the Sulzbergers the power to elect around 70 percent of the board. Sulzberger, who was known as Punch, died on Saturday. In the encomiums that followed, much was made of his fierce dedication to the First Amendment and his overseeing the remaking of The Times, especially the addition of feature sections that brought new advertising, and new life, to “The Gray Lady.” In recent years, that dedication has been sorely tested. As advertising gravitated away from the printed page and toward the Internet, Times Company stock has been hit hard. Profits have declined. In 2009, the company eliminated the dividend, which had been a source of cash for family members. At Dow Jones & Company, the ruling Bancroft family decided to sell to Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation. By all appearances, the Sulzbergers never flinched. None of which would have mattered without the protection provided by the dual class of shares. Inevitably, as the newspaper business declined, financial engineers came knocking. I understand that the Sulzbergers have made their share of mistakes, such as the purchase of The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993. But there is something both straightforward and honest about their approach. If you buy New York Times stock, you are buying into the notion that you’ll let the family run the show, as it has done for more than a century. And the Sulzbergers will put The Times’s journalism ahead of all else, because that is what is in the family’s DNA. The bet Punch Sulzberger made his whole career is that people wanted — and would pay for — great journalism. Today, despite an uncertain future, his heirs are making the same bet. The protection afforded them by the dual-class structure has allowed the current chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and the rest of the family to take the long view without worrying about corporate raiders or hedge fund managers.

MEDIA

“Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support.” By David Carr. New York Times. September 9, 2012. Journalism has a shortage of many things: capital, advertisers and, in some instances, readers. But certainly its most precious commodity is innovation. Again and again, the business struggles to get out of the rut that put it on a road to ruin in the first place. Consider the fate of the Web site Homicide Watch DC. When it popped up out of nowhere with a way of tracking every murder in Washington, it seemed likely that a big news organization would snap it up or that foundations would trip over themselves to shove money at them. It hasn’t turned out that way. Two years after it began, Homicide Watch is on hiatus and its founders, Laura and Chris Amico, find themselves with the tin cup out on Kickstarter looking for money to sustain the site. At the heart of Homicide Watch is its mission statement: “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” It’s a remarkable thing to behold — part database, part news site, it also serves as a kind of digital memorial for homicide victims in Washington. Their pictures are published, their cases are followed and their deaths are acknowledged as a meaningful event in the life of the city. Neither The Washington Post nor the weekly Washington City Paper covers homicide comprehensively — come to think of it, almost no major newspaper does. It is difficult but important work that current business models won’t accommodate, and Homicide Watch reaches an underserved community, since most of the victims are black. But even though it has received all kinds of notice in the press and went from 500 page views a month to more than 300,000, it remained the handiwork of a wife and husband team. “We reached a tipping point about nine months ago, when I think everybody just assumed we had been funded because of the buzz and coverage,” Laura Amico said. “But the fact of the matter is, no one was funding it but us. We have this high visibility, but every door that we knocked on was closed to us.”

“On Campus, an Experiment to Save Local News.” By Christine Haughney. New York Times. September 9, 2012. — From the rattling cicadas at twilight to the willow trees bending in the late summer heat, the lush campus of Mercer University seems like the last place to find one of the nation’s boldest journalism experiments. This fall, Mercer, a 179-year-old former Baptist school, is starting an ambitious $5.6 million project to try to save local journalism by inviting both the Macon newspaper and a Georgia Public Radio station onto its campus. Reporters and editors for the 186-year-old paper The Telegraph and the radio station will work out of the campus’s new journalism center, alongside students whom the university expects will do legwork for newspaper and public radio reports, with guidance from their professors and working journalists. It’s a plan born in part of desperation. Like many newspapers, The Telegraph has lost circulation and advertising revenue in the last decade, and the public radio station was forced to trim down to one staff member during the recession. William D. Underwood, Mercer’s president, expects that by applying what he calls a medical residency model to journalism, all of these players may give the struggling industry a chance to stay alive. “I want young people to be able to practice journalism ethically and competently the day they graduate,” Mr. Underwood said. “I have a concern about the future of local print journalism. There’s nothing more vital to a functioning democracy.” Mercer’s is one of several such collaborations across the country. A 2011 study by the New America Foundation called on journalism schools to embrace the model of an “anchor institution” and do what they can to help local media outlets.

MEDIA

“Mitt Romney: Slash Amtrak, PBS Funding, But Defense Cuts And Middle Class Tax Cuts Off The Table.” By Sam Stein. Huffington Post. August 15, 2012. In an interview with Fortune Magazine that was published on Wednesday morning, Mitt Romney gave a bit more detail than normal about how he would fulfill his promise to get the nation on track towards fiscal balance. But the proposals he laid out largely ducked the so-called “painful” choices that experts insist must be made, and seemed to be drawn from rosy assumptions about the immediate political and economic future. At one point, Romney was asked to respond to a Tax Policy Center analysis that concluded he would need to take away tax benefits that primarily help the middle class if he wanted his broader proposals to be deficit neutral. Romney’s campaign has insisted that they can trim federal spending enough to achieve fiscal balance, but in the Fortune interview, the items Romney pinpointed appeared to be low-hanging fruit. Romney identified subsidies for Amtrak, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities as things he would eliminate. The government spends $444 million a year on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the parent organization of PBS); Amtrak received $1.56 billion in federal funding in 2010, with $1.3 billion in stimulus funds; while the National Endowment of the Arts lists the current level of federal funding at approximately $146 million.

Peter Dobkin Hall August 8, 2012 at 12:41 pm [edit]

Ruth: I am sorry that you took as criticism my comparison of NPQ’s Newswire and Hauser’s Nonprofit News & Comment.

The comparison was intended to highlight the differences between the two features in order to highlight the ways in which they complement one another.

In comparing on a daily basis the stories each feature gleans from the media, I find very little duplication — in large part because Newswire is able to survey US newspaper coverage far more thoroughly than News & Comment can because of its more global focus.

Newswire is made all the more valuable because it is nested in the magazine’s website, which links it to your on-going commentaries on a wide variety of important topics relating to the sector, including matters (like law and public policy) to which the news feed itself gives relatively little attention.

Finally, as you know, I’m an old friend of NPQ, dating back to when it was the New England Nonprofit Quarterly (on whose advisory board I once served). The magazine, both hard copy and on-line, offers the most informed and independent-minded coverage of the nonprofit sector. Newswire is yet another gift to all if us who are concerned about the future on nonprofitdom.

Write on!

Peter Dobkin Hall

ruth mccambridge August 7, 2012 at 9:23 pm

Dear peter:

We were a bit surprised by the tone and inaccuracies of this post (for instance, the assertion that we confine ourselves to 501 (c) 3?s) “conventionally assumed to be the nonprofit sector”. We have never done so and do so now less than ever, covering philanthropy, non-institutionalized movements and even business and governments involvement in civil society. Or the suggestion that we do not cover general economic, political and social trends affecting civil society… that particular claim might cause more than a bit of cognitive dissonance among our readers! I would say that type of coverage may be one of the things we are most well known (and occasionally reviled) for.

But Peter, again, we are surprised because there is indeed room in this sector for the both of us. As you say we are not rivals in the least. I fear that someone has given you that impression. It never occurred to us.

There are some major differences between Nonprofit News and Cooment and us . NPQ purposefully works with practitioners as lay journalists spread all over the country and their reporting and commentary is mixed in with voices of “experts” and academics. This brings something different and wonderful to our mix to be sure. Just as you have someything different and wonderful here.

I would encourage anyone reading this post to check out the Newswire and our website for themselves (Peter was nice enough to provide a link). You may come away with a different impression than might be taken away from this post.

Respectfully,
Ruth McCambridge
Editor in Chief
Nonprofit Quarterly

Since March, Nonprofit Quarterly, has been offering a daily on-line news feature, “Nonprofit Newswire” — which is distributed by e-mail as “Nonprofit Headlines.”

Newswire/Headlines offers unusually thorough surveys of U.S. print media — including stories from many papers not covered by the Hauser Center’s Nonprofit News & Comment, periodicals (such as the Harvard Business Review, and on-line sources (such as Bloomberg News and ProPublica). It’s coverage of international stories is minimal, including occasional entries from the British press. It does not include coverage of broadcast media — from sources such as National Public Radio.

The feature does not offer an archive, nor does it sort stories by topic, so to use it as a scholarly resource requiring readers archive posts themselves.

So what are the differences between NPQ’s news feature and the Harvard’s Nonprofit News & Comment blog?

• breadth of coverage: NPQ’s Newswire concentrates primarily on stoies about nonprofits in the U.S. In contrast, Nonprofit News & Comment devotes significant attention to political, economic, and social trends and policies affecting philanthropy, nonprofits, and civil society throughout the world — such as the impact of the Tory government’s “Big Society” initiative on the UK’s NGOs and the role of India’s anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare on the political role of civil society in the world’s largest democracy;

• definition of the nonprofit sector: NPQ’s Newswire confines its attention to the 501(c)3 (charitable tax-exempt) organizations conventionally assumed to comprise the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit News & Comment covers the broader 501(c) universe, including mutual benefit organizations (such as clubs and fraternal entities), trade unions and trade associations, churches and religious bodies, and social movements, as well as activities and organizations on the margins of the sector, including corporate contributions and social responsibility and social enterprise;

• range of sources: NPQ’s Newswire draws primarily on the print media; Nonprofit News & Comment surveys print, broadcast, and on-line media;

• geographical reach: NPQ’s Newswire focuses primarily on the U.S.; Nonprofit News & Comment has a global scope.

That said, Nonprofit Quarterly’s news features — its web page and e-mail feeds — offer an invaluable service, the most important of which is calling practitioner and scholarly attention to the importance of media and the value to both of keeping abreast of changes in this rapidly growing and changing sector.

Newswire and Headlines also provides easy access to Nonprofit Quarterly’s outstanding coverage of the U.S. nonprofit sector.

Ultimately, NPQ’s news features and Harvard’s news blog should be viewed as complementary to one another, not as rivals.

Peter Dobkin Hall
Senior Research Fellow
Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations
Harvard University

MEDIA

“Artnet Chief Steps Down and Artnet Magazine is Closed.” By Randy Kennedy. New York Times. June 25, 2012. Hans Neuendorf, the chief executive of Artnet, an art-market information company that has helped to transform the way art is bought and sold, has stepped down, handing the reins of the company to his son, the New York Observer reported. In addition, the company is ceasing publication of its online magazine and on Monday closed its magazine offices in New York, Berlin and Paris, according to the Observer. Journalism has been something of a sideline for Artnet, which built its main business by functioning as a kind of Bloomberg terminal of the art auction world. It maintains a database of historical auction prices that now numbers in the millions on which collectors, dealers and auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s rely, and art galleries also use the company to list and publicize available art works online. Over the last several years, Artnet has also begun to build an online auction business and to develop a system to provide analytical data about the market performance of individual artists. “Nobody wants to let go of something that he’s doing, so it took a little bit of effort on my part to come to terms with it,” Mr. Neuendorf told the Observer. “It’s a good thing, though,” he added. “The new generation is taking over.” Mr. Neuendorf’s son Jacob Pabst has served as president of the company for the past year and was confirmed Monday as chief executive by the company’s supervisory board.

MEDIA

“Behind the Scenes, Between the Lines; Polit ico to Expand Its Subscription Service.” By Christine Haughney. New York Times. June 11, 2012. Just as print publications across North America are cutting newsroom staff and daily publication schedules, Politico is expanding. This week, the news outlet is starting to hire 20 more reporters and editors to help increase its coverage on the economy and military. Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico, said these journalists were being hired to expand its expensive subscription service, Politico Pro, which is often bought by lobbyists and trade associations. Politico is also adding 20 more employees to its business side. He wants to have this staff in place by September, well before the election and the lame-duck session of Congress. “We feel this sense of urgency to get it in the marketplace,” he said of the expanded coverage. But Mr. VandeHei said that while he had been steadily expanding Politico in recent years, he had not been overwhelmed with résumés from legions of unemployed journalists. That’s because so many other publications in the Washington area, like The National Journal and Bloomberg, have also been hiring. “The thing about the Washington journalism market that’s different from the rest of the country is that it’s a pretty robust market,” Mr. VandeHei said. “We’ve been hiring in the last three or four years. It’s not like tons of people are running around Washington looking for work.” News organizations in Washington also seem to benefit from the high price readers are willing to pay for content. A five-person subscription to Politico Pro costs $8,500. While Mr. VandeHei would not discuss Politico’s revenue, he said that its latest hiring came after an expansion of its coverage into energy, technology, transportation and health care.

“Philanthro-journalism: Reporters without orders; Can journalism funded by private generosity compensate for the decline of the commercial kind?” No by-line. Economist. June 9, 2012. BANDITS, terrorists, clan rivalries, lawless security forces and corrupt officials make Russia’s north Caucasus the murkiest part of an often opaque country. Journalism there is difficult and dangerous. Much of the best reporting is done by Caucasian Knot, a bilingual online news service. Whereas most of the Russian national media is owned and controlled either by the Kremlin or by tycoons wary of incurring its displeasure, Caucasian Knot is financed by donations. Media philanthropists are active in calmer places, too. Readers and advertisers have switched to the internet. Profit margins have shrunk or vanished. Papers are dying and journalists being sacked. Costly foreign and investigative reporting has been particularly squeezed, as has local news. One increasingly popular—if limited—response to these travails is the sort of “philanthro-journalism” long practised elsewhere by the likes of Caucasian Knot. Thanks to its charitable traditions, this trend is most visible in America. A few philanthropically financed operations have been around for decades, but recently they have been joined by many more. Jan Schaffer of J-Lab, a journalism think-tank at American University in Washington, DC, estimates that American foundations have donated at least $250m to non-profit journalism ventures since 2005. Many of these, such as the Texas Tribune, cover state politics. The highest-profile is arguably ProPublica, an investigative-reporting unit set up in 2008 with help from the Sandler Foundation. It has already won two Pulitzer prizes. Its managing editor Stephen Engelberg argues that, since investigative journalism is now too expensive to be sustained by commercial business models, it ought to be considered a public good. The trend is spreading to other countries, including Australia and Britain, where regulators and politicians have fretted about the decline of old-fashioned media without doing much about it. Money from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation is funding the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), based at City University in London. Iain Overton, its editor, reckons that many traditional outlets lack the forensic skills, as well as the cash, to crunch data and hold the powerful to account.