Say the United States needs 50,000 full-time local journalists to maintain our distinct and robust discourse. That’s to have an independent voice to sniff out injustice and to put a mirror up to communities with professional rigor. (Despite our discourse, two-thirds of Americans trust their local media.)
Today there are just 37,000 working journalists in the United States, and falling. More alarmingly, even that number is increasingly made of non-local reporters, based primarily in New York City, Washington D.C. and California.
We may have half, or even fewer, the number of full-time local journalists this country may need for an informed public. (Yes, there may be more American coal miners than local U.S. reporters.)
That 50,000 number comes from a landmark report for the FCC by Steve Waldman, the editor who launched and is now running Report for America aimed at addressing just that issue. Confronting an enormous gap, his nonprofit crucially places reporters in local newsrooms (both nonprofit and for-profit) with identified coverage gaps.
The journalism practitioners among us are maybe too aware of how disrupted is the advertising model that defined our category for a couple hundred years. Frighteningly though, seven in 10 Americans still think their local news media are doing well financially.
Put another way: a central part of U.S. democracy and local civic dialogue has been broken for 20 years, we still haven’t addressed the core problem, and, apparently, the stakeholders we most need to participate (our readers) aren’t even aware of the problem. This essay is meant to outline why my professional work has focused where it has and what I hope that might offer others who care about acts of journalism.
“The market has failed in local news,” said John Thornton, the Texas Tribune funder and founder of the American Journalism Project, at the Online News Association conference last month.
In so many ways he’s right. I worry, though, about how easily and limply it seems we journalism practitioners gave in to assume there are no market-based solutions for local news. A different version of that concept might read: “The market changed and we failed to invest in trying any new models for local news.”
I’m deeply worried by the pause Corey Ford is putting on Matter, the exciting venture-accelerator program targeting for-profit media models. They’ve done exceedingly interesting work. But I never thought the modern investment approach could single-handedly answer the question of whether there will be for-profit local journalism models in the post-advertising, digital world.
Relying entirely on private equity funders for exploration allows philanthropy to vacate this gap and, I fear, move too quickly and too universally to nonprofit-only models. (You know: everybody gets a membership program!). More importantly still, I do not believe venture investments are congruent with the kind of new-model exploration that local journalism requires.
We have tens of thousands of fewer full-time, independent community storytellers deploying journalism thinking and still nobody seems to know it. This is a climate change kind of problem, and, like climate change, market factors have to play a role, influenced by mission-first philanthropy.
Last month I published an essay outlining my worldview on entrepreneurial local journalism today. It received welcome support from thinkers I respect on the matter. I shared similar perspective at a session that I co-organized during the aforementioned annual Online News Association conference in New Orleans. From online to the conference, I’ve been blessed to have dozens of conversations more about the topic in recent weeks.
No surprise one of the most actionable conversations I had was with my dear friend Jim MacMillan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer turned genuine journalism tinkerer (look at his latest important work). A fierce champion of the style of our craft now popularly known as “solutions journalism,” he challenged me that my original essay was heavy on diagnosing the problem but short on administering a salve. I’m here to change that.
Because I timed that first essay with the ONA conference, which celebrated its 20th annual, for this essay, I looked 20 more years into the future: what is the work we need to do today to ensure robust acts of local journalism are produced for a wide-array of communities in 2040?
I want to start first with my definition of journalism: a set of methods to help a community approximate the truest understanding of itself, of its past, present and future. Journalism isn’t writing articles, although articles are very effective tools. Journalism can be done with an event and with a data visualization and illustrations and animations and through documentary and art and theater and likely many more today and to come.
The importance of maintaining a local reporter corps, then, isn’t, necessarily to have someone write an article. More generally, there’s a reserve power in having an independent voice for communities, a place to share a common narrative or uncover an important issue that may or may not be best served by law enforcement or other government intervention. Market-driven journalism practitioners are, ideally, motivated to do this in the most efficient and effective way, when the incentives are aligned.
Next I’d like to share with you some of the assumptions I bring to this exercise of future-thinking. If you don’t agree with all of these, I don’t necessarily think that disqualifies what I share below—but you can decide that.
I believe in journalism because I believe in honest, difficult, productive conversations. I believe a well-functioning community needs many inputs, and journalism practitioners are one of them. I believe question-asking, trend-spotting, narrative-forming and other journalistic skills are very rare and very important skills that experienced humans do very well, and will continue to do better than machines for a long time—though clearly technology tools have always and will always speed, improve and strengthen that work.
I believe a major split to understand is between the distribution of news and the creation of information. I believe we frequently confuse the two of them. I believe the former is a technology issue already being serviced by the market and the latter is the open question. I believe freelance journalists will be an important part of our future, so they need to be paid by someone. I believe organizations are very powerful cultural concepts, which amplify, codify and improve the effectiveness of all work, including acts of journalism, especially as they fit into specific communities. Organizations can outlast people and generations; We call them institutions.
I believe all worthwhile organizations are essentially the answer to specific questions, often identified problems. I believe commercial and nonprofit entities have different motivations so they should be harnessed for different kinds of problems; neither of them are business models, by the way, just tax statuses. I believe our economy is more efficient when we maximize the number of for-profits that are addressing problems, with nonprofits targeting market gaps that government also does not, or cannot, address. I believe we are at the beginning of coming to expect more positive impact from our companies. I believe that future is bright.
When I look 20 years into the future, I believe we can have a robust ecosystem of local journalism practitioners. Flying home from the ONA conference, I made a long list of the types of those practitioners I foresee a generation from now. From that list, I made five groups:
- The Pedigree Brand: I think of these like the journalistic equivalent of the regional Orchestra: Large, influential purveyors of a celebrated cultural institution (that orchestral model can last in smaller regions than you might expect). These will often be the descendants of local newspapers, some of which might still have versions of print products (because I believe print will last a lot longer than we think). Like orchestras, most regions will only have one and be lucky to have that. They’ll have a patron system, with a few other local quirks to their models. They’ll have a smaller staff than at their peaks (just like orchestras), but they will produce an extremely quality, if focused, product. They will be crucial parts of the identity of a region. By 2014, I’d expect many of these would have turned nonprofit (and full charities, like, again, many orchestras) but in 20 years, I’d expect to see remaining for-profit ones (lingering family-owned enterprises that navigated this difficult time). There will be newer examples though. For example Texas Tribune is the first, classic, modern example of a new Pedigree Brand.
- The Startup: I believe there must be smaller, nimbler niche efforts that will do community journalism (topical, niche or both) that ties directly to business models that solve some community problem and compete in the open market (you know, like how 250 years ago, early newspapers were solving an information distribution problem). In these early days, as we aim to incentivize experimentation to try out journalism thinking in new industry segments, I believe philanthropy will have to prove out early examples. If there are wins, private capital may be lured in here over time (the aforementioned pausing of Matter is relevant here). Judging by history, I’d expect the most innovation and experimentation to come from this category, so this is the most important category and the one I see least likely to exist in 20 years, without investment now. To be clear, I don’t mean “Startup” in the literal sense of having to only be new companies, but instead in the sense that this category is my catch-all for the companies that I think must fill community gaps in truly new models. (Spoiler, I identify my 20-person company in this category). I think we’ll see examples of non-journalists really stretching the definitions of content marketing and data analysis that will push boundaries here. We will have more crossover hits; We’ll fight over how to identify people who weren’t trained journalists but find their way into this work and who will be taken in by the tribe to produce important work.
- The Niche Nonprofit: These will be smaller-staff niche efforts (niche either by topic or by approach, like focusing on general-interest public affairs, investigative journalism). Like their for-profit startup counterparts, they’ll have done the important work of developing clever sustainability models, though many will have a membership, patron and other reader revenue models. They’ll be most important in rural or underserved communities but they’ll be familiar parts of the landscape everywhere. They’re true gap fillers and should exist only where a market effort tried and failed (again, either geographically, topically or by approach, like deeper investigative work). As a related note, I think a whole host of existing, older nonprofits, researchers and advocacy groups will likely fill a kind of space as publishing continues to radiate out. (Picture City Hall coverage including work done by nonpartisan nonprofits that did not begin with journalism in mind). This will challenge definitions. Still, more excellent and traditionally-familiar examples already abound, like Public Source in Pittsburgh or Berkleyside or the VT Digger. Some of these niche nonprofits might well transition into being a pedigree Orchestra for their community over time.
- The Conglomerate: These will be descendants of newspaper companies, evolutions of the big digital national media companies, morphed B2B giants or newer entities that gobble up several properties through consolidation, including Orchestras, Startups and other related properties, like national B2B publications, distribution products (like newsletters and their descendants) and pure profit centers that will spinoff from startup-style experiments (like agencies, products and the like that prove better detached entirely from acts of journalism). Economic history is made of cycle of bundling and unbundling. This is Advance and Gannet and McClatchy and TEGNA and Cox and many others, if they can survive, plus others to come.
- The Partnership: Distributing costs to align with different outcomes can result in powerful work. Universities will develop increasingly more professional student newsrooms and advocacy groups will align with credible partners to establish independent journalism. Early examples include many experiments from CUNY in New York City and Kensington Voice, a partnership with Temple University’s Klein College of Media, in Philadelphia. Resolve Philly is another example of this. Importantly, they might not often (if ever) fully sustain themselves, but rather their costs may be subsidized for other reasons (for example, justified as university coursework) or primarily rely on foundation funding. The best of these will fill important gaps.
Let’s test my model by playing a quick game of how I think various legacy media outlets might sort themselves.
If they can survive the transition, I think most metro daily newspapers are destined for the Pedigree Brand position and most newspaper companies are destined for the fourth, the Conglomerate. Could a newspaper transform its culture and develop a new model (as, for example, a regional polling agency!) to fit in as a kind of Startup, or bulk up to serve as a kind of regional Conglomerate, or spinout its own kind of niche nonprofit? Yes. Most local TV stations are already part of a Conglomerate, but I could see others spinning out as Startups, splintering into new kinds of Conglomerates or perhaps in a rare case vying to be their own kind of Pedigree Brand.
I think most student newspapers will look like Niche Nonprofits, though some could be part of clever Partnerships, or even might opt for Startup. Public media is quirky of course, but they’re natural candidates to be a region’s Orchestra, another Pedigree Brand, or perhaps an interesting kind of local/regional Conglomerate, housing various independent brands.
If that is the future I envision, this is my plan for how we can get there.
I think the survival of a Pedigree Brand in most regions is possible, but it will require real change management and local support. Many people have feelings about newspapers so I think that plight has champions. Depending on the value and type of assets, the Conglomerates might require support to ease transitions (think, if a public media outlet takes on several niche sites) but similarly I think that’s somewhat inevitable, albeit requiring incredible work. We’ll need acceptance of risk and patience with messy M&A, but these will happen as natural outcomes of the future of the existing journalism infrastructure we have today.
Today, I think the most attention being paid in national journalism circles in the niche nonprofit segment—and I think that’s important! The niche nonprofits require innovative thinking and themselves will be entrepreneurial. They also make famously-business-averse journalism types feel less icky than the final and, I think, least defined category: The Startup. But from my understanding of efficient ways to solve problems, this is the category that I believe has to do the most work to gain ground on that 50,000-local-journalist number.
No surprise that it’s this Startup category that worries me most. But rather than my worrying it most because I think I’m represented in it, instead, I’ve remained in this category exactly because I think it’s the most important, and least supported. I am increasingly worried that this category has largely already been abandoned, that media funders, journalism practitioners and related stakeholders already assume there will be no systemic commercially-viable local news providers.
As I wrote in my journalism thinking essay, my view is that most of what we call “entrepreneurial journalism” today (excluding good, quality examples in a nonprofit model) is actually just the replication of traditional subscription/advertising models over a kind of “town square.” Or what I see as people still trying to recreate newspapers but this time online. I believe this is unambitious, flawed and illogical. As a coworker of mine likes to put it, funders interested in this kind of work are playing with “scared money.” It sounds safe to fund something that looks similar to what came before it. But it won’t solve anything.
To ensure we secure commercially-viable journalism thinking (which I believe is the best chance for robust, innovative and varied offerings) in the future, we need to get aggressive.
We need 10 and then 50 and then 100 and then 1,000 examples of for-profit startups that are solving a specific problem for a specific community in a model that is strengthened by journalism thinking. To do that, exactly because this has a high-risk/low-return profile, philanthropy has to see the Startup category as essential for the future of local journalism. (Fortunately philanthropy is beginning to reconsider early operational expenses)
Without it, we are signing up for a lifetime of gap-filling with continually-over-strained Orchestras.
As a media funder, I would be looking for opportunities to experiment aggressively with new models of journalism. I’d be waiting for the tour group that produces historical preservation reporting. I’d be waiting for the green infrastructure company that starts as an offshoot of an environmental magazine.
Take just three from my hometown of Philadelphia:
- Hidden City could evolve into a historic tours company, using storytelling to bring history to life while sustaining local journalism.
- WURD 900AM radio could evolve into a Black professionals membership group, using storytelling to advocate as voting bloc, political action committee and convention (in a swing state, no less!)
- Grid Magazine could reimagine itself as a green infrastructure consultancy, funding its reporting by directly supporting the sustainable systems it covers.
I can’t guarantee that these models—or any others—will work. But you can’t tell me they won’t. And unless we try, we’ll never know. In 2011 I wrote: “Sustaining the craft of journalism matters more right now than the craft itself.”
This is the moment. If we continue down the nonprofit-only path, we’ll forfeit the territory entirely. Nonprofit models are vital, but they can’t be the sole solution. For funders who want to protect themselves from being the permanent, sole financial lifeline of journalism, they should care deeply about seeing commercial concepts like these play out.
We need to unwind the clock and reimagine the role of journalism in the communities we serve. Sustaining the craft of journalism matters more right now than the craft itself.
The future of local journalism isn’t guaranteed. But it is ours to create—if we’re willing to embrace risk, foster experimentation, and invest in diverse, sustainable models that look beyond tradition.