Community and Municipal Models

Across the country, new local reporting projects are bubbling up to fill the gaps left by shrinking newsrooms. These new projects share a public service mission, and many focus on sending reporters to cover beats that have been long forgotten or neglected, including coverage of city halls and statehouses. Capturing the unique role of these community-oriented projects, as well as the challenges they face, one article notes: "These tiny nonprofits — from Chicago and Minneapolis to New Haven and San Diego — are, at the very least, trailblazers. Some have become an integral source of information for their respective communities. All share a challenge: growing an audience while learning to break even."

Often Web-based, a few well-known examples of this model include the Gotham Gazette, New Haven Independent and Chi-Town Daily News. The Center for Independent Media has been building a network of nonprofit news sites that recruit local bloggers and journalists to focus on statehouses and local government in Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and Minnesota. Similarly, the New York Times recently announced that it was launching a series of "hyper-local" sites around New York City and New Jersey, a "pro-am journalism" effort that combines citizen reporters with professional editors. Some hyper-local experiments, including sites like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, supplement aggregated blogs or news articles with data from local governments and other sources of information, as well as track neighborhood home sales, crime reports and restaurant health code violations.

One of the most talked-about examples of the community-based model is the Voice of San Diego, a four-year-old, nonprofit, online investigative site dedicated to going "out there and [getting] investigative stories." With a staff of 11, the site updates throughout the day and focuses on key local quality-of-life issues through beat reporting mixed with in-depth analysis. Its revenue depends on a handful of large donors, 800 individual readers who give $35 to $1,000 per year; online advertising; large grants from organizations like the Knight Foundation, as well as smaller grants from local organizations. Another prime example of this model is MinnPost, a nonprofit, Web-based news organization that covers the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The site takes some foundation funding, but hopes eventually to be self-sustaining through subscriptions and advertising. MinnPost publishes new content five days per week, produced mostly by journalists who have left the Twin Cities' struggling daily newspapers.

Many of these sites reflect the blogosphere's increasing capacity to produce original news and reporting. For a long time, blogs were seen at best as places for commentary and opinion; at worst, they were dismissed as aggregators that were accused of stealing the news. At the national level, blogs like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo have conducted important investigations and served as watchdogs over national, state and local government. While it is true that much of the news that ends up on blogs has its origins in newspaper journalism, these new models are increasingly producing original reporting. For example, Chi-Town Daily News reporters broke the story of Chicago officials pushing through a 10 percent tuition increase at the city's colleges without public notice. In his profile of Voice of San Diego, Randy Dotinga of the Christian Science Monitor lists just a few of the stories the outlet broke: "The police chief's rosy crime statistics were a lie, it turned out. The councilman who urged water conservation was discovered to use 80,000 gallons a month at his home, more than five of his colleagues put together. And the school board president, according to an investigation, spent a full third of his time out of town and out of touch."

There is, however, almost universal agreement that these local news sites — and the blogosphere in general — still lack the capacity or scalability to truly replace the large newsrooms of legacy papers. Joel Kramer, the former publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune who started MinnPost, is clear about the possibilities and limitations inherent in this model. He writes:

With each new announcement of a paper closing, or a news company contemplating bankruptcy, or a dozen more journalism jobs being eliminated, my belief intensifies that the nonprofit approach has the best chance of sustaining serious regional journalism. But I am reporting back from the frontline of this digital journalism revolution that making it happen is no picnic. The same forces working against the for-profit model make self-sustaining nonprofit models challenging, too.

Although the emergence of these local news sites is to be applauded, the question remains as to whether they can by themselves stand in for the newsgathering operations that are downsizing or disappearing altogether. For example, in cities like Seattle and Denver where newspapers have shuttered, only a fraction of the reporters who lost their jobs are working at the new sites, whether established by the old newspapers or organized by the laid-off journalists. And even many of these initiatives are struggling to find adequate funding.

These community projects are filling crucial gaps in mainstream coverage, but it's still hard to imagine that they can provide the in-depth local news required to maintain an informed citizenry, let alone replace today's news institutions. "Can these nonprofits be self-sustaining?" asks Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, and one of the strongest supporters of these projects. "The evidence is of course they can. Is it easily done? No."

A glance at the history of newspapers shows a number of interesting alternatives that often have been overlooked, but that may hold lessons for addressing today's crisis. Although more research is needed to understand why most of these models ultimately failed, there are several that are worth noting here. Compelling historical examples of ad-free, subscriber-supported newspapers include New York's PM and Chicago's The Day Book. Ultimately, these pioneering newspapers folded for want of adequate funding — in the case of The Day Book, a sudden increase in the cost of paper sank what had been a sustainable model — but both maintained enthusiastic audiences until the end. Similar nonprofit models were seriously considered by the Hutchins Commission, a blue ribbon panel of experts in the 1940s that grappled with a crisis of the press bearing many similarities to the one facing us today and that presented a landmark report on the role of media in a democratic society.

In the Progressive, New Deal and postwar eras, social movements drove vibrant grassroots press criticism and activism that led to a flourishing of alternative media, including municipally owned and cooperatively run newspapers. With a distribution of 60,000 copies, The Los Angeles Municipal News, published in 1912, was financed by the city and governed by a municipal newspaper commission of three citizen volunteers who were appointed by the mayor for four-year terms. The editor of this "people's newspaper" described its mission as being "created by the people, for the people, and built for them under their control. It is in this sense unique." Citing this experiment, among others, Nikki Usher of the Online Journalism Review observed how the Municipal News was "truly hyperlocal" and didn't cover national or state news or include wire services. She notes that experimenting with these alternatives was a crucial endeavor: "Even without answers, news innovators of times past were willing to experiment. We should take our cues from the past, and consider new business models as opportunities for our industry rather than signs of its failure."

Several years ago, Harry Chandler, scion of the Los Angeles Times, suggested that municipal ownership might be a better option than letting the paper fall into the hands of "an even more profit-squeezing new owner" like the Tribune Co. After suffering years of "short-term profit targets that could only be achieved by staff and quality reductions," Chandler suggested exploring "community ownership, like that of the Green Bay Packers football team." The basic idea was ownership based on a stock offering available only to local residents. Here is how Chandler explained the Packers' structure: "Article I of its bylaws states, 'This association shall be a community project, intended to promote community welfare ... its purposes shall be exclusively charitable.'" Chandler noted that "if 20 percent of Times readers invest $1,000, it could work." He offered to write the first check for the "Los Angeles Times Community Owners LLC." History will tell us whether Chandler's plea was far-fetched or visionary.