Robert Picard, senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford
As newspapers and digital sites struggle for financial stability, industry executives and policymakers have been exploring and proposing new business models, including laws and regulations that encourage nonprofit support from charitable organizations and foundations.
Robert Picard, senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford, has for years been examining the connection between laws and journalistic sustainability. Picard, also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale University Law School, recently published his findings in a report on “The Impact of Charity and Tax Law/Regulations on Not-for-Profit News Organizations.”
”Philanthropic models of new organization operations cannot be effective without changes to charity and tax laws and regulations,” he concludes.
Picard brings years of experience to his studies, having taught at Oxford and Harvard University. He is the author and editor of 33 books and has been editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies and The Journal of Media Economics. Picard received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and had post-doctoral study and fellowships at University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Oxford. He has consulted and carried out assignments for governments in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia and for international organizations including the European Commission, UNESCO, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. He has been a consultant for leading media companies in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Click here to see the report.
1) How did you become interested in this topic?
For the past four decades my focus has been on why news organizations have failed and what can be done about it. The current crisis follows almost seven decades of struggles to maintain competing news organizations and news organizations in rural areas and suburbs. I have been particularly interested in public policy responses that can support news organizations and innovations in news gathering and delivery.
2) What were some of the major research findings in the academy or industry that informed your work?
Multiple studies have shown that news organizations, as well as other types of business, require a supportive political and economic environment to sustain themselves. This has been a major finding of research on creating a sustainable journalism and a free press in global development studies and in western studies on newspaper sustainability and digital startups. It is not enough to have good intentions. They must be bolstered by supportive public policies that provide factors that make independent news enterprises possible and facilitate their operations by making revenue models possible and providing indirect and direct support to them.
The failure of many news organizations and digital startups in the U.S. and other Anglo-American countries has been laid on the inability or difficulty to obtain legal status to operate as a non-profit charitable organization.
3) What did you learn from your research?
Our research in this study revealed:
- Journalism is typically not perceived as an educational activity covered by charity and tax laws and regulations.
- Journalistic activities of charitable organizations are constrained in analysis and commentary of political activities that are important parts of the role of new organizations in democratic society. Most charity laws preclude charities from taking political positions or making endorsements.
- Tax deductible donations to support journalism and news organizations require the receiving organizations to have charitable status and be recognized in tax law, and it is difficult for governments of the U.S. and other countries with Anglo-based legal systems to provide subsidies to some enterprises but not to others.
- Philanthropic models of new organization operations cannot be effective without changes to charity and tax laws and regulations.
4) What are the implications of your research?
- The legal and regulatory requirements and processes for receiving charitable status that supports tax deductible donations need to be changed to recognize journalism as an educational function that serves the public good.
- Tax laws must be concurrently changed to recognized tax deductibility of gifts to journalistic news organizations
- The use of commercial activities (advertising, merchandising, events) to support journalistic activity should not preclude granting and maintenance of charitable status.
- Charitable status and favorable tax laws alone will not be sufficient to ensure sustainability of journalism.
Interview by Bill Arthur
