Magda Koniecza, assistant professor of journalism at Temple University
Journalists and others have begun looking more closely at a nonprofit model for news publications as the business model dependent on advertising revenue has dwindled drastically. Since 2008, nonprofit newsrooms in the United States have opened at an average rate of about one a month, but many struggle financially. Magda Konieczna examined the problem in her 2018 book, Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails, in which she contends that nonprofits aren’t just a new way of doing “the same old journalism.”
Konieczna, assistant professor of journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia, has examined the status of nonprofits in the news from several angles, including a May 2019 article on The Conversation website entitled Why Congress Needs to Empower the IRS to Give Nonprofit Newspapers a Green Light. She is concerned that few news non-profits are earning significant revenue from subscriptions and rely mostly on donations.
Click here for information about the book and here for a link to the article.
Non-profit journalism is “not just a new way of doing the same old journalism. Instead, it’s a whole new structure based on set of incentives that prioritizes the production of the kind of journalism our democracy needs to function,” Konieczna says.
How did you become interested in this topic and this research?
In 2008, when the economic crisis laid waste to news organizations around the world, I was a city hall reporter at the (now closed) Guelph Mercury, a daily newspaper outside of Toronto. I had learned in journalism school that journalism was essential to democracy, and yet, at the Mercury I learned that providing news for a vibrant, diverse and engaged community of 100,000 people was reliant on the ability to sell advertising. Where else could funding for journalism come from? Canadian journalists love the story of a group of grumps who used to meet weekly to complain about their local newspaper and eventually started one of their own, with no business plan and no revenue apart from the $100 each of them put into the middle of the table. I started to wonder if there was a way for this kind of plan to be more broadly implemented.
What were some of the major research findings in the academy or industry that preceded your work?
The major economic crisis in news was just unspooling as I was getting started, but the industry had been pointing to financial challenges for a while. At the same time, we had people like Bob McChesney and John Nichols providing a historical argument about why the government should fund news, and Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson arguing for a mixed nonprofit-government solution. These two pieces in particular inspired me. At the time, though, we had no ethnographic work to explain what people in nonprofit newsrooms were trying to do, and why, and how it was working out, so I decided to take on that challenge.
What did you learn from your research?
The major takeaway here is that nonprofit news is not just a new business model for doing journalism. Early on in my research, one of the people I interviewed said that they were just doing “old school journalism by old school rules.” This stuck with me. Was it really the case that nonprofit news was just a new funding scheme for doing the same kind of investigative and watchdog reporting journalists had long been doing?
Ultimately, I concluded that there was more going on here. In commercial newsrooms, public service journalism is produced incidentally, as a byproduct of the relationship between advertisers and news organizations. In nonprofit newsrooms, public service journalism is supported directly – funded by foundations that care about democracy, and audience members who care about quality journalism. So, it’s not just a new way of doing the same old journalism. Instead, it’s a whole new structure based on set of incentives that prioritizes the production of the kind of journalism our democracy needs to function. It turns out that these incentives make a big difference.
The major question I set out to address was how nonprofit newsrooms, so tiny and so tenuous, were able to do anything their commercial cousins weren’t. I discovered a new set of journalistic practices centered around collaboration and sharing, which in turn were enabled by the new structure that supports quality journalism, as I described above. By collaborating and sharing across newsrooms, news nonprofits are able to leverage what they do best and have an outsized impact on their news ecosystems. Ultimately, Lucas Graves at the University of Wisconsin and I recognized that what’s happening here is what we called “field repair.” These organizations are working to fix the field of journalism from within, improving the quality of news where the audiences already are.
It’s become increasingly clear to me that the trouble in the news business is not just a result of a failing business model. The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that when the internet gave audiences a choice of where to go for news, many of them opted for sources other than their mainstream local newspaper. The reason for this, as other scholars have described, is that traditional journalism did not do enough to tell the stories that communities said mattered, and to build trust. While the early news nonprofits were focused on finding new ways to produce “old school journalism by old school rules,” today, many of them are acknowledging this gap in trust. As a result, we see projects like City Bureau in Chicago that aim to not just inform and engage but also to equip. We see places like Reveal, that have tried to tell their stories through cartoons on buses. I’ve come to consider this focus on the audience a second revolution in nonprofit news.
What are the implications of your research?
My research has shown how nonprofit news organizations have reconfigured the incentives to create a space in which quality journalism itself has value, instead of being produced incidentally, as a byproduct of the relationship between news organizations and advertisers. Once we realize that this is possible, we can then begin to look for other relationships that support quality journalism directly. Ultimately, this process represents a recommitment to the idea that journalism should serve democracy and begins to address the challenging question of how journalists can make that happen.
This interview conducted by Bill Arthur.
