Survival Strategies for Local Journalism
By Vauhini Vara
In an attempt to draw readers and advertisers, the San Francisco Chronicle began printing on high-quality glossy paper in November, 2009. Its circulation had dropped by more than fifty per cent in less than a decade.
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The awareness that advertising alone is not a sustainable model for local news has led some companies and nonprofits to look at other approaches. The Knight Foundation, which has helped to fund nonprofit local-journalism initiatives, last week published the third installment in a series of reports, begun in 2011, on how outfits focussed on particular cities or states have progressed toward being financially sustainable. (The Knight Foundation has funded many of them.) This year’s report contains some fascinating details, including the 2013 budgets of the twenty outfits the foundation studied. Their spending that year ranged from thirty-four thousand dollars (the Rapidian, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which launched in 2009 and had three employees) to more than seven million dollars (the Texas Tribune, started in 2009, which covers the state of Texas and employed forty-two people). Seventeen of the twenty publications had budgets of less than a million dollars.
The report puts one of its most important findings in blunt terms: “Nonprofits remain very reliant on foundation funding, and few appear to be rapidly approaching a sustainable business model”—that is, one that would allow the publication to live on without grants. To be specific, the news organizations received, on average, about fifty-eight per cent of their revenue from foundation and other grant funding. Earned income (from sources like advertising, corporate sponsorship, syndication of stories in other outlets, and sponsored in-person events) made up twenty-three per cent, while individual donations or membership fees comprised nineteen per cent. Jonathan Sotsky, the director of strategy and assessment at the Knight Foundation, told me, “A lot of these sites are started by former journalists, so they’re so focussed on editorial.” By “editorial,” Sotsky was referring to the published material, rather than the revenue model that sustains the publication. “The problem is that you can put up great content, but if you’re not creating a sustainable business model, you’re not going to have the lights on very long.”