The wave of non-profit locally-focused news organizations is growing

Los Angeles could be the next city to see the launch of a new not-for-profit news website, according to revelations from the Los Angeles Times.

As the article reported, venture capitalist and former Times Mirror executive Tom Unterman has been quietly exploring the formation of a news organization focused on public policy issues, like the ones that have flourished in cities like San Diego, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Austin and Chicago.

Even if Unterman doesn’t still have a formal plan, he’s testing the water with some community leaders around L.A. and looking for possible partners.

While “very hopeful” about making the site a reality, the article reported Unterman said the key would be coming up with a plan to sustain such a venture beyond the startup phase – which he estimated would last three years and cost $10 million.

“A good, smart, nonprofit journalism effort could be a very nice complementary piece to the media picture here in L.A.,” said Unterman, “particularly if it focused on investigative work and filled a gap in the kind of stories that for-profit media can’t persistently fill now because of changes in the economics of the news business.”

The flourish of “locally-focused” non-profit news organizations has spread within a lot of cities in the USA and they have become a significant part of the news landscape, the number one of those being ProPublica.

Together with projects that see partnerships with journalism schools around the country, these news outlets contribute to filling the gaps left by the mainstream media. Traditional news outlets are often unable to dedicate enough time to deep investigative stories, and maybe cannot properly cover all that happens in the local dimension of such big cities such as Los Angeles.

“The enormous county bureaucracy is larger than that of most states. It oversees beaches, health clinics, welfare offices, children’s foster homes and much more. Yet the whole megillah routinely gets covered by just two or three reporters”, the LA Times article said. In fact, rather than competing with The Times, Unterman suggested the nonprofit might work cooperatively with the newspaper — contributing its investigative pieces and “co-publishing” stories.

Among others, The New York Times has instigated partnerships with the Bay Citizen and with the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news site in Austin. Other well-established regional news sites that operate as nonprofits are MinnPost and theVoice of San Diego, which – as as the LA Times article pointed out – has become an admirable asset over the last six years, having managed to gain more contributions from a variety of sources, leaving the businessmen who founded it now contributing less of the total budget.

Another field in which news organizations are experimenting with success is cooperation with universities.

ProPublica too has started to collaborate with the university world, partnering with New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute and professor Jay Rosen to explore how to use the web to do better explanatory journalism and in San Francisco, the Bay Citizen nonprofit news site has teamed with the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeleyaiming to “enhance quality civic and community news coverage” in the Bay Area.

The Boston Globe also has announced it will collaborate with Northeastern University and Emerson College on news coverage for Boston.com’s Your Town hyper-local sites. Boston.com currently has 50 “Your Town” sites in and around Boston, which act as digital town centers, offering a highly localized news experience for readers.

“We’re delighted with this collaboration. It provides ‘Your Town’ readers with even more local coverage and enriches the educational experience of Emerson and Northeastern students,” said David Dahl, the Globe’s regional editor, in a press release.

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This post was originally published on The Editors’ Weblog

Photo Credits: Flickr CC ShironekoEuro[slow] and wallyg