How we’re financing meaningful journalism

Very few of us become journalists so that we can write product reviews, celebrity gossip, or forty-seven tips for driving your man crazy in bed—even if that’s how we pay the bills.

Yet as media have converged online, opportunities to produce meaningful journalism—that which gives people the tools they need to understand and improve their lives and society, the kind that inspires young people to become journalists in the first place—have declined precipitously, at least within legacy media organizations able to provide decent pay, benefits, and a measure of stability. By Ken Doctor’s count, for example, newsrooms laid off approximately 13,500 employees from 2007 to 2010—jobs that digital enterprises haven’t even come close to replacing, especially on a local level.

But as Craigslist, Google, Groupon, et al. have sucked up the ad dollars that once supported journalism, many downsized-but-not-out journalists have plugged into collaborative editorial and funding networks to launch investigative, explanatory, watchdog, audience-generated, and enterprise stories (here’s one example from my own work)—a movement we have only just started to see and understand.

As part of my Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, in January I launched an exploratory survey to discover how journalists are getting their most important work done in an age of shrinking resources. I took this on because I felt it important to break away from the obsessive focus on shiny new technology and failing business models. Instead, I wanted to examine how rising numbers of independent, entrepreneurial journalists are reinventing themselves and their work, and in the process sustaining journalism as a whole.

This post presents the raw, preliminary results—think of it as the transcript of a conversation among many kinds of journalists.

As you’re about to read, the survey found that today’s meaningful journalism predominantly arises from a nexus of collaboration, grants and donations, and nonprofit initiative—a commonplace but still controversial insight subject to wearying cycles of hostility and hype that tend to be highly resistant to the facts. The results also add to the growing pile of evidence that journalism is becoming a form of social entrepreneurship—an endeavor that combines commercial and nonprofit methods to achieve social change.

Another interesting result: the survey found that journalists who are out on their own, freelancers and entrepreneurs, are much more optimistic about their careers and the field than those who are working for someone else. And much of this optimism, it turns out, is tied to a belief that nonprofit media will continue to rise in importance.

I invite you to take a second survey of how you see your personal business model unfolding over the next 10 years. (Perhaps you haven’t yet thought that far ahead—but consider this a chance to do so!) In about one month I’ll report on the results of that survey and make arguments based on the results, including the implications for journalistic cooperation and training. Ultimately, I am trying to build up a useful picture of how journalists today can find the resources they need to launch the kinds of projects that matter most.

For now, however, I’d like to continue the conversation and hear what these numbers say to you. How do they square with your experiences? What do you see as the practical implications? What entrepreneurial possibilities do you see?

Who Participated?

One hundred and fifty-seven journalists participated in this survey; 107 completed every one of the 16 questions. Seventy-nine percent categorized themselves as freelancers or entrepreneurs—the rest were full-time employees of media organizations. Most participants came through the crowd-funding site Spot.us, the Knight fellowships network, friends of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and through targeted social media outreach—a process otherwise known as snowball sampling.

The survey first asked participants to rank their motivations for engaging in journalism. Participants overwhelmingly cited a social mission—a desire to change the world in some way. Financial motivations came in last by a very wide margin. (In open-ended responses, participants also mentioned curiosity, ego, and “not having to have a real job.”)

When asked how they measured their success as journalists, participants deemed “policy or social change” to be the most important metric, followed by the “quality of audience engagement.” Roughly equal percentages of participants rated money and audience size as somewhat important.

Overall, 65 percent of participants said they were optimistic about their personal journalism careers. However, there were huge differences between entrepreneurs and freelancers and their full-time counterparts in media organizations. Seventy-five percent of self-described entrepreneurs were optimistic about their careers, compared to 53 percent of full-time employees. For their part, freelancers were eleven points more optimistic than full-time employees about their careers. In a later post, I’ll describe some of the other interesting differences among participating groups.

What was Meaningful?

Participants were asked to describe a project they had completed in 2010 that they deemed “meaningful”—and what made the project meaningful to them.

Projects included watchdog coverage of renewable energy, a video about Sufi shrines under attack in Pakistan, a series about the impact of the Internet on China, a feature on mountain lions straying into urban neighborhoods, beat coverage of challenges faced by the small business community, a radio series about vocal music, an investigative feature on how climate change is affecting our health, an investigation into domestic terrorism at reproductive clinics, and many stories about conflicts of interest in government.

When asked what made the project meaningful, typical responses emphasized innovation, social change, social connection, storytelling, and passion about the topic:

The insights, “space” to think, friendships and professional connections it produced are not likely to have been found in a traditional newsroom (and not even I suspect in a full-time job in a successful new media operation).

We are trying to reinvent the newspaper business on the public broadcasting business model — noncommercial funding and public interest reporting about underreported topics for underserved communities. We need to sustain community journalism in an era in which the commercial model is failing.

Was able to experiment with storytelling techniques while at the same time telling a compelling story about an underreported and misunderstood phenomenon.

I wanted to provide a science-based, conservation-focused perspective on an issue that had been primarily focused on humans and their fear of lions, which is misplaced.

Small businesses are what will drive the jobs recovery, and it’s important to get these voices out there, talking about what they are experiencing every day, how they are managing, and what signs — good and bad — they see in the economy. I like talking to get “real people” talking as opposed to the “experts.”

It allowed me to weave in stories of coastal ocean and marine life protection with my exploration of local people, places and events.

I do a lot of corporate work, and this piece was a chance to get back to talking about real people – their emotions, their values, what really matters.

Incidentally, when asked to describe a meaningful project they had completed in the past year, many responses spoke to the diminishing opportunities to do such work:

Sorry. That’s over.

None. [This response appeared four times.]

Unfortunately, I had very few, which is why I’m not optimistic about my career. I am interested in a story I’m doing now about the connection between immigrant detention policy and the private prison industry, but I’m being paid very little for this, so it’s not realistically something I could do very often.

Where Did They Get the Money?

According to the survey results, today’s meaningful journalism can best be characterized as nonprofit, collaborative, and cross-platform. Almost all content appeared in at least two media—usually web and print, but sometimes across 3-4 different platforms. The projects were more often than not financed by (and shared among) multiple sources. These arrangements led many participants to envision a future in which journalists are (to quote one) “free agents” who piece together funding for their projects.

Now we get to the heart of the survey: While there has been a great deal of discussion about the decline of commercial media and the rising importance of grants and donations to meaningful journalism, I was personally shocked to see exactly how important institutional grants have become, at least for participants in this survey. The average grant contribution to these projects was at least twice that of any other source. The combined contributions of grants, donations, and nonprofit media dwarfed that of commercial media.

Funding in the “Other” category came from Google Ads, academic institutions, the journalists’ credit cards, syndication, and more.

In what I see as the survey’s most interesting finding, the vast majority of participants saw this trend intensifying, not diminishing. A stunning 71 percent of participants felt that over the next five years, commercial media would become even less important to meaningful journalism—while 84 percent said nonprofit media would become even more important. (One hundred percent of full-time employees, our most pessimistic group, said that nonprofit media would become more important over the next five years! Does this suggest that they might see a nonprofit future as a worst-case scenario?)

Sample comments:

There will have to be multiple funding streams, including inventive solutions we haven’t yet thought of, because advertising as we know it appears dead (or unreliable for the kinds of original, quality reporting and digging that should be sustained for an informed public).

I think alternative models, such as nonprofit venues, will become more common and more important.

I believe multiple funding sources will come together more frequently.

I think more of the legacy newspapers are partnering with non-profits, university j-schools, start-ups and other funding sources.

Obviously more journalism is going to be funded by sources other than large media companies.

Commercial media’s profit margins are so thin — or, are getting so much thinner — that they are more and more focused on making money than on meaningful journalism. Nonprofit media will have to fill the void.

I think it is harder to get long-form, meaningful journalism pieces into newspapers, online. Most sources that are hiring are looking for 4- and 5- paragraph stories that will pay about $100. Look at AOL, its Patch sites, even Reuters. It’s all hit-and-run journalism.

As I’ll argue in other venues, the combined predominance of social motivation and charitable support clearly suggests that non-Gawker journalism has become a social venture, not the bottom-line business it once was. (Some perspective: even most of the “underground” papers of the 1960s were founded as for-profit, if not entirely “commercial,” ventures—and indeed, the undergrounds evolved into profitable chains of alternative newsweeklies.) However, a minority of participants sounded dissenting or cautionary notes about this trend:

Non-commercial journalism tends to be too time-intensive for experienced, working journalists. The pay-per-hour is too low. Commercial news outlets are growing online and tend to be more efficient. Over time they will require more sophisticated journalism that taps crowd-sourcing and gives the audience unique, useful info and insights.

It’s important to note that, while much of the meaningful new journalism being done now is funded by nonprofits and grants, there is a much larger quantity of journalism being done by Bloomberg and traditional and online news organizations. The ways and places that Bloomberg is adding coverage show that it may not be the profit motive but a lack of organizational will and forward thought that presents the biggest obstacles for news organizations.

Foundations and philanthropists see the decline in commercial media coverage of important topics and are willing to step up and fund projects that would otherwise not occur. Most of the funds, however, are targeted at a particular field, such as health care or the environment. Projects that fit into those neat categories can get funding, but projects that don’t (covering the public sector’s budget crisis, for example) will not be easily funded.

Another funding opportunity not listed is the slippery slope of “advertorial” news stories paid for by advocacy organizations. When done transparently and ethically, it presents a great opportunity to advance an under-reported point of view into the public debate. If not managed properly, it becomes agit-prop with a byline.

It’s also worth noting here that despite a great deal of hope and hype, individual donations—crowd-funding—made up the smallest portion of financing, contributing an average of $2,503 to each story. Despite this current reality, 82 percent of participants said that individual donations would become more important over the next five years, and in open-ended responses cited it as a hopeful trend:

Since I’ve mostly chosen to fund my reporting through new models, like Spot.Us, start-up web sites and investigative journalism grants and centers, I think I will personally draw from those venues more down the line. Right now they are not established enough to support all of my work, but they support a good chunk of it.

Something like this has no commercial base. I do know that some funds were raised on Spot.Us. I didn’t work on any of those stories. I think more will be raised on Spot.Us in the future.

Crowd-funding is going to grow and grow in importance. My next step is a kick-starter project for the documentary version of my story.

Crowd-funding can really work, it’s expedient and puts power in the hands of journalists and communities, rather than institutions.

Readers’ role will become more participatory in funding models; content barriers (albeit small ones) will appear, perhaps encouraging some form of upswing in direct micro-payments; print-on demand technology such as magcloud will remove the overhead costs of self-publishing; multimedia publishing will become the norm, with journalists licensing different parts of the same story to different platforms (eg. podcasts, videos, print and interactive).

Helpful Resources

At the end of the survey, I asked what “resources have been especially helpful to you in preparing you to produce meaningful journalism in the 21st century?” I knew when I posed this question that the answers should be taken with a grain of salt—the survey wasn’t designed to assess these organizations’ effectiveness, especially when some of these groups are apples and some are oranges. However, I was still interested in what participants would have to say.

The rankings of Mediabistro, Poynter New University, and the Knight Digital Media Center are particularly impressive; as far as I know, these organizations did nothing to promote this survey. In open-ended responses, participants citied a dizzying array of other organizations, such as the American Society of Journalists and Authors (mentioned four times), National Association of Science Writers, MediaShift, Nieman Labs, and Spot.us, which helped promote the survey.

That’s what I found out. Now it’s your turn: How do you interpret these results? Are they surprising to you? Or do they just confirm what you already knew? Share your thoughts and experiences as a comment.

And please take the second survey on the evolution of personal business models over the next ten years. In about one month I’ll report on the results of that survey, synthesize the results, and make an argument based on your answers.

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This post was originally published on Stanford University’s Knight Garage

Photo Credits: Flickr CC Abode of Chaos