Jaclyn Schiff

News About Nonprofit News & New Project Announced

by Jaclyn Schiff on 06/14/09 at 10:49 pm

If you’ve checked out my About page, you know that I work for Kaiser Health News, a new nonprofit news organization that focuses on health policy. Working at KHN has really piqued my interest about the nonprofit news model and I’ve been thinking a lot about its strengths and weaknesses.

Shortly after KHN launched, I searched to see what people were writing about us, and I came across The Nonprofit Road. The blog describes itself as “a meeting place and a resource for people interested in applying the nonprofit model to enterprise and investigative journalism.”

Jim Barnett (@jimbarnett26) is the blogger. Barnett writes that he has “two decades of newspaper experience and an admittedly anachronistic belief that volunteer journalists – bloggers, citizen journalists and such – can’t replace what is being lost with the demise of newspapers.” He also tried his hand at launching his own news nonprofit, which apparently showed him how much he didn’t understand about the nonprofit model.

When the blog launched in April this year, he wrote a bit more about that experience:

I decided to launch my own nonprofit. I began by looking for sponsors for a newsroom that would report data-driven investigations from Washington, D.C., and give away its work. I shopped the idea to many of the leading lights in the business. To his eternal credit, Chuck Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity bought me a beer and offered me encouragement. But others sent back at most a few words of encouragement. And money? Forget it!

Fast forward to April 2009. Things have changed so much. New nonprofit news outlets are cropping up every day. Even as I write this post, I see an AP alert about Seattle P-I refugees starting their own online paper. Things have changed for me, too. I’ve left daily reporting to learn about the nonprofit sector, and I’m working on a second master’s – this one in Nonprofit Management in the M.P.A. program at George Washington University. As part of my studies at GW, I’m working on a report on the state of the nonprofit model in journalism. The project involves several phases.

Insomniactive recently gave the blog an enthusiastic endorsement and I also find that I’m excited to read Barnett’s updates.

On a related note, I’d like to announce a new project. One day, after perusing some of the regular journalism blogs I read and learning about a new journalism venture, I started thinking that it would be useful to store all these new journalism projects in one place. RSS didn’t seem like the best place because I’m not always interested in reading the news they produce (especially the hyperlocal ones) and I already have way too much in my RSS in reader. But I am interested at looking at the original sources from time to time and seeing the content for myself. So I started listing these projects on a wiki  page. Although I had hoped to have more sites listed before publicizing the wiki, it makes sense to mention the project at this point.

Also as I was adding content to the page, I created categories to group these new sites according to their business model and coverage type. I don’t think the categories I currently have are necessarily the best way to organize these sites, so suggestions are welcome! As you’ll see, I have just a few sites up there, there are tons that I’m missing, so please let me know what should be added and how it should be categorized. Right now, I’m the only one who can edit the page, but in the future I’ll probably open it up for multiple editors or allow completely open access.

Oh and if you’re curious about what Barnett wrote about KHN, check it out here.