The Rise of NonProfit Investigative Journalism in the United States

Bill Birnbauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351051880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

With a foreword from Michael Schudson, The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States examines the rapid growth, impact and sustainability of not-for-profit investigative reporting and its impact on US democracy and mainstream journalism.

The book addresses key questions about the sustainability of foundation funding, the agendas of foundations, and the ethical issues that arise from philanthropically funded journalism. It provides a theoretical framework that enables readers to recognize connections and relationships that the nonprofit accountability journalism sector has with the economic, political and mainstream media fields in the United States.

As battered news media struggled to survive the financial crisis of 2007-2009, dozens of investigative and public service reporting startups funded by foundations, billionaires and everyday citizens were launched to scrutinize local, state and national issues. Foundations, donors and many journalists believed there was a crisis for investigative journalism and democracy in the United States. This book challenges this and argues that legacy editors acted to quarantine their investigative teams from newsroom cuts. It also demonstrates how nonprofit journalism transformed aspects of journalistic practice. Through detailed research and practical discussion, it provides a comprehensive study of this increasingly important genre of journalism.

The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States is an important text for academics and students of journalism, communications theory, media and democracy-related units, as well as journalists worldwide.

1 Introduction

The Changing Face of Watchdog Journalism

In downtown San Francisco, Mother Jones’s CEO Monika Bauerlein is grappling with the final fact checking of an investigative story about the President’s financial dealings.

In New York, the Marshall Project’s editor-in-chief Bill Keller is choreographing a partnership with the Los Angeles Times that will assess the impact of reduced incarceration on crime rates. At the Wall Street end of Manhattan, ProPublica’s president Dick Tofel is surprised and delighted at the rapid growth in the number of individual donors to his organization.

At FairWarning’s one-room office in Pasadena, founder and editorial director Myron Levin is figuring out his next move in a bid to extract documents relating to enforcement programs operated by the US Labor Department.

In Minneapolis, Todd Reubold, who publishes the environmental magazine, Ensia, is concerned that a barrage of Washington political news has upended important discussions about climate change, the state of the oceans, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.

And in New Jersey, NJ Spotlight’s Lee Keough is getting medical and other routine appointments out of the way in advance of the long hours she anticipates spending on a merger between her news organization and a local public television station.

These journalists are part of an expanding sector of accountability journalism in the United States that operates under a nonprofit business model. Unlike commercial media that are funded by advertising and subscriptions, nonprofit news sites depend on grants from foundations, wealthy supporters, and, to a lesser extent, individual donors and fundraising activities.

The nonprofit investigative and public service journalism sector grew rapidly after the 2007–2009 global financial crisis that devastated commercial media revenues, leading to the loss of tens of thousands of journalism jobs and concern over the future of quality journalism. Since then, the nonprofit news sector has continued expanding, matured, and contributed to democratic processes well beyond its size.

The Institute for Nonprofit News, an association whose members are nonprofit investigative and public interest news organizations, has more than 160 member organizations across the United States after being founded in 2009 with just 27 members.¹ More than 100 of the institute’s nonprofit news organizations were created between 2007 and 2017. There are an additional 110 or so nonprofit accountability news organizations in the United States that are not members of the institute (S. Cross, personal communication, April 11, 2018). The United States, for all its economic, racial, political, and social issues, has at least some corrective resources when activities that support democracy are said to be at risk.

In a departure from traditional journalistic practice, many of the country’s most prestigious commercial and public media organizations now partner with and publish stories written by nonprofit center reporters. This shift represents a significant change given the distrust and wariness by mainstream media toward externally produced stories and the culture of competition between newsrooms. “Collaboration is maybe the most dramatic change I have seen in newsroom culture in my lifetime,” observed former New York Times’ executive editor Bill Keller (personal communication, April 25, 2018).

New nonprofits have rapidly established themselves as vigorous players in American journalism. They have won the most prestigious awards for journalism: Pulitzer Prizes, George Polk Awards, George Foster Peabody Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Investigative Reporting, and awards and honors from the American Society of News Editors, Online News Association, National Press Club, Society of Professional Journalists, and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

While not close to replacing the loss of professional journalists or the lost value of media companies since the 2007–2009 financial crisis, nonprofit journalism has invigorated a tenet of democracy by expanding the production and accessibility of civically important journalism. Nonprofit news organizations such as the Center for Public Integrity, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ProPublica, MinnPost, Texas Tribune, VT Digger, and the Marshall Project have shown that they can produce stories, datasets, and visualizations that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters simply do not have the resources, expertise, time, or culture to create.

This book examines the creation, funding, and operation of nonprofit accountability news sites in the United States. The central question it addresses is whether philanthropically funded centers are sustainable in the longer term. This is important because these new organizations have demonstrated that they can produce serious journalism that serves or can serve democracy (Schudson, 2008, pp. 11–26). Investigative and public interest stories scrutinize and hold to account powerful corporate and government figures and institutions, expose injustice and systemic flaws, provide the public with independently validated information, and act like a sword of Damocles over the heads of politicians, government officials, and business people who might be tempted to break or bend the legal and moral standards expected of them. Communications professor James Hamilton demonstrated how investigative stories costing thousands of dollars can deliver millions of dollars of benefits to society through policy changes and social returns (Hamilton, 2016, pp. 10, 111–135).

Situating Nonprofit Investigative and Public Interest News

It is helpful to understand the interactions the nonprofit investigative and public interest news sector has with other fields of activity. Of direct relevance are the economic, political, and mainstream media sectors. For nonprofit news organizations, the biggest source of revenue derives from philanthropic grants. These funders – foundations and wealthy individuals – constitute an economic sector. The political sector consists of the Internal Revenue Service and the federal and state government agencies that establish the rules for foundations and nonprofit organizations. For example, these rules mean that foundations are required to grant a minimum 5 percent of their assets each year. The Internal Revenue Service has to approve nonprofit status before organizations can be exempted from federal and some state taxes, receive unlimited donations, and donors are able to reduce their taxable income (Digital Media Law Project, 2014; Griffith, 2013). The mainstream media sector socialized in newsroom culture key players who moved to establish or operate nonprofit news organizations, and today routinely publishes stories produced by nonprofit journalism organizations.

This is not a book of media theory. Nevertheless, the concepts of field and various forms of capital developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu² are used to help us understand the relationships between the nonprofit sector and other sectors and why a reputable newspaper such as the Washington Post might be comfortable accepting a potentially controversial story from ProPublica or the Marshall Project but may reject – or write its own version of – a similar story from a citizen journalist.

My introduction to US nonprofit journalism occurred when a letter arrived from the United States in 1998 inviting me to join a new global nonprofit investigative organization based in Washington, DC. At the time, I was a reporter in a daily metropolitan newsroom in Melbourne, Australia. I had never heard of nonprofit investigative journalism and the idea of cooperating on stories and sources with unknown foreign reporters appeared unlike anything I would do. It was even bizarre. I doubted that nonmainstream media organizations were capable of undertaking serious investigative journalism. This was a time when weekend newspapers were thick with classified advertising, newsroom budgets allowed generous expense accounts, statehouse bureaus were well staffed, and few could foresee the impact that internet startups would have on traditional business models. After researching the people behind the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, I decided to learn more and agreed to join though I remained wary. At a meeting soon after with the consortium’s editors and reporter members from 60 countries, I quickly realized how similar we were in our ideas of what constituted a good story, the methodologies we used, and our ethical values. I was hooked by the vision, ambition, and impact of investigative journalism done on a global scale and soon was involved in two major consortium projects. Taking a voluntary buyout in 2008 after 33 years in print journalism, I moved to a tenured academic position and started looking more closely at the US nonprofit sector as part of my doctoral research. This book is the result of further research in the United States after I left my university appointment. No foundation or other funding was provided for the project. I had discovered that America’s philanthropic foundations supported journalists and their training in the early 1990s when I was awarded a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. Until then, I knew virtually nothing about US foundations.

Differentiating between investigative and public interest news centers was not relevant to the research because I sought to examine common factors in the development of centers that practice noncommercial professional journalism. Investigative and public interest newsrooms are funded mainly by foundations, wealthy business people, and donors. Both employ professional journalists and produce nonpartisan journalism that is in the public interest. Both have faced the same ethical issues due to their funding by philanthropic organizations, and both from time to time have confronted financial, personal, and management challenges. On a practical level, some of the analysis in this book is based on the membership of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which does not distinguish between investigative and public interest organizations. Using the institute’s membership as a filter offers some assurance that the nonprofit organizations cited produce nonpartisan in-depth journalism and are not fronts for advocacy organizations. Rather than indulging in an academic debate about definitions, this book simply refers to “accountability journalism” to cover investigative and public interest or public service reporting.

Nonprofit accountability journalism operates with the practices, ethics, and values of professional journalism, but its economies have elements in common with nonmarket citizen writers and bloggers. Journalists predicate their value to the community in terms of principles such as commitments to truth, accuracy, freedom of speech, unbiased reporting, the public’s right to know, and independence (Webb, Schirato, & Danaher, 2002, p. 183). But these cultural values alone do not provide the income that pays journalists to do their work. The job cuts, bureau closures, and other savings measures implemented by media companies as stock markets crashed during the financial crisis are a graphic illustration of the economic sector’s dominance over these cultural principles of journalism. Investigative stories, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, have little commercial appeal, though high civic returns. That means nonprofit accountability news centers rely heavily on donor funding and therefore are vulnerable to negative impacts from the more powerful economic (foundations and wealthy funders) and political sectors, and to a lesser extent, the commercial media.

Expansion of Nonprofit Accountability Journalism

Nonprofit watchdog journalism is not new. News organizations such as Mother Jones, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Better Government Association have published deep dive journalism for decades. Well-known general media that use the nonprofit model include the Christian Science Monitor, Harper’s Magazine, the Washington Monthly, NPR, PBS, and Associated Press.

The expansion of the nonprofit accountability reporting sector in the United States coincided with a period when commercial media were under extraordinary financial stress. The 2007–2009 financial crisis was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression (Reuters, 2009). The financial turmoil led to a sharp decline in newspaper and broadcast advertising revenue, leading to widespread job cuts and foreboding about the future of journalism and democracy. Newspaper companies were hardest hit: the closure of newspapers, moves to digital-only publication, and bankruptcy processes in journalism powerhouses like the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer sent shockwaves through the industry. Panic set in when it became known that the New York Times was bailed out financially by a Mexican billionaire (Lee, 2014). The industry was in difficulty even before the financial crisis due to digital startups drawing away its classified advertising, historic debt levels, and long-term declines in readership (Bagdikian, 1990; Benkler, 2006; Brock, 2013; Jones, 2009; Meyer, 2009; Nichols & McChesney, 2009; Picard, 2006).

Philanthropic foundations, journalists, academics, and civil society grew increasingly concerned that democracy would be affected by the budget cuts that swept the industry (Frank, 2009; McChesney & Nichols, 2010; Osder & Campwala, 2012; Riptide, 2013; Westphal, 2009). Investigative journalism looked particularly vulnerable: it was expensive to produce, was plagued by costly legal actions, it upset politicians and potential advertisers, and was unproductive in the number of stories it created. It was always subsidized, mostly by classified and display advertisements in commercial media; those rivers of gold as they were once called now looked like parched creek beds.

There wasn’t much of it being done in any case. A content analysis of the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, and 2003 concluded that watchdog stories were a small fraction of overall news (Fink & Schudson, 2014, p. 13). In 2003, only 1 percent of the stories were found to be investigative, which was consistent with previous periods apart from 1991 when they constituted 3 percent of the stories. A more recent study of the front pages of nine national, metropolitan, and local newspapers in five-year intervals between 1991 and 2011 found that “deep accountability reports” as a percentage of front-page stories averaged between a high of 4.03 percent for the Wall Street Journal and just 0.32 percent for a small local newspaper (Knobel, 2018, p. 24).

The inevitable demise of investigative reporting became conventional wisdom among journalists, funders, and media observers. It was this “crisis” in journalism – the conventional wisdom is questioned in Chapter 4 – that led to journalists together with foundations and a handfu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Changing Face of Watchdog Journalism
• 2 New Collaborations: A Mutual Benefit
• 3 Crashing through the Firewall
• 4 Saving Journalism and Democracy during the Financial Crisis
• 5 Funding Nonprofit Accountability Journalism
• 6 Secondary Factors Promoting the Creation of Nonprofit Accountability News Centers
• 7 Case Studies of Four National Nonprofit Investigative Reporting Centers
• 8 On the Ground with Smaller Nonprofit News Organizations
• 9 Ethical Issues in Foundation Funding of Journalism
• 10 Flash in the Pan or a Sustainable Business Model?
• Index