Geoffrey Cowan is university professor at the University of Southern California and dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. David Westphal is a senior fellow at USC’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and former Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers.

A mythology about the relationship between American government and the news business is again making the rounds, and it needs a corrective jolt. The myth is that the commercial press in this country stands wholly independent of governmental sustenance. Here’s the jolt: There’s never been a time in U.S. history when government dollars weren’t propping up the news business. This year, federal, state and local governments will spend well over $1 billion to support commercial news publishers through tax breaks, postal subsidies and the printing of public notices. And the amount used to be much higher.

This topic is back in the news because of the rapid economic decline of newspapers, news magazines and many broadcast outlets. Amid deepening concern about the impact on our democracy, some are calling on the government to get involved. Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson were among the latest, urging limited government aid to support the cause of news and information. The Federal Trade Commission is among the federal agencies wading in, scheduling discussions Dec. 1-2 to gauge whether government intervention is needed.

The truth is that American government and the news business have always been joined at the hip, and not just through the government’s copyright protections, restrictions on anti-competitive practices and regulation of the public airwaves. It’s also through the infusion of tax dollars.

The Postal Service’s subsidy of mailing costs for newspapers and magazines, which dates back to colonial America and the Postal Act of 1792, is often raised as Exhibit A. Less well known is just how large this subsidy was – and how much it has shrunk. As recently as the late 1960s, the government was forgiving roughly three-fourths of print publications’ periodical mailing expenses, at a cost of about $400 million annually (or, adjusted for inflation, about $2 billion today). Much of that disappeared with the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 and in subsequent cutbacks. But the Post Office still discounts the postage cost of periodicals by about $270 million a year.

Postal subsidies, though, are just the start of the story. Federal and state governments forego about $890 million a year on income and sales tax breaks to the newspaper industry, most of it at the state level. The actual figure is probably much higher because many states don’t report tax expenditure details.

Another major form of government support comes through public-notice requirements, which also have their roots in colonial America. These laws require cities, counties and school districts, along with state and federal agencies, to buy advertising space in newspapers to disclose a range of government actions – such as plans for a new school. Take a look at the Wall Street Journal, for example, and you’ll usually find a page or more of federally paid and mandated ads – in impossibly small print — announcing property seizures. Those are public notices, and nationwide they bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

But all three of these categories are shrinking. For example, legislation has been introduced in 40 states to move public notices to the Web, and the Department of Justice has already announced it will shift property-forfeiture notices from newspapers to its own Web site. The impact would be another blow to newspapers, especially small ones: In 2000, the National Newspaper Association estimated that public-notice billings accounted for 5-10 percent of newspaper revenue.

Postal subsidies, tax breaks and public-notice requirements only begin to describe the ways governments at every level have supported the American news industry. Municipalities provide newspapers with enormous sales and marketing benefits by allowing vendor boxes on public sidewalks at little or no cost to the newspaper companies. Drug advertising regulations by the Food and Drug Administration have been a boon to magazine publishers because they require TV ads to be accompanied by more specific disclosure, and magazines are one of the approved outlets. Commercial broadcasting has also benefited mightily, via the free use of government-licensed airwaves.

After backing the news industry for more than 200 years, the government should assess how it can be most helpful now, when the future of news and information is so uncertain. As it debates possible forms of support, the government should consider these principles:

First and foremost, do no harm. A cycle of powerful innovation is under way. To the extent possible, government should avoid retarding the emergence of new models of newsgathering.

Second, the government should help promote innovation, as it did when the Department of Defense funded the research that created the Internet or when NASA funded the creation of satellites that made cable television and direct TV possible.

Third, for commercial media, government-supported mechanisms that are content neutral — such as copyright protections, postal subsidies and taxes — are preferable to those that call upon the government to fund specific news outlets, publications or programs.

However policymakers proceed, they should do so based on facts rather than myth. The government has always supported the commercial news business. It does so today; and unless the government takes affirmative action, the level of support is almost certain to decline at this important time in the history of journalism.

Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations – Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union.

The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from “special-interest” labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – labor-backed newspapers.

A few months ago I stumbled on a website kept by the Kansas State Historical Society that listed labor newspapers published in Kansas during that period. There were 95 of them, going by names like Anti-Monopolist, Labor Champion, People’s Vindicator and Vox Populi. Theirs was an era when local markets often had many newspapers, not just one, and each reflected a constituency like labor or business, or one political party or the other, that provided audience and sustenance.

There were plenty of arguments then about what constituted journalism, what was accurate, what was fair. We’re certainly headed for more of them now now, with a likely proliferation of news hybrids that may make the previous era look monolithic by comparison. But don’t discount the potential of newsgathering backed by labor (or myriad other interests) to be the essence of journalism. There’s already powerful evidence that the two can happily coincide, and it’s hard to see why the trend won’t continue.

When I posted notes from my Harvard remarks last week, NYU’s Jay Rosen pointed me to David Beers, editor of The Tyee of Vancouver, British Columbia. I hadn’t realized how long Beers has been toiling in the world of investigative reporting backed in part by labor. He started The Tyee in 2003, with $190,000 in initial funding provided by labor. Quite quickly, he diversified his revenue stream, which now also includes philanthropy, advertising, audience contributions and small grants from the government.

The result is an award-winning nonprofit that’s investigative and progressive at heart, and focuses on the civic life of Western Canada. Beers’ budget this year is about $550,000, and his site last month reached more than 160,000 unique visitors.

“It’s a fantastically hopeful story,” said Beers. “And no, we haven’t solved the business-model problem. But we do terrific journalism that has impact and that journalists can take heart from.”

Beers, in fact, thinks labor won’t be the only special interest that will be funding news gathering in the future. “There are thousands of debates going on that people, institutions can’t afford to lose. They need venues for these debates. They have money. And they need journalism and journalists.”

(Note: I’ll write more about The Tyee in a subsequent post.)

THE VOICE OF ORANGE COUNTY
The business model for the nonprofit Voice of Orange County is fundamentally the same as The Tyee’s: Start with seed money from a labor union, add other revenue streams, and produce independent reporting. In the case of the Voice, though, supporters want to ramp up immediately. Norberto Santana, the Voice’s editor, said the $140,000 contributed by the Orange County Employees Association will be supplemented by private donations that could put the first-year budget north of $600,000. (Eventually, Santana said, the site hopes to diversify through advertising, foundation grants, NPR-style memberships and perhaps premium content).

Santana said the Voice of Orange County will differ from The Tyee in one other respect: Unlike The Tyee’s progressive orientation, Voice will be neutral ideologically. However, he acknowledged that the mission of doing strong accountability reporting in an overwhelmingly Republican area like Orange County may make it look like Voice leans solidly left.

In any case, Santana isn’t concerned that the labor money baked into the Voice’s business plan will skew its coverage. “My only orientation is aggressive watchdog coverage of the local scene,” he said. “What does labor get out of it? Only the guarantee that city hall’s feet will be held to the fire, the same way we’ll hold their fee to the fire. But they know they’re not getting a labor shill out of me.”

The Voice will begin with a staff of 6-8, Santana said, and plans to partner extensively – with public broadcasting, with local and topic-based bloggers and with NGOs like the League of Women Voters. Current plans are to translate significant pieces of the site into Spanish and Vietnamese.

ACCOUNTABLE CALIFORNIA
What do you call investigative work that is written by a union staffer and is part of the union’s strategic agenda? Can that be journalism? Is the writer a journalist?

I put those questions to Ted Rohrlich, former award-winning investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times who now is research coordinator for the SEIU local’s research arm. Six months ago it launched a website called Accountable California, whose aim is to produce investigative reporting about the government and its contractors.

Here’s Rohrlich’s answer: “I still think of myself as a journalist,” he said. “But I also think of myself as a staff member of a labor union with strategic goals. So I think skepticism of my work is not inappropriate. But this exercise is pointless if it doesn’t have credibility.”

Here’s one way in which his role is different. Rohrlich’s initial investigation was about the nonprofit Tarzana Treatment Center, which gets 85 percent of its money from the government. According to his reporting, the treatment center spent $22 million in government funds over the last 11 years on inappropriate benefits for company insiders. Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times ended up beating Rohrlich on some of the story. But here’s the difference. Rohrlich’s story wasn’t just for public discussion; it was a dossier that the union took to the attorney general’s office, where it’s demanding action.

“The Los Angeles Times would have the chips fall where they may,” said Steve Askin, who hired Rohrlich and heads the union’s overall research effort. “What we did was a detailed report that says to the government: This money should be paid back.”

Askin said part of the rationale for Accountable California is to respond to the vacuum that’s developed in coverage of labor issues. Labor beats used to be standard fare at metropolitan newspapers; today they’re almost non-existent. But he said the SEIU local has two other more specific goals: putting a face on public employees more favorable than the one people normally see, and acting as a counter-weight against the government.

Mixing journalism and an agenda like that would be in the realm of high treason at the Los Angeles Times, but Rohrlich said he’s perfectly at home with his role, and comfortable in asking the public to buy it.

That’s not journalism as I practiced it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have its own validity. We’re almost certain to see more of it.

Update: Josh Kalven has flagged me about the Progress Illinois site he edits. The site launched in 2008 under sponsorship of the SEIU Illinois State Council.

This framework, old vs. new, hasn’t been wholly wrong. For a long time it has mostly reflected facts on the ground. Old media was in the money-making driver’s seat and spent long hours scoffing and chortling at the new-media prophets. New media would not be outdone on the scoffing front, convinced that the digital revolution would change everything, if only old media would get out of the way. The battle lines were drawn and fixed. And there they would stay.

I was thinking about this last week on the drive up to San Francisco and the Online News Association. I wanted to write about the anniversary of my leaving the old (McClatchy’s Washington Bureau) and entering the new (USC Annenberg, writing and teaching about new media). What struck me is how this old framework was in the process of busting up, but also how much more dismantling was required. As many people have noted — Jay Rosen and Robert Niles among them — these shifting fault lines were much in evidence during ONA’s fabulous program. The old battles were somehow… fading away.

What happened? The war ended. The prophets turned out to be correct. The Internet has changed, is changing, everything — or close enough to everything that they get full credit. What else is happening? The crowd previously known as the money makers get it, too. The consensus now is overwhelming. Armistice is at hand.

Of course, not everyone gets it. Old ways die hard. And, in fact, there are still some real disputes. New-media veterans still see flare-ups of denialism that must be countered. The old-media crowd sometimes sees a presumption that everything old has now been discredited.

But these things now lie at the margins. The ground has shifted. There’s no longer a need to maintain a standing army. And, in fact, it gets in the way of progress.

To my friends in old media, I’d say: If you haven’t already, admit that the new-media thinkers were right — because they were. The Internet would change everything, it would revolutionize and devastate the business you came to love, and there are people who saw this much earlier than you did. (Let me say: Earlier than I did as well.) To my friends in the new media, I’d say: Kudos. You deserve acknowledgment for your vision and smart thinking. But now: Lower the barriers to entry in what used to be your world and yours alone. Newcomers are blessings to embrace, not Johnny-Come-Latelys to be mocked.

We journalists are back together again, or sure as heck should be,and the enemy now isn’t the other side but the challenge of finding new ways and new models that will sustain the information needs of democracy. This work needs everyone’s good thinking, and will be accomplished much more easily if it’s not weighed down by old grudges and tribal loyalties. What a richer world this will be when new-media thinkers critique new media with the same vigor they bring to old media, when old-media veterans feel free to say that old ways don’t work and may not have been the greatest anyway.

Tina Brown, also observing a one-year anniversary this week (the Daily Beast), declared the battle between print and Internet a “phony war.” I wouldn’t say the war was phony, exactly. I’d just say: it’s over.

This trend of experimentation and innovation has almost certainly just begun. Now on the horizon, for example, are multiple initiatives to charge consumers for some aspect of a news organization’s content.

To my eye, one of the more interesting new-model ideas popped up at this summer’s meeting of investigative reporting nonprofits outside New York. The idea, mentioned by two participants, was to set up a separate unit that would do contract or customized research for paying clients. Revenue generated would supply one piece of the business-model formula that would pay for the core investigative reporting business.

The concept seemed both promising and potentially ethically tricky, but in any case it seemed like a fresh approach. Fresh, anyway, till I discovered that the owners of the Economist have been doing this since 1946 through the Economist Intelligent Unit. These days the EIU, with more than 40 offices worldwide, sells country analyses in 200 markets, provides custom research and presentations for executives, convenes conferences on both government and business topics, and more. It calls itself the “world’s pre-eminent global research and advisory firm.” If that’s true, it’s obviously a business that’s bringing in tens of millions of dollars annually in revenue.

In the United States, though, this model has had little adoption, at least not by news organizations. Until now. Several new (or relatively new) sites are getting into this game, leveraging their research and reporting skills to offer specialized information services to corporate clients. Interestingly, two of the new adopters are in Boston: GlobalPost and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

GlobalPost, the international reporting startup created by Phil Balboni and Charles Sennott, has started a custom-research operation under its premium Passport service. For $104 a year ($50 for students and senior citizens), Passport members get access to special content, join weekly conference calls with reporters abroad, and make story suggestions to be voted on by other Passport members. But they also can request, for an additional fee, custom reporting by a freelancer or a GlobalPost reporter on a story of special interest.

Phil Balboni, CEO of the for-profit GlobalPost, said the fee would depend on the research’s scope, travel requirements and so on, but said it would be at least in the “thousands of dollars.” The client would have exclusive access to the information for a time, but GlobalPost would keep the information’s copyright and reserve the right to publish findings.

GlobalPost recently had its first paying customer, a client who asked for research about remittances sent back to Mexico by workers in the United States. The material hasn’t been published yet, Balboni said, but might be at some point. This client and subsequent ones won’t be named, he said, but Balboni argued that conflicts shouldn’t be a problem because any special-order research is liable to be published eventually on the website.

I asked Balboni what research GlobalPost wouldn’t do. “We won’t accept projects if they’re serving PR or advocacy interests,” he said. “Things that are before the courts or a regulatory matter… Basically we reserve the right to reject any research request that would compromise the integrity of Global Post.”

The custom research initiative not only brings in new revenue for GlobalPost — the remittances charge was in “the thousands” — but provides extra income for staff reporters, who are on $1,000-per-month retainers.

Might this become a big deal? “Conceptually it could,” said Balboni. “But it’s too early to say. It’s like everything else we’re doing. It’s so new.”

A similar program is under way at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, based at Boston University. Center director Joe Bergantino said one contract research project is in progress, and more are expected. Bergantino said he will use freelancers to handle the contract work.

Asked what kinds of cases he would accept and reject, Bergantino said classic private investigative work like divorces and insurance cases would be out of bounds.

“We’re thinking more along the lines of research an author needs for a book, or maybe a lawyer needs some pre-interviewing of witnesses, that kind of thing,” he said.

Like Balboni, Bergantino said the client list on the contract side will often (perhaps always) be confidential. That’s business-as-usual in the world of research-for-hire, but it’s at odds with the transparency ethic that the news operations embrace to the hilt in their core businesses. Might this become a problem? It certainly could, but as the Economist has shown, it doesn’t have to.

Journalists, of course, have often found their research skills a good match for related endeavors outside the news business, including investigative-oriented jobs in the criminal justice system or legislative branch of government. Some have chosen that route recently as investigative reporting jobs have retrenched in the legacy media. Case in point: Douglas Frantz, former star investigative reporter and editor at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, who was named chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Two other high-profile investigative reporters, Susan Schmidt and Glenn Simpson of the Wall Street Journal, went in a different direction. They set up their own investigative shop, SNS Global LLC, where Schmidt said they’ll be doing everything from organized crime to counter-terrorism work, for private clients.

What’s interesting here is the idea that news organizations might do this under their own corporate banner, using proceeds to fund the news. I asked Trent Seibert, who runs the investigative site Texas Watchdog, what he thought about this trend. Seibert had thought about doing something similar earlier, but now has doubts. He’s still thinking through how he would set up a separate research operation, and even more important how to decide which projects to take on.

“Where would you draw the line?” he said. “Would you, for example, do opposition research for a political candidate? I’m thinking no, but then it’s not clear to me what is out of bounds.” Seibert said he was also concerned about confidentially requirements that would clash with the news side’s ethic of transparency.

“But I’m not saying these things couldn’t be figured out,” said Seibert. “Everyone is re-evaluating. Everyone is wondering where next month’s budget comes from.”

When he applied to take a journalism elective course, he was rejected because he wasn’t an English major. When he applied for a job as food columnist at the school paper, he was also rejected.

But Motlagh persisted, and eventually won a spot on the school paper as travel columnist. His specialty: Travel to fascinating world spots on very low budgets.

Voila. Today Motlagh has five years of free-lance foreign correspondence under his belt and, in many respects, he is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget.

I found Motlagh through my friend Jon Sawyer, who runs the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and who has made Motlagh, 28, one of the workhorse reporters for his up-and-coming nonprofit. Jon confirmed one of Motlagh’s most attractive traits: his “doggedness.”

In the last two years, Motlagh has covered for Pulitzer the massive flooding in south Asia, the Maoist Naxolite rebels of north-central India, the Nepalese Maoist groups, Sri Lanka’s fight with the Tamil Tigers and, more recently, civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

But that rendition of Motlagh’s recent work doesn’t get at the heart of what he does or what makes it work. Here’s what’s telling:

• He’s a multimedia journalist. Motlagh doesn’t just write stories. He shoots still photos. He shoots and edits video. He does audio. He blogs. He narrates slide shows. And because he does all of those things, he says, he has a huge advantage over free-lance foreign correspondents working in a single medium. Having multiple media skills is “still unusual,” he said. “There aren’t a whole lot of people yet who have gotten up to speed. If you are, you can make clients an offer they can’t refuse.”
• He’s an entrepreneur. This isn’t a new part of a free-lancer’s life, but it’s becoming increasingly important as traditional clients fall by the wayside. In the last two years he lost two important outlets in the San Francisco Chronicle and U.S. News & World Report. But landing work at the Pulitzer Center, and increasing billings through his multimedia work, fills the gaps.
• He lives modestly and accepts that there may be periods in his work where he’ll have to do something besides journalism to pay the bills.

This question of compensation is something that bedeviled my class at the USC Annenberg School for Communication last semester. Students were thrilled with Jon Sawyer’s presentation about the Pulitzer Center – some of them were ready to go abroad immediately – but were stumped about how they would live when Pulitzer essentially pays only travel stipends (usually $1,500 to $5,000).

One answer for the foreign free-lancer, Motlagh said, is that you can live abroad much more cheaply than you suspect. “I was paying less than $500 a month for a very, very nice place in Delhi,” he said. “Even had a house-cleaner. You can do what I do and live well. You can buy insurance, get an apartment.”

Motlagh was a few years into his free-lance career before hooking up with the Pulitzer Center. He began with a six-month stint in West Africa, came home to work for UPI for about a year, then made a decision to go abroad full time. Over the next three years he focused his work on south and central Asia, producing mostly newspaper stories and photos.

Then, about two years ago, another example of Motlagh’s never-say-die trait played out. He pitched an idea to the Pulitzer Center. Then another. Both were rejected. Finally, the center said yes, and Motlagh has become one of its chief contributors.

He acknowledges that his multimedia skills are a big reason. One of Pulitzer’s key partnerships has been with Foreign Exchange, the weekly public broadcasting show. Now Motlagh and other Pulitzer free-lancers were being asked to produce short video documentaries that could air on the show. He needed to learn video and shooting, on the fly.

“One of the things I’d tell students is if I can do it, the sky is the limit,” he jokes. “I’m comfortable with it now. I can shoot and edit my own video.”

In addition to giving him free-lance assignments and a productive nudge on the multimedia front, Pulitzer maneuvered to connect Motlagh with other possibilities: He’s done a couple of IWitness webcam interviews for Frontline/World – work for which Pulitzer pays him $1,000 per interview. It also put him in touch with Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways, resulting in a 7,500-word article on the Asian ethnic insurgencies. (Another Virginia Quarterly Review piece, on the anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, is forthcoming.)

Perhaps most rewarding to Motlagh have been the campus lectures he’s done for Pulitzer’s schools outreach program. Pulitzer made his India work the focus of its schools program last year, and created a Web site that includes lesson plans plans and an interactive chat room. The school visits, to Ohio University, Southern Illinois University, Washington University (St. Louis) and several St. Louis high schools, produced a $500 honorarium for each trip, but also gave Motlagh an emotional charge.

“It’s very satisfying,” he said. “You get more mileage for the work you do; you get feedback, dialogue. You get students interested in foreign concerns.”

I asked Motlagh to circle back to the questions of my students, wondering if their interest in foreign reporting can square with financial realties.

“I feel my case is evidence that this is very possible for young journalist to do,” he said. “As grim as it might look, there are opportunities out there… The other thing I’d say is just go if you think this is what you want to do. Sometimes it’s just being there that creates the opportunity.”

At least for Motlagh, being there is what he wants to do. After a brief stateside visit, he’s heading back to Afghanistan.

Almost five years ago now, my wife (Geneva Overholser) and I sat in Jon Sawyer’s living room in Washington, D.C., and listened to him spin out what sounded like an improbable tale. He wanted to set up a nonprofit center on foreign reporting, and he wanted a philanthropist to bankroll it.

I will confess right here. I was supremely skeptical that this could work. And I was wrong as could be. Jon, the longtime Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, indeed did persuade Emily Pulitzer to establish the nonprofit center. And today, three-and-a-half years old, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is producing dozens of exclusive, multimedia reports on issues and regions of the world that otherwise wouldn’t be covered.

Jon is a longtime friend so I won’t feign impartiality here, and will basically let him tell his own story. But it’s worth making a few points up top:

First, the Pulitzer Center is demonstrating that high-quality international reporting can happen on a modest budget. Jon’s entire expense budget is less than $1 million a year, and that pays for the center’s staff in Washington as well as dozens of reporting grants.

Second, the center is one of the leading proponents for the journalist-as-entrepreneur model. Free-lancers commissioned by the center receive only a travel stipend; but the center then works with the journalists to find multiple platforms and venues for their work. (Note: In a later post we’ll focus on a couple of journalists who exemplify this model.)

Third, the Pulitzer center’s projects aren’t just one-off stories, or even a multimedia menu of stories. They are full-blown campaigns, designed to create maximum exposure for the reporting. Notably, Jon is developing the idea that the college lecture hall and the school classroom are critical pieces of a journalist’s ability to get his or her story across.

I asked Jon a few questions about his center. His answers run a little long, but they’re worth your time:

I’ve been surprised at how quickly you’ve made the Pulitzer Center into a major engine of foreign news coverage. How have you pulled this off in such a short time?
Three and a half years isn’t so short (especially since it feels like three and half years with no weekends off!). But I agree, the Center’s scope has grown much faster than I imagined when we began. We’ve gone from fewer than 10 projects the first year to a projected 35 for 2009, and from just a handful of placements in the first year to more than 250 in 2008.

We benefited a great deal from my experience doing this sort of enterprise reporting over many years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a newspaper with a strong commitment to independent reporting on global issues but no foreign bureaus and a relatively modest travel budget; in my dozen years as DC bureau chief we never had a budget greater than $150,000 for domestic/foreign travel. On the 40-plus foreign projects I did for the PD the travel budget was never more than $20,000, even for trips where I spent six or eight weeks traveling. So I was used to squeezing as much as possible out of limited dollars. I also had field experience in most regions of the world, was familiar with most of the issues presented, and enjoyed relationships I had developed over the years with editors at many print and broadcast outlets.

We’ve also grown faster than anticipated because we’ve been offering unique and high-quality content at a time when the traditional sources for such content have been in free fall. You know the drill – bureaus shuttered, budgets slashed. News organizations that told me three years ago they had no interest in partnering with outside collaborators on international reporting have a very different view today. (This also reflects, I think, the fact that three years in we now have an established reputation for providing quality work – and so we’re able at least to get a hearing most places when we pitch our journalists’ work.)

Lastly, and most important, I was very lucky in the people I hired, and in the quality of journalists who came to us for travel support.

My associate director, Nathalie Applewhite, brought a wealth of experience in video documentaries and international education; Ann Peters, our director of development and outreach, had been a UPI reporter in the U.S., Jerusalem and South Africa and later, after law school, worked on the program side for
Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute; Janeen Heath came straight from college but with terrific organizational skills and experience in campus leadership positions that made her well suited to take the lead in our high school and university outreach programs.

How is the Pulitzer Center different from other news organizations (profit and non-profit) in focusing on foreign news?
The biggest distinction is probably our “full-cycle” approach, from the identification of underreported systemic crises and the recruitment of journalists to help in placement of their work across multiple media platforms and a very aggressive program of after-marketing and educational outreach. In essence we view our projects as campaigns – not as one-off stories where the work ceases at the point of publication or broadcast.

The heart of our work is travel support to journalists, getting them out in the field, but we differ from other funding sources in that we seek out journalists who embrace our model and are willing to work closely with Pulitzer to maximize the impact of their work. The commissions we make come with a host of requirements – all the information you see on our “project pages,” multiple print and photo/video blogs from the field, the creation of audio slide shows to complement the work, entries on Wikipedia, at least one article for our partners at Global Post. For many of our journalists, the blogs and audio slideshows they create for us are their first experience with either – and almost without exception they’ve found it rewarding and highly useful in terms of promoting the work.

The relationship with Global Post is typical of our many collaborations, from traditional platforms like the Post, the Times and NewsHour to new outlets like WorldFocus. We’ve built strong relationships with regional or niche papers that had interest/resources in foreign news (Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Times), putting us in position to help less established writers/producers get outlets and income. We’ve also worked hard on the magazine front, from big outlets like Time and Newsweek (online and print) to specialty mags like Mother Jones, Rolling Stone and The Nation. Because of the many contacts we’ve made, and the track record we’ve established, we’re able to serve our journalists as agent, getting their pitches a hearing. We also do a lot of work on the pitches themselves, getting them in shape to make the strongest case possible.

Among the several dozen projects we fund each year there is implicit competition to be singled out for the after-marketing and educational placements we do for the best of the projects. We plug the chosen journalists into our growing network of schools and universities, giving them this additional opportunity for exposure, contacts and income. We handle all the logistics, the marketing and payments.

The after-marketing and education outreach distinguishes us in another way, in that we are singularly focused on reaching out to audiences not now engaged in traditional news media outlets. In our view we are creating the news audience of the future, exposing young people to quality journalism and encouraging them to join a conversation on critically important global issues – but within the context of vetted, professional journalism.

This is one of the reasons our partnership with YouTube on Project:Report was so important. YouTube came to us as the journalist partner on their first video reporting contest because they wanted to convey their commitment to serious journalism. If you look at the way the contest was structured you’ll see that commitment vividly displayed. Each of the three rounds of the contest was presented with aspirational “model” videos from the work of Pulitzer – on Iraq, Jamaica and Liberia – and each round included a “how-to” video produced by us with our journalists and videographers (e.g., how to do an effective profile, how to find the universal elements in a local story, how to create a collaborative video project). YouTube showed its own commitment to the project via heavy promotion on its site and throughout Google, and by showcasing the ten finalists on YouTube’s homepage (a rare exception to YouTube’s general rule of having popularity dictate placement). The result was nearly 3 million views for videos associated with the contest, and priceless exposure for some exceptional video work. The grand-prize winner, Arturo Perez, is now at work with Pulitzer on a reporting project from Cuba that will be showcased on YouTube, too. We are working with YouTube on doing Project:Report again next year, hopefully with even greater participation by journalism school students and by the broader YouTube community.

What are the one or two projects you’re most proud of?
Of course I’m proud of all our projects (well, almost all!) I tell more about WaterWars and our growing strand of multiple-reporter projects in the section below. Our work in Sudan is very special to me, partly because of our sustained commitment (half a dozen projects and counting) but also because our work on the African Union in Darfur was the Center’s first project, one I did myself and on which we discovered the extraordinary value of using multiple platforms. (The decision to hire a videographer to work with me led to the short documentary for Foreign Exchange, a longer 25-minute doc that aired on LinkTV and that we used to frame a special presentation at the Holocaust Memorial Museum that we simulcast to 35 college locations via Internet2 – and that then became the basis for some two dozen talks I gave at universities, schools and churches across the country … in short a pretty good wake-up call to the idea that the Pulitzer Center was going to be more than a funder of print journalists!)

Our multiple projects in Iraq are worth special note, I think, because they demonstrate (a) the role we can play highlighting under-covered angles even on stories that traditional media IS covering; and (b) the fact that small operations such as the Pulitzer Center can play a significant role even in active conflict zones characterized by security concerns and high cost. We supported Beth Murphy’s documentary on Kirk Johnson, the young AID worker who left the government to mount a campaign to win U.S. visas for Iraqis who were targeted for their work with U.S. army/government. We also made it possible for the Baltimore Sun’s Matt Brown to do a three-part series on the plight of Iraqi refugees stuck in Jordan and Syria.

And lastly, most significantly, we have funded four different projects over the past two-plus year by free-lance journalists David Enders and his wife Alaa Majeed (formerly of McClatchy) and videographers Rick and Jacqui Rowley. They’ve done things most American news organizations didn’t even try – embedding with Mahdi units and Sunni militias and getting cameras in to vast Shiite displaced-persons camps that were off limits to UN, NGOs or other press. We’ve aired multiple pieces on Foreign Exchange, put David on air with Fareed Zakaria to challenge conventional wisdom on the Surge, and made possible dozens of articles and broadcasts across a range of outlets, from the Washington Times to al Jazeera English, Democracy Now, Pacifica, The Nation and Mother Jones. David and Rick would tell you that they couldn’t have done this work without the Pulitzer Center – not so much because of the money (although that of course helped) but because we were willing to serve as sponsoring news organization at times when no one else would, given the security risks entailed and possible liability. They went in with their eyes open as to their own exposure, and having signed liability waiver forms with us. But we went in with our eyes open too, cognizant of the potential risks we bore but viewing it as crucial to produce stories that weren’t otherwise being told.

The other project I want to cite is HOPE, our multimedia examination of the human face of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. This is the definitive example of our approach to news projects as campaigns, and our willingness to work outside the box in drawing attention to the big systemic issues we address.

HOPE began with a commission from the MAC AIDS Foundation, which gave us a grant to “do journalism” on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, the region with the second-highest incidence of HIV in the world but one that had gotten far less media attention than sub-Saharan Africa. There were no restrictions on the work we did, beyond a geographic focus on the Caribbean. The first project we completed was an examination of U.S. policies on HIV/AIDS in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in collaboration with Foreign Exchange, the Palm Beach Post, and Cox Newspapers. This led to a newspaper series, three television pieces, and an interactive web portal “Heroes of HIV: HIV in the Caribbean.” It also produced results, among them a $200,000 emergency appropriation from U.S. AID to clean up sanitary conditions in a Port au Prince prison we exposed in the reporting.

For the second project we opted on a very different approach, commissioning a report on the human face of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica by Kwame Dawes, a Ghanian-Jamaican poet who teaches at the University of South Carolina. Kwame has written some 20 books of poetry and a highly regarded book on Bob Marley and reggae but before this assignment had never done anything on HIV/AIDS. He was recommended to me by Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. I made the first trip to Jamaica with Kwame and over the course of several months in late 2007 and early 2008 he made four more trips, twice with Nathalie Applewhite and twice with other videographers we hired and also a photographer and web designer we commissioned to work with us. He interviewed some 50 individuals in all, from those infected with HIV to educators, doctors, social workers and gay-rights activists; along the way he wrote some 20 poems about the individuals he had met.

In the spring of 2008 we aired two short docs on Foreign Exchange. Kwame wrote an 8,000-word essay for VQR and I then pitched a shorter version of it The Washington Post, which published it in Outlook that spring. Meanwhile Kwame recommended that we commission original music to accompany the poetry. We agreed to do so, at a cost of $15,000, even though this was beyond the scope of the initial MAC AIDS commission and thus something we had to fund through internal Pulitzer dollars. The music, photography, video and poetry all became the basis for www.livehopelove.com, the multimedia website we launched in early 2008. The website is an extraordinarily beautiful piece of work, one that has been honored by the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and with multiple design awards – most recently as special honoree in one category of the WEBBY awards, finalist honors in two other categories, and winner of the “people’s choice” award for best use of art in a website.

We arranged for Kwame to present the project in an appearance at Busboys and Poets in DC, at the same time pitching coverage of it. NewsHour featured the project last fall, in a lengthy segment that included excerpts from the site as well as interviews with Kwame and me. We were then approached by PRX (Public Radio Exchange), which co-funded production of a one-hour radio documentary drawing on all of the material we had collected in Jamaica as well as the music we had commissioned. That documentary has aired across the country this spring, on some of the biggest NPR stations. In the meantime we were seeking a venue to produce HOPE live, as a music/spoken word ensemble. We learned last month that we had been selected as a feature presentation for the National Black Theater Festival in North Carolina, widely regarded as the most important venue in the country for black theater. The production takes place this August; we hope to make it the occasion for raising the visibility of the HIV/AIDS issue as well as for our innovative approach to journalism. We hope that it will help us raise funds for the Pulitzer Center in general, and for further productions of HOPE, on university campuses and in Jamaica.

In the meantime we are pursuing a follow-on reporting project on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, this time focusing on stigma and homophobia and how that has contributed to the spread of the disease. We are working in partnership with WorldFocus, on a series of broadcast pieces that we hope to air early summer – in time to help with marketing of the Black Theater Festival event.

My students at USC were excited about the Pulitzer Center, but were perplexed about how a travel stipend fits with the journalist’s need to pay the rent. How would you say the center’s business model is working for the journalists who receive your grants?
The Center is not “the answer” to journalism’s crisis. It is one answer, not just through the help we give to specific journalists but also as a model for other actors in this sphere – a demonstration that relatively small amounts of money, strategically deployed, can jumpstart careers and lead to sustained relationships.

The next generation of journalists is going to be much more entrepreneurial than ours. It’ll have to be. The old model of “company men (and women),” rising through the ranks of stable news organizations and drawing on ample resources to do stellar work, is simply gone – and not likely to return. But for imaginative reporters willing to hustle there are many opportunities, and few so rich as in foreign coverage. Our success in placing stories by quite young journalists in high-end publications/broadcasts is evidence of what can be done.

On the modeling front I also want to stress again the importance of new players stepping up to take responsibility for sustaining this kind of journalism. Start with universities, and journalism schools. To me it’s an outrage that J Schools expect journalists to come on campus and talk for free, at the same time as they bewail the dwindling opportunities for their students. They should be working to fund this work themselves, through initiatives like Campus Consortium — and I hope many more will be signing up in the months ahead.

I believe I’ve heard you say that the Pulitzer Center has quickly become one of the top creators of international news content in the United States. Is that a true statement? Is the work receiving the kind of attention you want?
I’ve said that we are one of the dozen or so top U.S. providers of original enterprise reporting abroad. I believe that is a true statement. If you were to make up a list of organizations sponsoring at least three dozen enterprise reporting projects per year, you’d be hard-pressed to get beyond a handful. But in making this point my larger purpose was to indict those in our business who say international news is too expensive and can no longer be afforded. The Pulitzer Center is doing 35 in-depth projects a year, nearly half of them encompassing television elements too, on a budget of less than $1 million. We are stretched way too thin and we need more money, for adequate staff to manage/promote this work and to funnel more dollars to the journalists themselves. But still: What does our record say about the performance – and the hand-wringing — of traditional news organizations with vastly more resources?

It’s interesting how much focus you put on the educational portion of your mission. It’s almost as if the news presentation and the education part – campus visits, etc. – are two sides of the same coin. Talk about how the educational piece works for you.
Our Global Gateway and Campus Consortium educational outreach programs are absolutely central to our mission, to engage the broadest possible public in global affairs. The original journalism we sponsor is a means to that end but won’t do much good if we don’t use it creatively to engage younger audiences.

We started with a pilot program in St. Louis high schools and middle schools two-plus years ago, bringing our journalists on selected projects into the classroom and creating interactive web portals where they could engage with students online. If you look at Global Gateway on our site you’ll see the series of projects we’ve presented, from the first one we did in spring 2007 on environmental issues in Mozambique (you’ll also see there five short videos on the Global Gateway concept produced by St. Louis public television station KETC). Gateway projects since have included Iraq, child soldiers in Liberia, HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, WaterWars from east Africa, India’s internal conflicts, and Women/Children/Crisis.

Crucial from the beginning was our partnership with Arthur Lieber and Civitas Associates, a St. Louis educational consulting firm with deep roots in that region’s schools. Arthur helped us make contact with interested teachers and to get through the often-daunting challenge of demonstrating that exposure to our projects met state requirements as to educational “purpose.” We subsequently have worked on teacher lesson plans on several of our Gateways with the Choices program at Brown University’s Watson Institute, a national leader on international-issue curriculum packages with an established network of 5,000 schools.

The in-person visits by journalists have been invaluable in testing out our approach – and a wonderful experience for journalists and students alike – but long term our goal is very much to create an interactive online experience accessible to any school anywhere. Beginning with WaterWars last fall we have significantly enhanced the online experience, using everything from YouTube and Google map platforms (for “your stories” videos responding to each of the reporting topics) to video interviews with journalists and the subjects of their reporting to bring the stories home to students.

We took WaterWars to a dozen-plus schools in Seattle as well as St. Louis, and then to additional schools in Philadelphia, New York, Miami and Nairobi. These schools are now all part of the Gateway “community,” with simple logon/passwords that allow their students to post comments/questions on any of our Gateway portals. The portals themselves remain open to anyone.

Our Campus Consortium is the university counterpart to Global Gateway. We had achieved considerable success at finding university venues for many of our journalists, producing some 100 events over the past three-plus years and often persuading universities to cover all or part of the cost of bringing journalists on campus and giving them an honorarium ($500 to $1,000 per event). Last December we decided to systematize this relationship, seeking commitments by universities/colleges to fund this relationship on an ongoing basis via the Consortium. We set the price at $10,000 per year. In return the university would work with us to bring at least one journalist event on campus each year (in practice this is looking more like one per semeseter). We would designate a Pulitzer liaison on each campus, to work with us on making campus use of all Pulitzer journalism and Gateway portals. And lastly, students at Consortium schools would be eligible to compete for $2,000 travel reporting fellowships with the Pulitzer Center, one per participating campus. In a miserable economic climate we got a wonderful response: full commitments from Ohio University, SIU-Carbondale, UNC-Chapel Hill, Kent State University and the University of Oregon, plus partial commitments from St. John’s/Minnesota and Washington University. We are actively recruiting for additional Consortium members – hopeful that journalism schools in particular will see this as a low-cost means of bringing innovative journalism approaches on campus and supporting the work of stellar journalists.

Where is the Pulitzer Center going next?
As the Pulitzer Center has scaled up, producing several dozen projects a year, we’ve gotten to the point where we can draw on multiple reporting projects to create quite extraordinary web portals that tackle big issues in a variety of ways.
WaterWars is one example, where we’ve followed up the initial reporting from east Africa with our current work on desertification in China, water issues in South Asia, and drought in Kenya. WaterWars is also the model of stronger relationships we’re building with NGOs and other journalists. We teamed with the nonprofit journalism organization Media21 (out of Geneva) to send three Pulitzer journalists (including me) to the World Water Forum this March in Istanbul, and then on follow-on reporting trips to India and Ethiopia. We produced nearly 40 short videos, interviews with experts, other journalists and people on the ground, summarized in blog entries and encapsulated in posts to the WaterWars site. We also created banner ads on this work, serving as hyperlinks back to the reporting and videos, and worked with NGOs like Water Advocates to get them displayed on NGO websites.

This spring we launched a similar cross-cutting web portal on Food Insecurity, drawing on reporting we’ve commissioned in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, India, Tajikistan, Guatemala and Vietnam (and counting! with Australia and other reports yet to come). Lead partner is NewsHour but we’ve also placed stories in The Washington Post, Slate, Global Post and elsewhere. All displayed together on the FOOD portal, which we plan to make focus of major schools/university outreach this fall. We’re also partnering with Mercy Corps to make this content (and accesss to the “Your Stories” video feature) part of the Mercy Corps “Action Centers” that have been established in New York City and Portland, Oregon.

Later this summer we’ll launch our similar web portal “Heat of the Moment: Human Face of Climate Change,” with at least half a dozen separate Pulitzer reporting projects around the globe. By fall we’ll have portals that showcase the four projects we’re currently funding in Afghanistan, a portal based on work now in the field on education in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and FRAGILE STATES, the comprehensive work we’re doing on failed/failing states with support from Carnegie and the Stanley Foundation.

By then (we hope!) we’ll have redone our website to make the interactive portals a more integral part of the site overall – and to set them up in ways that can be integrated routinely in school curriculum and as a social-networking site for audiences more broadly.

Our biggest challenge is raising the resources (dollars) we need to take advantage of the amazing opportunities we now have. From our point of view we’ve established a model that works – from identifying gaps in coverage to recruiting journalists to do the work and then a means of getting it out to the broadest possible audience. On the reporting side I think our current scale is optimal; 35 projects a year is about the max we can do and maintain a personal connection with each of the projects. The key is staff resources to build our network of schools and universities, through the Gateways and Campus Consortium. Much of this work will eventually be self-sustaining, through Consortium membership fees and the possibility of modest charges to schools for engagement with our journalists on line. Getting to that point is a matter of persuading foundations and individuals to invest in success – to invest in the Pulitzer Center.

Until recently, this question wasn’t even asked much. If there was worry about what would happen to watchdog reporting with the decline of newspapers and other legacy media, it was expressed at the national level. It’s why the launch of ProPublica,, the investigative journalism non-profit, got such acclaim, and now why many of us will be paying close attention to the establishment of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

But look what’s happening now at the community level. Last summer came the launch of Texas Watchdog, which got one-year foundation funding to play watchdog over state government and other Texas institutions. Two months ago Investigative Voice in Baltimore sprang to life. Now David McCumber of the dear-departed Seattle Intelligencer is trying to rustle up funding for an investigative journalism site focusing on issues in the West. And a gang from the RIP Rocky Mountain News is aiming to launch InDenverTimes with the idea of making investigative work one of its centerpieces.

Meanwhile, investigative reporting centers in Wisconsin and Boston (plus likely additions in other locales) are raising the prospect of a state-by-state network that might have abundant university connections. Bill Buzenberg, director of the longtime giant of investigative reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, told me recently he could envision CPI as an umbrella organization fostering the growth and work of such a consortium. (Disclosure: My wife, Geneva Overholser, is on the CPI board.)

That all of this, or even some of this, might really blossom is speculative in the extreme. As Jay Rosen observed while helping preview the Huffington operation, investigative reporting is one area of journalism that is unlikely to have market support. Financing by philanthropists, foundations, readers, interested citizens will almost certainly be required.

But there’s little doubt that a head of steam is forming. And if grassroots investigative reporting takes off, one important moment will turn out to have occurred just last week, when the Voice of San Diego won a major award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. The four-year-old, muckraking Voice became the first community news site to win IRE’s online award – for its watchdog coverage of two downtown redevelopment agencies in San Diego.

Here’s how the Voice described its work: “The stories uncovered relationships between redevelopment officials and developers with lucrative development contracts and exposed a clandestine bonus system at (the agency) that the president used to pay herself and other employees $1 million over the course of five years. The result: The leaders of the agencies were fired or resigned, criminal investigations are under way, and the organizations have begun to undertake wholesale reforms.”

As IRE executive director Mark Horvit suggested in his lavish praise for the Voice’s work, the stakes here are not small. I’ve been arguing that it’s wrong to think just about I-team investigative units when pondering a future that does not include robust newspaper newsrooms. It’s better to describe the at-risk work as watchdog reporting, which I believe has a very large imprint on American journalism, and very large ripple effects in our country’s governments and other institutions.

So it’s been heartening, to say the least, to see a rising level of concern and action on the watchdog reporting front. Buzenberg has the Center for Public Integrity back on track after weathering a near-death experience. Robert Rosenthal’s Center for Investigative Reporting is exploring all manner of networking possibilities. And Paul Steiger is off to a fast start at ProPublica, demonstrating the value of partnerships with the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS and more. Steiger’s recent hiring of Amanda Michel will help kick-start the promising proposition that distributed reporting might assume a powerful role in the investigative world. (On that front, we already have the fascinating spot.us experiment that David Cohn is conducting.)

The mainstream press is part of this movement as well. Editors increasingly are talking not just about the threat to watchdog reporting, but of how they can preserve it as one of their core missions even as resources dwindle.

There are multiple strikes against the idea that watchdog reporting can actually gain a foothold as a grassroots movement. Practically any business model has sharp limitations when it comes to investigative work, which is time-consuming, treacherous in its predictability and certain to be controversial. So is there a financing mechanism that legions of out-of-work journalists and others could adopt that would at least partially bankroll accountability reporting projects?

The answer is likely many months or years away.

Even for the Voice of San Diego, with its budget of about $800,000 and eight full-time reporters, the reality of a sustainable investigative reporting operation is a distant hope. (See Update below.) Voice is financed partly by foundations and mostly by philanthropy, and neither the foundations nor philanthropists are intending for their funding to be permanent.

But it’s an island of stability compared to the challenges facing other sites. Texas Watchdog got first-year funding from the Sam Adams Alliance, but now is looking to other potential revenue streams, including advertising and money made off a citizen journalism training program. Baltimore’s Investigative Voice is in a different situation. It basically began with no start-up funding, and exists now with a few advertising dollars and contributions, but mostly free labor.

“The business model is a challenge,” said senior reporter Stephen Janis of Investigative Voice. The site has signed up several advertisers, he said, but ultimately will rise or fall on whether it can get readers to make voluntary payments – perhaps coupled with premium items such as a subscription to the Voice’s print-on-demand publication.

And yet both sites have quickly shown how critical it is for local watchdog reporting to thrive. Texas Watchdog has gotten notice with its reports on dead people on voter rolls. Investigative Voice has landed several scoops in its first two months of operation, including coverage spotlighting questionable trips to the Caribbean approved by Baltimore’s pension board.

Scott Broom, a blogger and reporter at WUSA-TV in Washington, wrote that Investigative Voice “is a wake-up call to traditional print reporters and broadcasters” and is demonstrating the power of “one-man-band digital reporting.”

Janis said others who want to start a watchdog reporting site must be willing to “rethink how they work, how they report, and what merits reporting. The Web is a very fluid information outlet, so you have to work much harder to find readers.”

And worth it? “Despite all the challenges, he said, “this has been the most interesting endeavor of my career.”

UPDATE: Scott Lewis of the Voice of San Diego pushes back on my assertion that the Voice, which he leads with Andrew Donohue, is a long way from attaining sustainability.

In an e-mail he wrote: “Yes, the grants we received from foundations aren’t permanent. But our number of donors is exploding. We now have 822 donors… None of our donors have indicated to me that they plan to pull back. Quite the contrary, they are more passionate than ever.

“While I don’t think we’ll always have the donors we have now, I don’t understand what is so exotic about our model. Why are we so unsustainable compared to, say, public radio? The local NPR affiliate raises $20 million from donors and grants who may or may not think of their annual funding as permanent. Our budget this year has been expanded to just over $1 million. Why is it so crazy to imagine that, using almost the exact same fundraising formula, we could reach one-tenth of the funding that KPBS gets?

“This year, we’re projecting a massive increase in our corporate sponsorships. And the number of $1,000 to $5,000 donors is going up each week. Is it really that crazy to think that, like the opera or museum of art, we’ll be able to significantly diversify our funding to sustain a $2 million organization?”

It’s because Ann Arbor Chronicle is coming up on its six-month anniversary, it’s meeting financial targets, and Morgan and husband/business partner Dave Askins are able to pay household bills out of revenue from the site. “When I was a business reporter, I used to laugh at firms that marked each anniversary,” said Morgan, who acts as publisher. “Now I know how they feel.”

With a deep and potentially long recession set in, I wanted to circle back with Morgan and some of the other for-profit news site owners I talked with last fall, and see how their mostly new operations were faring. The question has taken on more urgency in recent weeks. As economic conditions have worsened and newspapers have shown accelerating signs of stress, the health of these online-only news sources seems suddenly more critical.

The anecdotal answer from my small sample group is this: So far they’re hanging tough. Business hasn’t fallen much, if at all, and most are instituting expansion plans. If they’re a barometer, community news sites have some resiliency to them.

“We have seen some impact from the economy in terms of advertisers cutting spending or even going out of business,” said Jonathan Weber, who’s been running New West since 2005. “On the other hand, this kind of dislocation forces people to revisit how they are spending money, and rethink their marketing strategies overall, and that is actually very good for us.”

The group also answers affirmatively another fundamental question for what seems to be a growing number of people thinking about starting up a community news sites: Can you do this and make a living?

Local news sites come in all sizes and shapes. Some are non-profits. Some aren’t trying to live off the operation. But for those who are, some survivable wages are being earned.

Tracy Record and Patrick Sand, another husband/wife team who operate West Seattle Blog, are getting revenue in the high five figures. Debbie Galant, co-owner of Baristanet, earned more from the site than she did from her free-lance writing business last year. And Bob Gough, who runs Quincy News, pockets $1,000 a week in wages from his startup that serves an Illinois community of only 40,000.

Gough, fired from his TV news job in the fall of 2007, may be Exhibit A for the potential of independent news sites. A one-man band, Gough has mined 40 Quincy advertisers, writes about the heart of civic and political life in town and is now hoping to expand by hiring additional staff. His two original investors are also thinking growth, looking at the possibility of replicating the Quincy News model elsewhere.

Galant, at Baristanet, has even bigger expansion plans. The Montclair, N.J., site, established in 2004, will soon partner with another community site, Montclairkids, rebranding it as Baristakids. The idea, said Galant, is to expand Baristanet’s network in a way that expands reach and revenue for both partners.

With the help of new-media expert Jeff Jarvis, she also plans an incubator model offering turnkey services to news site aspirants. Baristanet’s servers, basic business model and consultation services would be available to new players, with Galant and co-owner Liz George taking a share of revenue.

Many of the news-site operators I spoke with see indications that local advertisers, while hammered by the recession, are still acclimating themselves to the possibilities of low-cost pitches on their sites. “In general, I think the online opportunity at the non-metro local level remains pretty untapped,” said Weber.

But many are also diversifying, as Weber has done for years with his New West conferences and indoor billboard advertising business. Nancy Peckenham, who runs the New York Cornwall-on-Hudson site, is heading in a different direction. She’s now able to receive contributions through a 501(c)3 sponsor and will start a fund drive this spring.

I also asked many of these new-media journalists about the burnout factor in a business that, at this juncture, is famously all-work, little pay.

Tracy Record, the ubiquitous poster at West Seattle Blog, and emblematic of the grit you see in this world, had this response: “You have to look at it like any small business. You kill yourself trying to get it off the ground. Stop whining about that. We have been dismissed by people saying, ‘You’re going to burn out.’ No, we’re not.”

Here’s a closer looking at some of the people who are making a go in the for-profit sector:

West Seattle Blog (Seattle)
Tracy Record and Patrick Sands don’t try to cover all of Seattle, much less all of greater Seattle. Their target is the 58,000 people who live in the West Seattle area. And they never seem to stop.

Patrick handles ad sales, Tracy is the incessant, 24/7 poster, and they use their knowledge of and passion for West Seattle to do everything from watchdog coverage to bake sales. Visiting fellow Jane Stevens at the University of Missouri did a great case study on their operation.

Here’s some of Tracy’s e-mail response to my question of how things are going in their three-year-old operation:

“I am adamant about the ‘hyper-local’ space being a place for local independents. I am sick to death of these national VC-funded operations (Patch, American Towns, whoever else) trying to swoop in and say, ‘Hey! We’re your plug-and-play hyperlocal news!’ No, you are NOT. Nor is a voiceless aggregator. Let’s not let this precious new type of coverage be poisoned the way the ‘big corporate media’ world evolved from local, independently owned tv/newspapers/whatever … It may happen eventually but don’t smother this industry from birth!

“Every community has different needs, and must be served by someone who tailors the service based on what they learn in interaction with their community. I WISH that the people throwing money around would share some with those of us who are bootstrapping, rather than yet ANOTHER aggregator, or sharing site, or whatever. THIS is where the action is happening and the future is being paved. But I can’t get a Whatever Grant to so much as give me the time of day. Just not considered sexy enough to be busting your butt uncovering and/or sharing information and news in real-time re: your community.

“Back to the community … it really is all about community. Someone wrote that out there in the “future of media” writing sphere this week. We really aren’t a news site so much as a community site. Some of what the community is interested in is the news we dig up or follow up on etc. Some is news they share. Some is what they post in the forum. Some is what we are all part of in our parallel Twitter and Facebook streams (and who KNOWS who’s next). Even our ads are perceived as more a community service … letting people know about businesses and services out there. And much of what we do community-wise never hits the site … half my day is spent answering e-mails, either resource questions or checking out rumors that don’t pan out but at least I write back ‘here’s what I found out.’”

New West (Missoula, Mont.)
Jonathan Weber’s vision of a Western regional Web site that anchors a highly entrepreneurial business remains a new-media icon. With a staff of nine, NewWest reports on issues that unite the West – the environment, wildlife, development, politics, water and the like.

But Weber has leveraged that core by sponsoring a series of conferences that focus on these issues. One next week is called “Designing the New West, Architecture and Landscape in the Mountain West,” and is sold out. He also layers on an editorial services arm, a display advertising business and an events-calendar product.

Web is a fierce advocate of the for-profit model for independent news sites, even to call foundation-funded models “unfair” competition. In a recent blog, he said the free market was the best guarantor of success for his company. “Here at NewWest.Net, we’re getting by with online advertising, a solid conference business, a few complimentary activities like online event calendars, and relentless effort to do a lot with a little,” he wrote… “And the happy fact is that the last three months have been our best ever on the business side, despite the economy and the general ad-market meltdown.”

Here’s how Weber responded when I asked him about business conditions:

“We have seen good growth in online ad sales over the past 4-5 months. Despite what the conventional wisdom in the business says about falling CPMs, we are in fact getting very healthy CPMs for our ads. I think we have done a much better job recently in offering good ad tools in areas like flash and video advertising, and generally positioning ourselves as the next-generation media partner for local businesses. Longevity also helps — we have been around four years now, lots of online publications come and go but I think people are now persuaded that we are here for the long run.

“We have seen some impact from the economy in terms of advertisers cutting spending or even going out of business. On the other hand, this kind of dislocation forces people to revisit how they are spending money, and rethink their marketing strategies overall, and that is actually very good for us. On the local level, most advertisers are not very far along in the transition to online, and I think the economic dislocations are actually helping to push that along. Some categories, notably real estate-related, are obviously very weak, but other sectors are more than picking up the slack.

“In general, I think the online opportunity at the non-metro local level remains pretty untapped. That’s why I think it’s way too early to give up on the idea that local journalism can be a business.”

Ann Arbor Chronicle (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
When Mary Morgan wrote me last fall about the new site that she and her husband had established in Ann Arbor, Mich., this is how she described its mission: “Ultra-local events within easy arm’s reach – whether it’s a pickup softball game, a client meeting in a coffee shop, a spontaneous political caucus, a school play – that’s the lens through which The Chronicle sees topics like entertainment, economic development, government, education.”

So far it’s worked. Here’s the update Morgan e-mailed me earlier this week:

“We’re coming up on our six-month anniversary (when I was a business reporter, I used to laugh at firms that marked each anniversary…now I know how they feel!) and we’re hitting our financial goals, which were admittedly modest. Without getting too specific, we’re now in a position to pay our household bills (mortgage, health insurance, etc.) with revenue from The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

“Aside from the initial investment in equipment (primarily laptops and digital cameras) and site design, we’ve kept our overhead costs fairly low. Our next goal will be to grow revenue to the point of being able to hire freelancers or even (gasp) part-time or full-time staff.

“Given the economy, especially in Michigan, I’m pleased with how things are going. Interesting to me is the number of non-business advertisers we’ve signed up: two local school systems, a school within the University of Michigan, the public library and some local government agencies, in addition to the retailers, banks and other business advertising I’d anticipated.

“Our readership is growing as well, which is crucial to our advertising, obviously. We had nearly 20,000 readers (measured by unique IPs) visit the site in January. We started out in our first month (September 2008) with about 4,000.

Quincy News (Quincy, Ill.)
Quincy hardly seemed like the right place to launch an independent news startup. It already had an established newspaper and, despite having just 40,000 residents, two local TV stations.

But then, Bob Gough had just lost his TV news job in the fall of 2007, and was firmly rooted in the western Illinois community. With the help of two investors, he launched Quincy News in 2008 and has quickly signed up enough advertisers to pay his $1,000-a-week salary, his $350-a-month rent and a few other operational costs.

But it’s still a tough go. “We’ve got an Internet connection and a cell phone but no land line and no fax,” said Gough. “And that’s hard because the city refuses to e-mail me its press releases.” Gough contends that’s part a city government tilt toward the Quincy Herald-Whig, which he says derives from the local daily’s “glowing, fawning coverage” of City Hall.

Gough figures his audience – roughly 9,000 unique monthly visitors – is already not much less than half the numbers of the Herald-Whig. But his dream of adding a staffer, or a part-timer, is still on hold. “I’m making enough to pay the bills,” he said. “But not enough to add a second person.”

Baristanet (Montclair, N.J.)
Montclair’s proximity to Broadway, just 15 miles away, may account for the sass that Debbie Galant and Liz George have baked into Baristanet.

“It’s important to have a personality-driven site,” said Galant, who was a novelist and free-lance writer before adding Web-site owner to her credentials. “It’s the news, yes, but it’s not just the steak that makes you successful. It’s also the sizzle.” Baristanet has almost 85,000 monthly unique visitors.

Galant is bullish about the upcoming addition of MontclairKids to the site. It’s Baristanet’s first partnership, and once live the material will be branded as Baristakids. Owners of the Montclair kids site will get a revenue share, said Galant.

Next up will be the Baristanet Incubator which will leverage the site’s infrastructure and expertise to help launch new Web site operators. Baristanet might charge an up-front fee of $5,000 and then take 25 percent of revenue and equity from the new business, Galant said.

“I think with these projects we are starting to get more involved in the idea of networks and networking,” she said.

Galant siad business tailed off a bit in January but had been running strong until that point. She said Baristanet’s nearly five years of experience in Montclair are beginning to pay dividends.

“This was a really a hard sell for us at the beginning,” she said. “What’s happening now, though, which is really fabulous for us, is that our readers and advertisers sell us. A new business opens and people ask them, ‘Have you been on Baristanet?’”

Some other notes from local news sites:

Cornwall-on-Hudson (Nancy Peckenham)
“Honestly, I am not seeing much of a recession impact on my advertisers. I have been running the site since mid-2006 and most of my advertisers are local businesses that are supportive of the site and appreciate being able to target the local community.

“The daily newspaper here serves three counties and a newspaper ad is a lot more costly than an ad on my site, which can be had for as little as $50 a month (up to $125). As a one-person band, I actually spend a very small percentage of my time actively selling ads. Most advertisers come to me because they see the value. I do have expansion plans, however, and am in the process of hiring a part-time content writer so that I can concentrate on the business side. I am optimistic about recruiting new advertisers because I do believe that in this climate small is beautiful and people are recognizing more than ever the importance of community to support each other.

“My readership has not dropped off, either. In 2008 I had 36,000 unique visitors and 140,000 visits — in a town of 13,000.”

Dagger Press (Steve James, Baltimore)
“Traffic is up slightly over the past six months, around 15 percent. Now that the Maryland General Assembly is in session, we tend to have more articles on a daily basis which will help as well.

“We’ve lost a few writers but have gained a few more, so it’s almost evened out. As for revenues, we still haven’t been able to carry out our advertising plans other than Google Adwords. We have made our advertising kit and determined preliminary prices, but haven’t taken the next step to start soliciting potential advertisers. That should
be coming in the near future.”

Black White Red (Steve Crozier, Dallas)
“Audience continues to grow at a rapid pace, roughly doubling each year. Our revenue has averaged a 10 percent increase month-over-month for the last 13 months.
We’d like to do better, and we can as our critical mass of readers grows. But we’re being careful not to sacrifice quality for growth.

“The recession hasn’t hit us too badly here in Dallas. However, the last 30 days has thrown some hints that things may slow down somewhat. Bucking the trend, our CPM remains very high: selling targeted local advertising to local readers is the answer.”

Note: The Knight Digital Media Center is hosting an entrepreneurial journalism workshop in May at the USC Annenberg School Journalism. More than 100 people have applied for the 12 slots.

Charlotte Hall, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, told me the idea raises multiple questions about how newspapers could solicit philanthropic support and still retain credibility. But bottom line? “I believe that a model could emerge for foundations to fund some local reporting at newspapers — investigative reporting or an important local beat, for example,” she said in an e-mail. “A new kind of firewall would be needed to assure independent reporting and unencumbered editing.”

The idea that for-profit media might seek subsidies from community foundations came into sharp focus last week, when the Knight Foundation awarded $5 million to 21 civic foundations that pitched plans for expanding news and information in their communities. Some of the ideas sounded much aligned with the mission statements of local newspapers and TV stations.

The most striking was a winning proposal from the San Antonio Area Foundation, which received a $488,500 Knight grant to produce live Web video on community issues. Its proposal began this way: “Although ranked in the top 50 media markets in the country, San Antonio lacks in-depth news coverage about diverse communities and issues.”

Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, was taken aback. He sought out the foundation’s director, Reggie Williams, to ask how the foundation could be making such a claim given the newspaper’s concerted efforts to reflect and report on the city’s diversity. Williams issued a statement praising San Antonio’s local media and, while not backing away from the project, said it was in no way intended as a slap.

But no expression of comity could mask the powerful dynamic on display. Local foundations were teaming up with Knight to support a total of $17 million worth of new-media journalism that, in many cases, the for-profit media in town would love to be doing.

I e-mailed Rivard asking if the Express-News would be willing to compete for foundation money of the kind Knight gave to the San Antonio foundation. It took him less than 5 minutes to respond. “We would have shown keen interest in such a grant, which could fund a couple of teams of online documentary journalists for two years and help us move more rapidly to enrich the site with dynamic content not repurposed from the print edition,” he said. “I wouldn’t have a problem accepting funds from such a reputable foundation, especially since it’s a leader in the movement to reinvent the way we gather and distribute news and information…”

Nancy Barnes, editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said newsroom leaders there have also kicked around the idea of seeking philanthropic support. “What we need most as a newspaper is investigative help,” she said. “If I could get some non-profit funding for that, it’s a plus… That’s the part that must survive.” The Star Tribune last week sought to reorganize its business under Chapter 11 bankruptcy provisions.

And how does Knight feel about the possibility of redirecting some of its philanthropy to newspapers and broadcasters? The idea seems potentially at odds with Knight’s determination to encourage news innovation, not to mention foundations’ reluctance to invest in profit-making ventures. But Knight said the door is open.

“In general, we support nonprofit endeavors,” said Marc Fest, Knight’s vice president of communications. “What we’re open to are innovative ideas from wherever.” He pointed out that Knight has backed MTV and Village Soup, both for-profit concerns but worthy recipients because of their strong proposals.

In fact, Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab at American University in Washington, said there’s nothing new about journalism foundations supporting for-profits. Between 1993 and 2002 Schaffer said she funded 120 pilot projects with mainstream news organizations, many of them profit-seeking, as director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism.

“So, I would suggest that many news organizations have been open to this idea for, oh, the last 15 years,” she said.

Robin Reiter, a Miami adviser to Knight in its new communities grant program, said many foundations aren’t willing to go through the hoops required when their money is given to for-profit businesses. An “expenditure responsibility requirement” kicks in that can be costly and time-consuming, she said. But Reiter said newspapers or broadcasters, joining with civic foundations, could easily get around that problem through a partnership.

“Let’s say the newspaper brings $100,000 worth of resources to the table for a project, and the foundation brings its own $100,000,” she said. As long as no money changed hands, a little creative partnering could end up doubling the newspaper’s investment. “A newspaper could, for example, set up its own nonprofit arm,” said Reiter.

The Knight program is but one aspect of the new competitive environment that legacy media find themselves confronting across the country. Increasingly, in big metros like Minneapolis as well as smaller ones like Quincy, Ill., online-only news sites, both nonprofits and for-profits, are springing up to compete for news and local ad dollars.

The relationship between these sites and the big news guns in town — newspapers and broadcast outlets — is much in flux. At an industry level, there’s a push toward collaboration. ASNE is in the process of changing its bylaws to admit the editors of Web-only news organizations. And Schaffer is starting what she calls a “networked journalism” project that will partner five news organizations with five citizen media sites.

But some editors have questions about foundation funding by Knight and others of community online news sites.

Bill Marimow, editor of thePhiladelphia Inquirer, told me that the idea “is troubling to me… All of us in newspapers are struggling to fulfill our public service mandate. Creating competition at a time of flagging revenues and rofits runsis contrary to preserving the core mission.”

The involvement of local civic foundations in supporting alternatives to the hometown media is particularly intriguing, partly because legacy media over the year have often been the financial and leadership bedrock of these organizations.

In an e-mail (her full statement is at the end), Hall said she believes newspapers should embrace much of what the new-media grants represent. “Most seem aimed at fulfilling specific unmet needs, rather than displacing existing media, thereby broadening a community’s information sources and providing a platform for more local voices,” she said. “That is to be applauded and nurtured.” She acknowledged that many newspapers have had to trim staffs. At the same time, she said newspapers are innovating in new media forms at a fast pace, and remain dominant information sources in their communities.

At one level, most newspapers seem comfortable with a nonprofit partner. There’s been little pushback against the idea of pairing up at a newsgathering level with a nonprofit like Pro-Publica, for example, or the Center for Public Integrity or the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The questions become more difficult when the philanthropy is not from a journalism organization.

Hall said many questions would have to be addressed: “Do we lose our independence if we take money from a foundation? What about from individuals? What about from the government? Can an NPR model emerge for local newspapers as profitability erodes? Are all foundations created equal on the independence issue? Is funding from the Knight Foundation different from funding from a foundation with a political agenda or a single-issue agenda? Should we take money from a local foundation we cover?”

Here’s the full transcript from ASNE’s Charlotte Hall, who is editor of the Orlando Sentinel:

“I think that relations with community foundations probably vary from newspaper to newspaper, so I can’t generalize on how a grant would affect those relationships. Generally, newspapers have had two faces in the community: an editorial face that is independent and that works for the public good through its reporting and editorial positions, and a corporate citizen face that fulfills the civic responsibility of an influential business through philanthropy and board service. The relationship of the business side and philanthropies should not affect news coverage.

“As I read through the list of the Knight grants, I was impressed by the range of projects. Most seem aimed at fulfilling specific unmet needs, rather than displacing existing media, thereby broadening a community’s information sources and providing a platform for more local voices. That is to be applauded and nurtured. ASNE, in its proposed changes to its membership criteria, recognizes and welcomes the emergence of Web-only news sources.

“Newspapers and their Web sites generally have the largest audience among local news sources, but declining staffs have left some areas under-covered. I would add, however, that editors have made local public service journalism a priority as they’ve had to make cuts. They also have used their Web sites to deepen public service reporting with databases, documents, video, photo slide shows, crowd-sourcing and interactivity. Because of their large audience and their ability to uncover stories, newspapers remain influential in the public life of their communities.

“The question of whether newspapers should seek and accept foundation funding deserves a lot of discussion. Independence is the basis of journalistic credibility. That’s why we separate the business side from the editorial side and why we enforce tough ethics codes. Do we lose our independence if we take money from a foundation? What about from individuals? What about from the government? Can an NPR model emerge for local newspapers as profitability erodes? Are all foundations created equal on the independence issue? Is funding from the Knight Foundation different from funding from a foundation with a political agenda or a single-issue agenda? Should we take money from a local foundation we cover?

“The questions seem endless, yet I believe that a model could emerge for foundations to fund some local reporting at newspapers–investigative reporting or an important local beat, for example. But a new kind of firewall would be needed to assure independent reporting and unencumbered editing. We live in the most exciting–and most scary–time imaginable for media. We need to experiment boldly and guard our values. I think we can do both.”

In the first year of the Knight Foundation’s $24 million, five-year program, 100 of the nation’s community foundations sought some of the action, pledging their own philanthropy in applications for matching Knight grants. That amounts to nearly 15 percent of the nation’s civic foundations – and many of them submitted more than one grant proposal.

Knight officials were taken aback by the turnout. “The biggest surprise for me was how many responded in the first year,” said Trabian Shorters, Knight’s vice president of communities. “It’s not unusual with these grant initiatives that people wait and see. So that was a big and pleasant surprise.” Shorters said the response indicated there’s some “pent-up demand on this front.”

For local media outlets, the projects funded by Knight often read like pointed shots across the bow. In many cases, the initiatives are work newspapers in particular are trying to do, or have traditionally done. The involvement of civic foundations ups the ante, with leading local figures agreeing with Knight that something must be done to augment the mainstream media’s reporting. Shorters said no slap was intended at local media, but he said even mainstream journalists acknowledge that staff cutbacks have created gaps in community news and information.

Knight reviewed a total of 170 applications and funded 21 of them to the tune of $5 million. Shorters said the local foundations would put up an amount “north” of that total. (UPDATE: Knight reports the total expenditures will be $17 million, meaning the community foundations will put up $12 million.) Knight’s 2009 contributions range from $500,000 to the San Diego Foundation to $41,250 headed to the Manatee Community Foundation in Florida. Grant terms, not specified for each recipient, range from one to three years.

The wholesale pairing up of civic foundations with news and information non-profits marks a new frontier in the development of non-profit community news sites. And it busts through whatever barrier there might have been to hometown foundations identifying local news needs as a core mission. “They’re seeing the gaps in community information,” said Shorters, who predicted that many foundations who’s applications were rejected would go ahead and fund local projects on their own.

Some of the foundations are partnering with community news sites that have won national attention for their pioneering work. The San Diego project will be a partnership with the Voice of San Diego, with its news staff of about a dozen and recent record of strong muckraking journalism on civic matters. The project, which also involves local public libraries and Media Arts Center San Diego, is designed to create “community-based digital storytelling” aimed especially at the Native American population and other “underserved” groups.

A $100,000 grant to the Minneapolis Foundation will create new reporting beats at MinnPost, Joel Kramer’s robust news start-up. The idea is to get donors to bankroll reporting beats with money matched by both the Minneapolis Foundation and Knight.

The second-largest grant, $488,500 to the San Antonio Area Foundation to create Web videos focusing on community interests, was an example of money aimed directly at the local newspaper’s mission, and it did not sit well with Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News. The first sentence of the award summary says: “Although ranked in the top 50 media markets in the country, San Antonio lacks in-depth news coverage about diverse communities and issues.”

Asked about his reaction, Rivard said the assertion “does not tell our story.” He said in an e-mail that the Express-News does a good job of covering “all our communities. A day doesn’t go by without a story or multiple stories in our pages about our minority communities.

“How many newspapers field a team of high profile local columnists like ours: Cary Clack (lead features columnist; African-American); Ken Rodriguez, Carlos Guerra and Jaime Castillo (our three metro columnists; Latinos); David Flores (Sports columnist; Latino). We continually finish in the Top Five of the ASNE metro markets for newsroom diversity, and our newspaper pages and Web site reflect that diversity and the diversity of our city.

“We have our critics, of course, and we are self-critical, never satisfied with where we stand. But there is much to be proud of here.”

The president and CEO of the San Antonio Area Foundation, Reggie Williams, said the group meant no slight to the Express-News or any other local media. “We believe our newspaper and broadcast media are as strong as any in the Nation,” he said in a statement, in which he took responsibility for imprecise wording. (Full statement posted as a comment below.)

(I also queried Orlando Sentinel editor Charlotte Hall, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I’ll update.)

Shorters emphasized that none of the projects was intended as a commentary on the performance of local media. Knight’s intent is to foster community information needs, he said, and local citizens sometimes have views on that subject that differ from the local media’s. “It’s important to understand that our interest is not saving the newspapers and radios per se,” he said.

I asked Shorters whether for-profit media might be eligible for the Knight civic grants. He didn’t answer directly, noting that it’s “more complicated” to give grants to profit-seeking concerns. But he added, “We’re more concerned with meeting the information needs than which organizations to support.”

What’s next for the program? First, a new seminar for civic foundations, set for Feb. 16-17 in Miami. After that, Shorters hopes for even more applications for next year’s funding round.

While he and other reviewers said they were impressed with the savvy shown by applicants in the first round, Shorters said Knight will be looking for a “broader range of strategies” in Round No. 2.