First-year grand total for Knight's civic program: $17 million

January 14, 2009 by

Can community news non-profits persuade hometown civic foundations to help bankroll their operations? The answer looks like a resounding yes.

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.

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GlobalPost: A startup treads where big media retreat

January 8, 2009 by

Journalists can’t resist “man-bites-dog” stories. Here’s an example of one they’ll find irresistible: Even as media companies shed revenue and staff in ever-growing numbers, a new company will spring to life Jan. 12 that will employ about 80 journalists with the un-modest aim of covering the world. And… it aims to make money.

Boston-based GlobalPost is a Web startup that will try to fill a void left by newspapers and network television, which collectively have pulled back sharply in deploying journalists abroad. If it’s successful, GlobalPost will be one of the most spectacular against-the-grain stories since news companies began their accelerating revenue slide almost two years ago.

“There’s literally a revolution going on, and we want to be in it,” Charles Sennott told me Thursday. “We want to be right there at the barricades.” Sennott is GlobalPost’s executive editor who, with CEO Philip Balboni, is trying to accomplish what conventional wisdom would say is improbable at best. At a time when the economy is tanking, advertising is fleeing newspages and most American media are going local, GlobalPost is betting that what happens in South America and Africa and more is worth an investment of Americans’ time and money.

In one way, GlobalPost is the perfect combination of new media and old. GlobalPost’s foreign correspondents – about 65 have been lined up in 45-plus countries – will receive just $1,000 per month, with the assumption that they’ll pay the rent and groceries by earning additional income elsewhere. This arrangement may become a defining aspect of the new-media world, but it’s one that’s been a part of the foreign correspondence world for decades.

The correspondents also will be paid with shares of the company, but Sennott has had to do a sales job to persuade his new hires that the stock could be valuable. “We mean it,” he said. “We will assign a dollar value and we’ll buy back if they want.”

GlobalPost hopes to draw income from three buckets – advertising on its Web site, syndication to news media clients and a premium Web service that will cost $199 per year. On the surface, all three look like uphill climbs, but Sennott promises that GlobalPost will be “nimble and creative” in adjusting its business plan as things go.

At a minimum, Sennott, a former Boston Globe veteran, has made a believer of some impressive names in lining up his foreign correspondents – people like Caryle Murphy, Michael Goldfarb, Matthew McAllester, Seth Kugel and Josh Hammer. Jack Farrell will be covering foreign policy from a Washington perspective.

These names reflect, in part, the continuing lure of the swashbuckling life of a foreign correspondent – “the grandest ride you can have in journalism,” Sennott said. I was constantly amazed when I ran the McClatchy Washington bureau at how consistently our foreign-based team accomplished the near-impossible, and I told Sennott these qualities might make them uniquely adept in their digital-world quest.

Sennott agreed, but said his journalists will need to become much more entrepreneurial in order to succeed. “We all need a better, vested sense of making a business work,” he said.

At a minimum, GlobalPost has a cost structure that mainstream media can’t touch. At $1,000 a month, Sennott will have a team that will cost less than $1 million annually. A Washington Post or New York Times or McClatchy gets only three or four moderately priced bureaus for the same sum. Of course, these bureau correspondents are full-timers; GlobalPost’s are stringers who will amount to part-timers. It’s on the revenue side where the big question exists. GlobalPost is talking with potentially paying customers who would subscribe to the service, but there’s nothing to announce yet, Sennott said.

Interestingly, GlobalPost started out as a nonprofit idea, more along the lines of Global Voices or the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, both wonderfully valuable additions to the world of foreign reporting. GlobalPost could end up in the same place. But profits are where Sennott and Balboni are aiming. If they make it, journalists will be dancing in the streets.

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Well-known news sites to use Knight money to deepen reporting

December 19, 2008 by

Four poster children for the community online news movement plan to use new cash infusions from the Knight Foundation to strengthen reporting resources on their hometown sites.

The Knight Foundation, journalism’s biggest funder of digital innovation, announced it was giving $390,000 to the Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, MinnPost and ChiTown Daily News. All are non-profits, and the first three represent some of the most ambitious efforts to marshal community news reporting solely on the Web.

By relying on major gifts and foundation money, the sites are trying to create large enough audiences to sustain themselves – through advertising and/or continued philanthropy – when the initial funding peels away. Other, mostly smaller, online news startups are trying to build businesses from the ground up by relying on advertising alone.

OJR took fresh looks at the Voice of San Diego, Minn Post and ChiTown Daily News early this fall, and the New York Times followed suit last month with a front-page story on the muckraking San Diego site. “There hasn’t been a day go by since then that I haven’t had some follow-up from that story,” said co-executive editor Scott Lewis. Many inquiries have come from job-seekers or news entrepreneurs hoping to replicate the “Voice” in their own hometowns, he said.

Lewis said its $100,000 Knight grant would be used to start a free-lance operation to supplement its stable of about 10 full-time reporters and editors. The two main areas will be science and technology, which already are highlighted on the site, and the federal government’s involvement with San Diego. The latter focus may partially fill a void created by the year-end closing of the Washington bureau of San Diego’s daily newspaper, the Union-Tribune. Lewis said the focus initially will be on border issues and the area’s big military operations.

Lewis and co-leader Andrew Donohue also hope to benefit from another Knight initiative exploring how civic foundations might rally to the cause of independent online news. Knight has pledged $24 million in matching funds, over five years, to push the idea that community foundations could take a leading role in helping ensure local news needs. Knight is expected to make announcements about the program in early January.

The Voice of San Diego and the other four sites represent a hybrid business model in which they seek the support of foundations, philanthropists, advertisers and NPR-style member-donors. Lewis said his site’s budget projections are on track this year, despite the down economy.

Here’s how the other three sites say they’ll use their Knight money:

ChiTown Daily News – Editor Geoff Dougherty said his $100,000 Knight grant would go toward hiring four full-time reporters to cover local issues. He plans to expand coverage of higher education and public housing, and begin new beats on public health and labor. A separate $50,000 grant from the Abra Prentice Foundation will also go toward those reporting efforts.

St. Louis Beacon — Margaret Wolf Freivogel, the Beacon’s editor, said Knight’s $90,000 grant would go for two or three new hires who would focus on “the nexus of the economy, politics and health care.”

MinnPost – CEO and editor Joel Kramer said its $100,000 grant would finance additional reporters placed on retainers. Kramer told Knight that the funds might deepen coverage from Washington or on local business and government, but that actual use will depend on circumstances – including “finding the right talent within our price range.”

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