Non-profit journalism: A solution to the no-profit economic model that’s killing Maryland’s media
By Howard Libit
For much of the past decade, Marylanders have watched their local media shrink. The Baltimore Sun, which once boasted a newsroom of more than 400 journalists, is now below 150, and its print edition no longer has separate sections for metro or business. The Washington Post, which once had local news bureaus in virtually every D.C. suburb from Frederick County to St. Mary’s County, has steadily retreated toward Washington; its Southern Maryland Extra was just eliminated, and much of its news from Howard and Anne Arundel counties comes from a “content-sharing” partnership with The Sun. The Baltimore Examiner came – and went. The Washington Times just eliminated its entire metro operation. And the cuts to the electronic media are just as severe, from WBAL Radio curtailing its weekend local news broadcasts to the gutting of WMAR-Channel 2’s news operation.
And as the Maryland General Assembly returns for its 427th session, the loss of media will become abundantly clear yet again. Newspapers that used to cover everything that moved in Annapolis for the 90 days of law-making simply can’t do it anymore. The Sun used to send a staff of six reporters, with one dedicated to nothing but business issues. This year, the news staff is unlikely to muster half that number. Television and radio stations that used to post reporters to Annapolis for virtually the entire session will now “drop in” when they hear that there’s a big vote or a controversial debate. And many of the smaller newspapers from the far-flung areas of the state, who used to pride themselves on full-time session correspondents, simply don’t have the dollars. They’ll be quicker to rely on email press releases and the occasional phone interview with the local politicians.
What’s happening is far from unique to Maryland. News outlets across the nation have shrunk, or simply ceased operation. They’ve fallen victim to the double whammy of the Internet – a place where no one expects to pay for content – and the national recession that has hammered advertising revenues. With both public and private media companies under intense pressure to keep up their profit margins, the solution for the past few years has been to cut. Cut back on journalists. Cut back on the space available in the print edition. Cut back on the coverage of the “dull-but-important” topic areas that are crucial to holding government accountable for the laws it passes and the taxes it collects.
Sure, the pack of remaining Annapolis reporters will flock to the high-profile, bright-light topics that crop up year after year, like the death penalty and slots. In the meantime, many of the important issues that affect thousands of Maryland businesses and hundreds of thousands of Marylanders will be considered by lawmakers with little outside scrutiny. Perhaps a reporter will drop in to write a single story about a particular business topic, with a follow-up three-paragraph item when the legislation gets killed or passed.
This is where Center Maryland hopes to offer a solution. With the corporate media under siege, it’s time for non-profit journalism to take a shot at filling the breach. It’s time to find a way to cover the important issues that, without enough media paying attention, fly under the radar screen until it’s too late for public pressure and public scrutiny to stop the politicians’ mistakes.
As the Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, looked back over the past decade of journalism in a recent column, he noted how unthinkable it was back in 2000 that so much media coverage would come directly from websites – from Politico to Drudge to the Huffington Post. Some of those websites have enough money to even hire top journalists away from old-school print publications like the Washington Post. So far, few publications outside of the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times are able to demand subscriber payments for access to their online material, and online media continue looking for ways to generate revenue.
Just as unthinkable a decade ago is the decision made in recent years by these mainstream publications to accept journalism produced and paid for by outside foundations – often foundations that have a stake in ensuring their issues get covered. Consider the Kaiser Health News, funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Separate from the health conglomerate Kaiser Permanente, the foundation nevertheless has a long history of advocacy on health care issues. But Kaiser Health News has hired a roster of top-notch, veteran health care editors and reporters who promise thorough, comprehensive, fair news articles. And the Kaiser-produced articles and opinion pieces are now published in places like the Washington Post.
In California, former Los Angeles Times editor Michael Parks has helped establish the California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting, in conjunction with the University of Southern California. Financed by the foundation, the center has already lined up newspapers across the state looking to work with them on reporting and to publish their work. The Hechinger Institute, based at Columbia University, has set up a nonprofit to finance education reporting across the country that otherwise would not get produced and published. Even the New York Times has looked into ways that non-profit foundations might help with news costs, according to a column by the Washington Post’s ombudsman.
In recent months, the declining coverage of state government has attracted several prominent non-profit start-up organizations that are seeking to fill the void. The Texas Tribune launched as a non-profit model last year, and here’s how its founders described their mission:
The reason we started the Trib is not because your local paper doesn’t believe in journalism in the public interest. It does, and it produces as much as it can. But in this severely depressed economy, human and financial resources are not as plentiful as they once were. So papers have had to make hard choices. In the end, most of them have eliminated people and pages, and as a result, coverage of policy and politics has been cut way back. This has created a substantive void. You can’t solve big problems if you don’t know about them, and you can’t know about them unless someone tees them up.
California Watch, a non-profit which launched this month, now features the largest investigative reporting staff in the state. There is talk of similar operations being considered in other states.
Center Maryland aims to bring this national idea to Maryland. A nonprofit organization funded by its founders and outside donors, Center Maryland’s original news coverage will be overseen by an experienced editor and focus on important issues that are falling through cracks, in such areas as clean energy, developing economies, the next economy and smart government. Opinion pieces from people calling for centrist, practical solutions to Maryland’s problems will be highlighted. And all of the state’s political and government coverage will be assembled in one place each morning for a quick and thorough information download, from the antics in Annapolis to Campaign 2010 to the legislation passed by the Baltimore County Council.
The idea of nonprofit organization supplementing the declining media is working elsewhere. It’s time for Maryland to give it a try.
Howard Libit spent 15 years as a reporter and editor at the Baltimore Sun. When he left in 2009, he was the newspaper’s Assistant Managing Editor for News, overseeing all local, national, foreign, business and investigative coverage. He is a co-founder of Center Maryland.
