Nonprofit Newspapers?

Former Washington Post editor Steve Coll blogs in The New Yorker that the way to save the institution of traditional newsrooms with investigative journalism and reporters in far-flung corners of the earth is for a paper like the Post or the New York Times to become a nonprofit organization.

The typical spend rate for endowed nonprofits is in the five-percent range. If the Washington Post had a two billion dollar endowment, it would be able to fund a very healthy newsroom. And this is before revenue from continuing operations—advertising, circulation, etc., which could surely cover at least the cost of distribution and overhead, particularly if the form of delivery is increasingly digital.

He notes, by way of comparison, that little old Williams College has an endowment of over $1 billion.

Coll is by no means the first person to come up with this solution, but he's the most prominent former journalist I've come across to do so.

I have a few arguments with the idea, though. The first is that part of the energy a paper derives is from the need to scoop the other papers--and thus to sell more copies! If selling more copies isn't as important (because the paper's livelihood isn't at stake), there's less urgency to find a scoop.

No reporter ever turns his nose up at a scoop, but it's editors demanding scoops because the publisher is on their tail that makes reporters actively scrounge around looking for them. And those are the best kind.

My other issue is the idea of saving an institution because of its past performance. But newspaper publishing, like book publishing, has become more of a big business than it was in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer, and publishers are no longer the paragons of journalistic integrity they once were.

Blame it on capitalism, I guess, but when the great papers get out of the hands of the families that built them for reasons of pride, publishers become more concerned with cost-justifying every expense, and protecting powerful interests like advertisers and political operatives.

(What better way for Mr. Murdoch to make sure he gets to own TV stations and newspapers in the same market than to protect candidates that will loosen regulations?)

The nonprofit model would insulate newsrooms from that vice, but would fail to generate the creative spark that only fear of starvation inspires.

Which begs the question of whether the institutional model of journalism is worth protecting, or whether it is in the processes of living out its usefulness.