The Northern California chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists handed out awards recently, and several winners – including one with Milwaukee connections – were nonprofit news organizations.
California Watch, which is headed up by former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel projects editor Mark Katches (and whose staff includes former JS reporters Erica Perez and Susanne Rust), got recognized for investigative reporting. And California Watch wasn’t alone: The San Francisco Public Press, Newswire21.org, The Bay Citizen and the Global Press Institute based in Alameda, Calif. – all nonprofits – also shared in the honors.
Then there’s ProPublica, the nonprofit startup in New York that drew talent from places like the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize last April for a story on the wrenching choices health care workers made in overwhelmed and disabled hospitals in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is following the same model, in partnership with Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and other news organizations. Founder Andy Hall has already become tagged as something of an expert in the nonprofit news world.
Next spring will see the start-up here of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, a hyper-local, nonprofit organization that hopes not only to post stories on its own website but also feed them to local news and TV outlets.
Is this, then, the future of serious journalism? Or at least part of it?
Increasingly the answer seems to be yes.
You need look no further than radio news to see where things may be going.
Only three commercial stations still offer any real news on the radio – WTMJ
620-AM, and WISN 1130-AM have the highest profile, while WMCS 1290-AM
is a niche broadcaster serving primarily the city’s black community –
though it also has the ear of anyone who wants to reach that audience
as well. But both TMJ and ISN have ideologically polarized their
programming and audience via their conservative talk radio formats;
their news breaks, meanwhile, are mostly short, sound-bite fare.
There’s nothing like Chicago’s all-news WBBM here.
Meanwhile WUWM 89.7-FM and Wisconsin Public Radio’s WHAD 90.7-FM
both offer far more in-depth coverage, and the former is even looking
to expand its offerings. (Full disclosure: Milwaukee Magazine partners with WUWM via the station’s Lake Effect show.)
Commercial news operations are subject to the economic
vicissitudes that can cut into advertising sponsorship, not to mention
the current sweeping technological and cultural change that may lead
advertisers to flee permanently to new and different platforms.
Nonprofit organizations have their own challenges, both with the
economy but also with the care they have to take about ethical issues.
Then, too, is the reality that even highly successful nonprofits
are likely to have much smaller audiences than commercial enterprises:
Data from Arbitron suggests that the two public stations have only
about one listener for every five who listens to TMJ and ISN combined.
Still, for those who love and value good journalism, the rise of
nonprofit news holds promise. In the bad news of the news business,
they are a hopeful story.
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