October 22, 2009
The Future of Nonprofit Journalism
A new report that urges foundations, universities, and the federal government to support a new model of American journalism is generating a lot of buzz — and some skepticism.
The study, commissioned by Columbia’s journalism school, calls on philanthropies to support local reporting and on the government to ensure the tax code allows news organizations to operate as nonprofit enterprises.
Jim Barnett, a blog writer at the Neiman Journalism Lab, worries about the study’s suggestion that the Internal Revenue Service should establish a new definition in the tax code for nonprofit news efforts.
“The solution, I think, is for the broader nonprofit community to address this issue in a proactive way,” he writes. “Even if it can’t produce a bulletproof definition, it can identify practices and procedures that create a fairly bright line between journalism and advocacy.”
For Rick Emdonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, says the most controversial proposal may be for a federal fund that would support public-service reporting, both for-profit and nonprofit. While it is intriguing idea, it “may prove a tough sell politically or a flawed concept,” he writes on Poynter’s blog.
Over all Mr. Edmonds, Mr. Barnett, and others have applauded the study’s proposals. But as David Carr, a reporter for The New York Times, points out, getting those proposals to become reality will be the hard part.
“All we have to do is get the government to open the kimono on databases, foundations to rethink their priorities, universities to become newsrooms, rewrite the federal tax code, get public broadcasting overlords to think local, and commercial broadcasters to kick in money for the public good, and we will have a dependable news infrastructure for a new, more complicated age,” he writes on a Times blog. “If only it were so simple.”
What do you think of the report’s proposals? What will be the role of nonprofit news enterprises in the future?
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This is a slippery slope. Invoking the tax code gets government involved in what constitutes legitimate journalism, which is antithetical to a free press.
Just look at what this White House is doing at this very moment by isolating and ostracizing Fox news, and trying to intimidate other news organizations into steering clear of stories Fox has generated for fear of retribution by this administration.
The more we link society’s institutions to government, the further we move away from a free society. We’re getting the change that was promised, all right, but it’s not for the better. Wake up, America, before we become Amerika.
— Jeff Steele Oct 23, 02:01 PM #