The New York Times has begun considering foundation funding to help cover some of its news-gathering costs.
Craig Whitney, an assistant managing editor at the
Times who serves as
the paper's standards editor, said in a telephone interview Friday, "We've begun to ask ourselves whether it would be possible to get the kind of support that NPR does from foundations for its journalism."
He said
Times editors "haven't reached any conclusions and we haven't gone to any foundations," but he said the idea of seeking broad foundation support for areas of coverage "seems conceivable."
Whitney, who has been with the
Times for 44 years and expects to retire in the next few months, indicated that the paper would be careful to avoid letting foundations have a say in specific coverage and would guard against "being influenced by any particular agenda."
He said no formal committees have been formed within the paper to explore foundation funding, but said it has been discussed by the top editors who make up the paper's masthead. Asked when the discussions began, Whitney said they began at about the time ProPublica launched last year but have picked up since the beginning of 2009.
"Don't make it sound as though we're going to do it," he cautioned, stressing that no decisions have yet been made. "But we have to think about whether we should do it or could do it, given economic conditions."
He said the paper has "no desire to become a nonprofit corporation."
Whitney said Clark Hoyt, the paper's public editor, will write about some of the related issues in
his column this Sunday.
I called Whitney to follow up on an e-mail exchange about a smaller story -- how the
Times has worked with freelancer Lindsey Hoshaw on her proposed coverage of the
Garbage Patch, a massive mess of trash twice the size of Texas floating in the North Pacific.
Discussion of the Garbage Patch story has bubbled through the Twitterverse as Hoshaw seeks to cover part of her reporting expenses with
a pitch on Spot.Us, the crowd-funding start-up funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Whitney
and Spot.Us founder and director
David Cohn point out that each organization is playing a different role with the story -- and that the work does not represent a collaboration between the two.
Whatever you call it, what's happening spotlights an important step in how we'll pay for the news: finding some workable alternatives to news organizations shelling out big bucks required to cover important news in far-away places.
Don't worry. The
Times is not thinking of withdrawing its huge investment in international news. But its approach to the Garbage Patch story, coupled with its consideration of foundation funding, reflects new ways of thinking about funding the news at the paper -- and across the industry.
According to a chronology provided via e-mail by
Whitney, here's how the Garbage Patch story has unfolded so far.
Glenn Kramon, an assistant managing editor at the
Times, meets Stanford graduate student Hoshaw during an intern recruiting trip last fall. Kramon likes her idea for a story about the Garbage Patch, and encourages her to pitch the story to
Times science editor Laura Chang, who also likes the idea.
But there's a problem. Hoshaw says it'll cost $10,000 in expense money for a three-week trip on a research ship sailing to the Patch in September.
The
Times had already published a related magazine piece, but Chang tells Hoshaw the paper might be interested in a slide show for the Web along with a brief article about the Patch. Such an assignment might pay $700 or a bit more, but is not a big enough story to justify a $10,000 expense tab.
Seeking a way to cover her expenses, Hoshaw posts a pitch for 60 percent of the money on Spot.US: "A toxic garbage soup over twice the size of Texas sits in the Pacific Ocean, and I've been given an opportunity to write about it for
The New York Times."
Spot.Us founder Cohn told me by e-mail that he "made sure that the
Times would still consider the pitch if we raised money for her travel on Spot.Us."
Cohn added: "They said they would (for some donors they might not, i.e., if Hoshaw got funded by an advocacy group). Spot.Us' role is really just to try and raise the travel funds. The editorial is between Lindsey and the
Times."
As of Friday afternoon, Spot.Us users had kicked in $1,615 with $4,385 to go of the $6,000 Hoshaw requested on the site. Since its launch last year, Spot.Us has collected only about $30,000, so asking for the full $10,000 seemed unrealistic to Cohn, according to Hoshaw.
She said she is already $50,000 in debt for her Stanford master's degree, but said she's willing to seek an additional loan if that's what it takes to come up with the $10,000 to get on the ship.
As you'll notice on Hoshaw's pitch page, the
Times is one of two listings under "organizational support" for Hoshaw's story.
Bay Nature, a quarterly magazine published in Berkeley, contributed $45. (See Cohn's
discussion of Bay Nature and "organizational support" in comments.) The
Times put up no cash but carries a tag: "has shown interest."
In addition, more than 25 individuals are listed as "supporters," including
Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee ($30), Spot.Us director Cohn ($50) and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar ($100).
Comments attached to the page include back and forth among users and Cohn and Hoshaw.
In a telephone interview Friday, Hoshaw said she likes the demands imposed on her by the Spot.Us process.
"Nobody is going to put up their own money unless they're satisfied I'll do a good job," she said. "It forces me to be very transparent about what I'm doing ... It's really important that the public is engaged on critical issues like this."
I asked Whitney if the contributions from Omidyar and Lee raised any red flags for him.
"Jenny Lee has asked me whether it's OK for her to contribute $30, and I told her it is," Whitney said by e-mail. "I don't see that $100 from Pierre Omidyar or anybody else raises any issue worth worrying about. A hundred $100-contributions from eBay employees would."
(In a Friday evening Tweet, Lee reported that public editor Hoyt has kicked in $50 for the Spot.Us Garbage Patch collection.)
Whitney said he had talked with Cohn about Spot.Us safeguards aimed at preventing an interest group from exercising excessive influence on any one story. He also said the
Times would "explain all the circumstances, including maritime ones, if the project comes to fruition."
I looked at the online version of
The New York Times ethics policy, especially the sections titled
"How We Gather the News" and
"Paying Our Own Way," to see if I could find specific guidance for the kind of funding for a freelancer's expenses involved on this story.
I couldn't, but neither could I find any indication that the paper's handling of the "Garbage Patch" story is violating any of its standards or core principles.
Whitney pointed out that the ethics guidelines "don't prescribe solutions for every single little thing, but the spirit of them is what I tried to make sure we're consisistent with." He described the arrangement as "somewhat unconventional" -- and said he alerted executive editor Bill Keller to what was happening -- but said it's not that big a deal.
"It didn't involve a lot of soul-searching," he said before placing tongue in cheek and adding: "...unlike another kind of proposal where a sponsor would be offering to pay $25,000 to sponsor a dinner at Arthur Sulzberger's home to discuss health care reform. That would have [required soul-searching]."
What I like about the way the
Times has handled the Garbage Patch story -- and, for that matter, the way
the Washington Post is working with Kaiser Health News -- is the enterprising approach to getting the story told.
Rather than limiting themselves to the old school alternatives of Yes or No, both papers seem to have asked: Why? (or Why Not?) and How?
These approaches reflect an acknowledgment that news operations need help from other stakeholders, including audience members and foundations, to get the news covered. Such collaboration holds potential pitfalls, but they're mostly the sort of issues that can be addressed if dealt with transparently and thoughtfully early in the process. Not, obviously,
the way the Post handled salongate.
Hoping to anticipate potential peril in the Garbage Patch story,
Times staffers called my Poynter colleague,
Kelly McBride, to discuss what landmines might be involved.
Even though none of the decision-makers at the paper consulted with McBride (or anybody else outside the paper, as far as I know), I applaud the instinct of the staffers who took it upon themselves to get involved in exploring the issues.
Whitney says he wants to avoid the "misunderstanding that we made an assignment to a freelancer and looked for a way to get somebody else to pay expenses." In fact, as it often does with freelancers, the paper left it up to Hoshaw to find an acceptable way to cover the cost of getting the story.
Whitney also says the paper "would of course acknowledge [Spot.Us] support if we published a slide show or an article, and that we had no objection to its mentioning the possibility of a publication of Ms. Hoshaw's work in the
Times in its own pitches to donors."
A freelancer, a start-up, readers putting up some cash, foundation funding under discussion -- the
Times, they sure are a changin'.
Dan and David, Thanks for your notes. As David suggests,...
