Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 4, 2013
9:00 am
The Council on Foundations
The IRS should change how it decides whether to grant tax-exempt status to news nonprofits, says a report released Monday morning by the Council on Foundations.
The current system presents "serious and unnecessary obstacles to critical innovation," says the report, which was funded by the Knight Foundation.
News nonprofits have particularly struggled to become designated as 501(c)(3) organizations -- a tax-exempt status that most major foundations prefer their beneficiaries have -- because of rules the report says have "not been updated for the digital age." The Chicago News Cooperative, for example,
cited its inability to vault the IRS' restrictions as one of the reasons it shut down last February.
Those hurdles are especially dangerous, the report argues, because news nonprofits often fill a void left by the cratering newspaper industry.
A 2011 FCC report by Steven Waldman, who also chaired the group that produced the new report, pointed to the important role nonprofits could play when local news and investigative journalism, for instance, fall victim to budget cuts.
Among the obstacles the report says should be fixed: The IRS should reconsider its definition of journalism:
The IRS has taken the position in several cases that journalism is not educational. This position is inconsistent with the applicable federal tax regulations, which define "educational" as "the instruction of the public on subjects useful to the individual and beneficial to the community."
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 5, 2012
11:16 am
St. Louis Public Radio and nonprofit news site the St. Louis Beacon signed a letter of intent to explore "options for strengthening regional news reporting by using their individual assets in combination," the organizations say in a press release.
The two news organizations already
partner on coverage from Washington, D.C., where the Beacon has a bureau. This announcement indicates a willingness to take the partnership a lot further, and though it doesn't use the word "merger," Beacon Editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel is quoted in the release as saying, “By combining talents and resources, our organizations will again make this region a national leader in journalism that serves the community."
So what's the difference between a partnership and an alliance? Freivogel and St. Louis Public Radio General Manager Tim Eby say what their organizations are discussing could be "a model for communities across the country that are searching for new ways to expand the flow of high-quality reporting and thoughtful discussion in the digital age."
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Andrew Beaujon
July 27, 2012
11:08 am
The Wall Street Journal | The Times-Picayune |
Gambit |
NPR
Cameron McWhirter and Keach Hagey report in The Wall Street Journal that NPR and the University of New Orleans will announce Friday the launch of a nonprofit news organization called
NewOrleansReporter.org, which they plan to have operational by the end of the year. The site will employ 10 to 20 people, McWhirter and Hagey report.
NPR issued a press release after the story, saying the new site will follow a "public radio funding model" and will be open source, like ProPublica and The Texas Observer. NewOrleansReporter.org will be based in WWNO's newsroom, and its general manager Paul Maassen will run both organizations. NPR, the release says, is "providing consultation to WWNO around technology infrastructure and online revenue generation as well as training to support the rapid deployment of a multimedia newsroom." It also says NolaVie and The Lens are "content partners."
The Lens recently announced it would also be part of an online news collective called the New Orleans Digital News Alliance.
Advance Publications' Times-Picayune
announced a plan in May to print only on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Advance Digital CEO Steven Newhouse told the reporters that "competition is great."
Reporters at the new organization will cover local government, economic development, education, crime and other civic issues. "We are filling a reporting gap that the free market will not necessarily fill," said Michael Hecht, chief executive of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional business development group, who will head fundraising.
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Steve Myers
May 23, 2012
12:13 pm
Knight Foundation | VoiceofSanDiego.org | CJR
The Knight Foundation is giving VoiceofSanDiego.org $186,000 to build a membership program called "
Raise Your Voice" and to publish a print and digital magazine.
VoiceofSanDiego.org will publish
Voice of San Diego Monthly using MagCloud, which offers on-demand publication of print and digital magazines (including iPad editions). The magazine is free to Voice of San Diego members
who give $501 or more a year; others can buy it in print for $7.99 or in digital form for $2.99.
CEO Scott Lewis writes that the magazine will give its stories a longer shelf life:
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Steve Myers
Apr. 11, 2012
3:14 pm
Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, has confirmed a
tweet from The Bay Citizen's Jeanne Carstensen saying that it is ending its relationship with The New York Times as of April 29.
The change
does not come without warning, as CIR aims to narrow the focus of the San Francisco nonprofit news site after the two
agreed last month to merge. The California attorney general approved the merger this week, Rosenthal said, but this decision was made by The Bay Citizen and the Times. The final decision came over the weekend after discussions over the past several weeks.
"We want the opportunity to have multiple media partners in the Bay Area and not be in an exclusive relationship with, really, anyone," Rosenthal said. He envisions working with many outlets in the Bay Area, on all platforms.
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Steve Myers
Apr. 4, 2012
12:42 pm
DigiDave
David Cohn has decided to leave Spot.Us four months after the crowdfunded journalism site became part of American Public Media's crowdsourcing platform, Public Insight Network.
When APM took it over, Cohn had planned to stay involved in a contract role. Now, he writes on his blog:
It has come to my realization, however, that in its new form Spot.Us is no longer the best place for me. In many respects that’s perfectly fine. ... With this post I’m handing full reigns of Spot.Us over to APM not just in ownership (which already happened) but in terms of direction. This change has been going on in the background for some time and now it’s official. This is me taking a bow and exiting stage left.
When I asked him what happened, Cohn told me by email:
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 27, 2012
4:58 pm
Center for Investigative Reporting | The Bay Citizen
The "exploration" is at an end. At a meeting today, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Bay Area News Project, which runs The Bay Citizen, agreed to formally merge their operations. CIR says in a news release:
The merger of the two award-winning news forces will create the nation’s largest nonprofit organization focused on investigative and accountability reporting and one of the largest data and technology teams in journalism. ...
The expanded Center for Investigative Reporting will be made up of three unique editorial brands: The Bay Citizen (local enterprise and investigative reporting focused on the San Francisco Bay Area), California Watch (investigative reporting on major issues and topics affecting the entire state) and CIR (targeted investigative and explanatory reporting on issues of national and international significance).
Dan Fost, reporting for The Bay Citizen, wrote that the site probably would stop covering breaking news or culture, seen as commodity news.
He described the merger this way:
The Bay Citizen on Tuesday enters the second phase of its young life, surrendering its independence in exchange for a partnership with an older, more established journalistic entity ...
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Steve Myers
Mar. 20, 2012
3:45 pm
Investigative News Network
The association, which aims to help nonprofit news sites collaborate and share resources, was approved as a 501(c)(3) organization Friday, 19 months after applying and "following numerous discussions with the IRS over INN's mission and goals," according to the group. “We hope the IRS will expedite the processing of applications from numerous nonprofit newsrooms that also have been waiting months, if not years," said INN CEO Kevin Davis.
Among the sites still waiting to hear from the IRS:
SF Public Press (applied in January 2010),
The Lens (October 2010),
San Diego Newsroom (January 2011) and
Arlington Mercury (August 2011). The Chicago News Cooperative didn't get approved before it ceased operations last month. Besides INN, the IRS recently has granted nonprofit status to two news outlets, the
Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting and
Centro de Periodismo de Investigativo. SF Public Press' Michael Stoll said the IRS employee handling his case told him that the application for INN was handled differently because it's a nonprofit that serves other nonprofits, as opposed to a nonprofit that produces news. But Stoll is hopeful that he'll hear from the IRS this spring.
Related: Passing the nonprofit test: A guide for nonprofit news outlets on how to get 501(c)(3) status (Nieman Journalism Lab) |
Does the Texas Tribune’s nonprofit journalism hurt journalists? (Poynter) ||
Earlier: IRS delays make it hard for nonprofit news sites to build their businesses (Poynter)
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Joe Grimm
Mar. 20, 2012
12:01 am
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