Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | Nonprofit Journalism: Removing the Pressure of the Bottom Line, page 3

Nonprofit status has proved especially suitable for the journalism of advocacy. It's noteworthy that Princeton's Paul Starr, who knows as well as anyone the role profits have historically played in building strong news organizations, is a founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, a nonprofit liberal journal of ideas. Since its founding as a quarterly in 1990, it has grown into a monthly with a paid circulation of 55,000 as well as what it calls "a daily web magazine [www.prospect.org] with more than 300,000 monthly visitors." The American Prospect was founded partly to counteract the intellectual dominance of conservative think tanks in Washington--which are themselves underwriting nonprofit journalism in the form of reports and newspaper op-ed articles by resident scholars and others. In fact, American newspapers took on their current nonpartisan, objective garb only when mass circulation became a profitable business goal, making it more lucrative to leave behind party affiliations and trade partisanship for appeal to a broad base of readers. To this day, despite critics on the left and the right, most for-profit news organizations insist that their journalism embodies fairness and objectivity.

The poster child for the role not-for-profits can play in doing serious journalism is National Public Radio, a nonprofit since its founding in 1970 that has become the preeminent cultural and journalistic force in the lives of a large number of mostly well-educated Americans. NPR's remarkable growth is a testament both to the journalistic potential of nonprofits as well as the failings of the marketplace. NPR distributes more than 120 hours of original programming each week to independent radio stations across the country; its programming is also available on satellite radio, and NPR's Morning Edition is probably the nation's leading morning radio show--proving that lots of people want real journalism, especially if it's free.

While for-profit radio stations still deliver headlines, traffic and weather reports, NPR offers more breadth and greater depth--something it did not always have the resources to accomplish. Back in 1979, it had a single foreign correspondent, Robert Siegel. It now has 36 bureaus worldwide, and its coverage of both the September 11th terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, which recognizes excellence in journalism. (Since 9/11, NPR has established a system for breaking into the local broadcast time at many of its member stations, which wasn't possible before.) Three years ago, NPR opened a major production center in Culver City, California, near Los Angeles, and has also launched a training program for radio journalists to cultivate new talent.

The lack of investigative reporting is a longstanding criticism of NPR, and partly to address this, the organization hired former investigative journalist and Baltimore Sun editor William K. Marimow as one of its top editors. NPR president Kevin Klose insists NPR is doing investigative journalism and cited a report on the very day of our interview by national reporter Snigdha Prakash, who has dug into Merck's handling of its Vioxx painkilling medication, which has been linked to cardiovascular problems.

The size and demographics of NPR's audience suggest a major market malfunction. For example, 75 percent of its news listeners have household income of $50,000 or more, and NPR listeners in general are fifty-eight percent college educated. NPR listeners also are more likely to own a computer and to have voted in an election than Americans in general. These are presumably the kind of listeners prized by advertisers. So why hasn't the marketplace offered similar fare? It's as if the automakers never thought to manufacture Volvos.

Klose insists that the key to NPR's success is precisely that it is not commercial, and instead pursues a mission "to be of assistance to listeners in the act of citizenship." He adds: "The purpose of what we do is not creating an encounter in which we can sell them anything." McChesney argues that NPR's success stems in large part from commercial radio's abandonment of its public interest obligation, which fell by the wayside in the 1980s, as well as from the ownership consolidation and general homogenization of commercial radio that commenced in earnest in the late 1990s. These changes left the door wide open to local public radio stations, he says, as well as the NPR programming they carry. (A lot of additional public radio programming, including some from the BBC, is provided by yet another thriving nonprofit, Public Radio International, which is supported by a number of foundations. And there is growing competition in this field from Public Radio International and American Public Media, among others.)

The door has never opened as wide to public television news in this country. For one thing, McChesney notes, radio news is relatively cheap to produce while television news is expensive, requiring more people and equipment. And then there is the matter of politics, which looms larger in the literally and figuratively more visible medium of TV. Insulating public broadcasting from political influence was emphasized by the original Carnegie Commission when it did its work, and has been a tenet of the system since it was launched. But not long after, public television came under pressure from the Nixon administration for its coverage of Vietnam and Watergate. Politics became an issue more recently when Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, then chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, accused the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) of failing to achieve balance in its programming.

Public television is hamstrung, moreover, by a lack of secure, reliable government funding, which in turn has increased its reliance on corporate support--and therefore the programming preferences of corporate funders. The system's complicated structure hasn't helped either. What Congress actually funds is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit agency that exists to funnel federal money into public broadcasting--mostly to local stations. (The chairman of CPB is appointed by the White House.) PBS is a membership organization of 348 local TV stations, and doesn't itself produce programming. It distributes and promotes programming, though, and even provides some funding for programming, but actual programs are created by local stations such as WGBH in Boston, or by independent producers who must piece together backing from stations and corporate or philanthropic underwriters. This decentralized system may be characteristically American, but it's not designed to support a large newsgathering organization, even if it does result in such significant public affairs programming as Frontline, POV and NOW.

Yet public television's sole traditional news program--The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer--is also its crown jewel. NewsHour reaches 98 percent of U.S. television households and is seen in Asia, Europe, Japan and Latin America. Despite the system's limitations, NewsHour, which has an annual budget of $24 million, is watched by about 2.7 million people nightly and was ranked as the most credible, objective and influential TV news program in the country in the Erdos & Morgan Opinion Leader survey. Like everyone else, it has found its way onto the Internet, where its web site averages more than a million unique visitors each week.

The contrast between American public broadcasting and the British Broadcasting Corporation is stark. Federal funding for public broadcasting is $387 million in the current fiscal year, or about $3.50 per household--in a nation where the average annual cable bill in 2003 (the latest year available from the FCC) was $543.84. Now consider the situation across the pond. Funded by an annual television license fee of #126 (about $220) per household, the BBC is a massive multimedia operation that spent roughly #400 million (about $719 million) just on news in the most recent fiscal year it. It employs some 3,500 people in its worldwide news operations, including roughly 2,000 journalists. They staff 40 bureaus in every part of the globe, and the BBC is heard perhaps just as widely. Its World Service, which broadcasts in 40 languages, has an audience of 150 million people, the BBC says.

Next page: A BBC survey last year found that eighty-one percent of respondents think "the Beeb" is worth the money--and many would pay more.

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