Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Steve Buttry: Students already consume news digital-first; student media should follow suit
- A reason for optimism in the IRS’ handling of nonprofit news orgs
- Four years later, the Ann Arbor Chronicle is still weird and wonky — and it’s growing
| Steve Buttry: Students already consume news digital-first; student media should follow suit Posted: 19 Sep 2012 09:00 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: It’s the start of the school year, which means students are returning to journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Over the coming days, we’ll be sharing their thoughts with you. Here’s Steve Buttry, digital transformation editor for Digital First Media. Students live digital-first lives. Student media need to become digital-first. They should consider and experiment with new approaches even more vigorously and daringly than professional media. But student journalists working for campus newspapers quickly mimic their elders’ fondness for working for a print product. The rush of seeing your byline in print crosses generational divides. At two recent workshops, I showed student journalists in Texas why their student media are becoming digital-first. On a whiteboard in one workshop and a flip-chart sheet in the other, I drew four columns: print, broadcast, computer, and mobile. I asked the students to tell me what media bring them their information about the world beyond friends, family, and faculty, placing each student’s percentages for each type of media in the four columns. Student journalists from the University of Texas-Arlington and Texas Christian University filled them in about the same: One would say 60 percent computer, 20 percent mobile, and 10 percent each print and broadcast; the next would say 60 percent mobile, 30 percent computer, 10 percent broadcast, 0 percentprint. The columns filled up with large numbers in the digital columns, small ones in the legacy columns. The only TCU student who put 0 in the mobile column felt obliged to explain that she had a crappy old phone. No one felt a need to explain zeros in print or broadcast. These were numbers for students who were considering careers in print and broadcast media, I noted to them. The numbers would be even more skewed toward digital for their peers who had never labored to put out a newspaper, never clipped out a story bearing their byline. On an April consulting visit to TCU, I wandered one evening to a few campus buildings and saw stacks of that morning’s Daily Skiff unclaimed in several distribution racks. Earlier in the semester, when Fort Worth police arrested 16 students in a drug bust, coverage by TCU360.com brought 100,000 pageviews. This year, I have consulted or trained with student media at UTA, TCU, and the University of Oregon on their conversion to digital-first operations. I’ll be training this fall at the University of Colorado, where student media are digital-only. I presume that other student media are making similar moves, but too many remain focused on publishing a daily newspaper and/or planning a daily broadcast, with the website in a secondary position. In that way, they are like too many professional media. I have worked in professional print and broadcast operations where the tasks and culture of legacy media thwarted efforts at digital innovation. That’s unfortunate and damaging in professional news operations, where the audience and revenue streams from the legacy media provide some cover for resistance to change. But student media can find a prosperous future themselves as they show professional media how to make this difficult transition. Student media are structured in different ways. Some are completely independent from the journalism school or university. Others have varying degrees of subsidy or governance from their university. Whatever the structure, student media have advantages that professional media don’t in experimenting in their pursuit of digital-first prosperity:
I’m not sure which is the right digital-first approach for student media, but I like that we’re going to see a variety of experiments in the coming school year:
I’m sure (and I hope) that other student newsrooms are experimenting this year with digital-first approaches. On campuses everywhere, students have made the news-consumption transition swiftly, learning about their world on smartphones, tablets and laptop computers. The choice for student media is simple: Slide into irrelevancy even faster than professional media that fail to adapt, or race into the digital future and help show them the way. Image from Matt Hintsa used under a Creative Commons license. |
| A reason for optimism in the IRS’ handling of nonprofit news orgs Posted: 19 Sep 2012 07:55 AM PDT Editor’s Note: This update — from Digital Media Law Project director Jeff Hermes — got lost in the shuffle on Friday afternoon, so we’re reposting it here. The takeaway: There’s a reason to be a little more optimistic about the IRS granting nonprofit status to news organizations. I am very pleased to be able to share the news that, after more than two and a half years, the nonprofit San Francisco Public Press has finally received recognition of its tax-exempt status from the IRS under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
For a while now, the Digital Media Law Project has been tracking numerous instances of journalism nonprofits delayed at the IRS in their efforts to obtain Section 501(c)(3) status. This status, among other benefits, allows a nonprofit to receive tax-deductible donations from charitable foundations and private donors. The ability to receive such donations is critical for the survival of many nonprofit organizations in their first years, and the San Francisco Public Press has had to struggle along without these donations for longer than just about anyone else stuck in the IRS process — a whopping 32 months. Although the IRS has not commented on the specific reasons for these delays, the agency has historically been skeptical about granting 501(c)(3) status to nonprofit journalism and publishing organizations. In the past, it has required these organizations to demonstrate that they are organized and operated for an educational or charitable purpose beyond disseminating news to the public like a traditional newspaper. (For much more information on this topic, see our guide to IRS treatment of journalism nonprofits.)
This is not to say that the Public Press does not engage in research or investigative work; to the contrary, they work with dozens of professional journalists and volunteers to develop incisive and important accountability reporting. However, the Public Press’ application for 501(c)(3) status would have presented the IRS more squarely with the question of whether the dissemination of news is itself educational. And to everyone’s benefit, the agency has now recognized that the Public Press does serve a critical educational function in a media landscape with gaping holes in news coverage and numerous underserved communities. Although the IRS did not explain its decision to the Public Press, with luck this represents a positive shift in the agency’s attitude toward journalism as an educational endeavor. We will continue to follow developments in this area. Originally posted on Harvard’s Digital Media Law Project blog. |
| Four years later, the Ann Arbor Chronicle is still weird and wonky — and it’s growing Posted: 19 Sep 2012 07:00 AM PDT
For four years, Mary Morgan and Dave Askins have been the change David Simon was waiting for. The married couple’s website, the Ann Arbor Chronicle, doesn’t just cover the planning commission, as the Wire creator once suggested bloggers never would; it covers the taxicab board. It doesn’t just publish local election results; it publishes fact-checked 13,482-word summaries of the fifth-ward city council candidate forum, 10 days after the event took place. Morgan, Askins, and seven paid freelancers contribute. On a busy day, the Chronicle posts three stories; on a slow day, it posts nothing.
It’s one of the oddest local-news startups in the country, and one of the most idealistic. It’s also, Morgan and Askins say, bringing in $100,000 a year and growing by 16 percent annually. When we last caught up with the Chronicle, in 2009, this Michigan college town of 114,000 had just lost its only daily newspaper. Advance Publications had folded its Ann Arbor News, dismissed 55 employees, and replaced the company with AnnArbor.com, a high-volume news website that publishes a print edition on Thursdays and Sundays. This summer, Advance said the AnnArbor.com model is going national. In July and August, the company tapped six more papers, including New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, to end daily print publication. It seemed like a good occasion to revisit the Chronicle and get their advice on running a news startup in a post-daily town — as well as their take on AnnArbor.com, which Morgan (a former News staffer and, obviously, a competitor) describes as “a train wreck.” For news entrepreneurs looking to follow in the Chronicle’s footsteps, here’s some wisdom from four years of shoe leather. 1. Small ad sales just aren’t worth the hassle.“When we launched, I was naively thinking that the small-pebbles-to-large-boulders approach would be better,” Morgan, who acts as publisher and handles all ad sales, told me. At launch, the Chronicle’s cheapest ad position sold for just $100 a month — and though Morgan managed to singlehandedly juggle 111 separate ad accounts in 2009, she soon realized she was wasting her time. “It takes a lot of hand-holding to sell maybe a small ad once to a small business to whom that $100 is very important,” said Morgan. So in 2011, she doubled their ad rates and targeted “larger institutions [for whom] spending five, six thousand dollars with us is like a pittance in their overall plan”: Zingerman’s Deli, Ann Arbor State Bank, the University of Michigan. The number of different Chronicle advertisers plummeted to 46 last year, according to the site. But the higher prices kept ad revenue steady — and Morgan saved a lot of sales calls. 2. You don’t need a paywall to get substantial reader contributions.Though the Chronicle is a for-profit LLC, 25 percent of revenue last year — $22,000, by their numbers — came from voluntary “subscriptions” and contributions from readers. Every one of the Chronicle’s vast, meticulous posts about local government deliberation now finishes with a solicitation to join, though Askins is careful never to call it a “donation.” “To me, that has the stink of desperation about it,” said Askins, the Chronicle’s editor. “I don’t want it to be a charitable enterprise. I want it to simply be somewhat recognized: ‘That’s a thing of value. I need to support that.’” To build awareness of their subscription program, the couple this summer invested $4,000 in a postcard mailing to the 8,500 locals who’d showed up to vote on a recent school bond issue — or, as Morgan calls them, “our base.” It didn’t bring in $4,000 in new donations, they said. But Askins expects they’ll do another mailing someday, because he thinks it retains their existing donors and proves to their fans that they’re making efforts to grow.
3. Exclusive events pay off.Morgan and Askins haven’t considered offering premium content to subscribers; their pitch to donors, after all, is that support for the Chronicle is “a gift to the community.” Instead, the main benefit of Chronicle membership is an invitation to its annual Bezonki Awards — a civic-recognition affair that, this summer, featured free appetizers, a cash bar, a set of custom cocktails including the “ink-stained wretch,” and, for old time’s sake, a filing cabinet containing a bottle of scotch. Morgan is also dreaming of inviting Chronicle groupies to join them at a local bar for a Mystery Science Theater-style viewing of a televised city council hearing. “There are people who would do that,” she said. 4. Don’t pull punches against the competition.Morgan, a former business editor for the News whose fashion trademark is a pair of typewriter-key earrings, said her ad sales pitch never includes attacks on AnnArbor.com. But when the subject came up in our interview, Morgan didn’t mince words. “What’s happened here is clearly a train wreck in terms of journalistic integrity, ability to cover the community,” Morgan said. The site’s new staff is dominated by non-locals who are “a couple years out of college, maybe,” Morgan said. In the time a single Chronicle freelancer was covering public schools, she said, AnnArbor.com cycled through three different beat reporters.
“In a university town, you’re going to have some young reporters,” Morgan acknowledged. “But for God sakes, you’re going to have some veterans who will be able to say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not the name of the street, or you know, that person a year ago was embezzling.’” AnnArbor.com has lost its institutional knowledge, Morgan said, and the town is suffering. In their characteristically massive columns dissecting AnnArbor.com, she and Askins risk coming off as cranks. But it’s obvious that they’re not the only Ann Arborites dismayed by the reduced quality of Advance’s operation, even as the company reports a high digital share of the local audience. And it’s just as obvious that public resentment of Advance’s cutbacks is important to the Chronicle’s business model. (Paula Gardner, AnnArbor.com’s community news director, declined to comment for this piece. She referred questions to Advance’s regional headquarters in Grand Rapids, which didn’t return a request for comment. Advance’s Steve Newhouse defended the model to Poynter here.) 5. Be weird.Morgan and Askins are eager to note that the Chronicle’s content model — governance without politics, simplicity without brevity — is unusual. The local news business needs more strange ideas, Morgan says. “One thing that’s really striking to me is how uncreative and unimaginative most of the new media is,” she said. “There are, one would imagine, endless opportunities for niche publications or mainstream publications. But by and large, people are just doing the same thing…spot news…police blotter, council meeting.” But what if that’s simply because spot news is what readers want? In Ann Arbor, at least, readers seem to want deeply informed procedural reporting, too — Morgan and Askins have the modest lifestyle to prove it. And as they focus on drumming up enough subscriptions to hire more freelancers, they’re hoping for a breakthrough in voluntary support. “When you’re trying to get the fog off the bathroom mirror with a hair dryer, you hold it there and nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens,” said Askins. “And somehow when you reach that point, suddenly it all goes away. I think it’s that idea. We just need to hold the hair dryer there a bit longer.” |
As a result, the Public Press might have been facing significantly more scrutiny at the IRS than some other news projects — particularly those able to point to educational activity in the form of a teaching program or a focus on research via data-based or investigative journalism. In fact, several news centers focused specifically on investigative journalism have received their 501(c)(3) status over the last year. In contrast, as an organization focused on news of general interest, the Public Press would not have provided quite the same hooks for the IRS to latch onto as these other nonprofits.
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