Where's the money for journalism to come from?

As anyone who has been reading journalists knows, US journalism has been suffering huge hits to reportorial muscle as thousand of people have lately been laid off by remnant print outlets like Gannett newspapers and online power houses like BuzzFeed and HuffPost.

People who want journalism to survive as a component of a healthy democracy and society have been struggling to come up with a sustainable new model. It must pay for serious news now that the local and regional advertising monopolies that were once your daily newspaper have been displaced by the internet.

I'm among those who worry that too many outlets will reinvent the tack taken by progressive social movements losing their steam in the 1980s and 1990s. Many tried to transform vigorous insurgent entities into plausibly "charitable" non-profit organizations in order to be attractive to institutional funders. That is, they/we went shopping for grants. They shied away from "politics" -- the contest for actual power. This reinforced a bias that the nitty-gritty pulling and hauling of local democracy was somehow dirty. This turn kept a semblance of grassroots activity alive, but, by professionalizing it, distanced it from the people who ought to have wanted and needed it most. The internet has to some extent brought back small donor fundraising and that has helped revive a more disruptive politics.

Josh Marshall, who runs a struggling small journalism business at Talking Points Memo, writes thoughtfully about the siren attraction of non-profit status. I've added some emphasis.

A more complicated question to me is non-profit support. To me the first cardinal point is that we should have a diverse news ecosystem – so a lot of different models is key. I think we all agree that Pro-Publica, which I see as the archetype nonprofit news operation, has become simply irreplaceable. But I do not think that’s a general model. The kind of deep diving PP does is very congenial to the nonprofit model.

I have some experience in the pre-PP nonprofit journalism sector. There’s a lot of great stuff. But one key problem is that you tend to follow your funders. I don’t mean that in a corrupt or mercenary sense. I mean that the funder wants to see this kind of stuff or that kind of stuff so that’s what you do.

That means their audience is fundamentally the foundations. That’s a problem. Because the customer and the audience should be the reader. I am not saying this is an unworkable problem. Again, a huge amount of great journalism is produced this way. So I am all for a vital nonprofit journalism sector, as opposed to my deep skepticism of government funding. I just don’t think it works as the dominant or majority model. You want your business to be fundamentally tied to your readers.

Marshall's model is to combine what amounts to small dollar fundraising (tiered subs) with some advertising and a lot of experimentation with various journalism delivery vehicles. So far this is working for TPM.

Another model of funding journalism is to depend on our oligarchs for funding. Think Jeff Bezos acquiring the Washington Post; Marc Benioff buying up Time magazine. (That one is a hoot for those of us who remember the Henry Luce publication.) Even the ascendancy of the younger generation of the Sulzberger family at the New York Times fits this pattern. Meanwhile the Mercers of hedge fund infamy have Brietbart. As much a feudal throwback as all this seems, it is how historically enterprises that didn't turn a profit have been funded: there would have been no great works of Michelangelo without the Medicis.

Marshall's experiment seems as promising as any, though there are probably limits to its scale. He does seem an incubator of journalism and journalists, an honorable role.

We are left to ask: do we want the thing that journalists do? If so, we have to support and more frequently pay for it.