How PA Nonprofit Newsrooms See Their Role in Addressing the Journalism Crisis
Annenberg researchers identified two competing visions of nonprofit news, a restorationist vision and a transformational vision, and calculated the cost of implementing each vision.
Hundreds of newsrooms across the country have shuttered over the past two decades and left many communities without local news due to declining advertising revenue, social media, acquisitions of news outlets by private equity firms and hedge funds, and declining public trust in the media.
As a possible solution, in recent years “academics, journalists, and public policymakers have coalesced around the idea that nonprofit journalism is a viable pathway forward,” says Aaron Hyzen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Media, Inequality & Change Center, which is co-directed by Annenberg School for Communication professor Victor Pickard.
However, although previous studies have focused on nonprofit news funding, they have not addressed how people in that sector view their purpose.
Now, in a study published in Journalism, Hyzen, Pickard, and David Elliot Berman — an assistant professor at Seton Hall University and a former Ph.D. student and postdoctoral researcher at Annenberg — interviewed 11 nonprofit news leaders in Pennsylvania. Their goal was to understand how these leaders envision the role of nonprofit news in addressing the journalism crisis and assess what funding level is needed to achieve different visions.
They identified two competing visions of nonprofit news: a restorationist vision, which focuses on filling gaps left by the decline of traditional news organizations, and a transformational vision, which imagines a structural alternative to for-profit media. They also identified four tensions between the two:
| Tension | Restorationist vision | Transformational vision |
|---|---|---|
| Framing of problem being addressed | Collapse of advertising revenues | Prioritization of wealthy, white audiences over the working class, communities of color, and rural populations |
| Appeal of the nonprofit business model compared to for-profit news | Differently commercial: allows for more diverse revenue streams | Less commercial: allows for journalism that is less dependent on external pressures |
| Purpose of the nonprofit news model | Filling gaps left by the departure of news outlets from communities | Going beyond small-scale correctives and building an alternative to market-driven journalism |
| Relationship to readers | Audiences can be measured through analytics and must be competed for | Audiences should be engaged as citizens rather than consumers and given chances to provide input |
“It’s important to make the distinction between reforms that shore up failing commercial models and reforms that work towards building new journalistic models that are more resilient and more democratically accountable to local communities,” Pickard says.
Pennsylvania currently has 51 news organizations with estimated annual expenditures totaling $160 million. Using a Boston Consulting Group study, the researchers estimate that funding nonprofit newsrooms in Pennsylvania to fill gaps from declining advertising revenue — representing the restorationist vision — would cost an additional $29-68 million. Using the Journalism Ecosystem Cost Calculator, they estimate that achieving the transformational vision in the state would cost between $442 million and $4.1 billion.
Implementing either the restorationist or transformational vision, the authors write, would require funding not only from foundations and philanthropy but also from governments.
Hyzen says the research team is building on this work by examining how nonprofit news organizations are responding to the journalism crisis in Pennsylvania and mapping nonprofit news expenditures at the county level.
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center.
Aaron Hyzen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Media, Inequality & Change Center.
David Elliot Berman is an assistant professor of journalism at Seton Hall University and a former Ph.D. student and postdoctoral researcher at Annenberg.
This research was supported by the Democracy Fund.
