September 14, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
The editors of Chi-Town Daily News have helped pioneer nonprofit journalism, but now they say they must abandon the charity model.
The Chicago group, which has received substantial support from foundations, including more than $400,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, couldn’t raise enough money to provide “comprehensive local coverage,” writes Geoff Dougherty, Chi-Town’s editor, on the online newspaper’s blog.
“The Daily News needs $1-million to $2-million per year to do a great job of covering a city as sprawling and complex as Chicago,” he says. “And despite hundreds of phone calls and letters to foundations, corporations, and individual donors over the past four years, we’ve never come close to that.”
Mr. Dougherty says the editorial team will start a for-profit news site and other nonprofit groups may take over Chi-Town’s Web site and neighborhood reporting projects.
The move disappointed Jim Barnett, a former newspaper reporter who writes for the blog of the Nieman Journalism Lab, at Harvard University. He says that Chi-Town should be patient and continue to work on the nonprofit model.
“Dougherty wants to get to the promised land, and he wants to get there now. I understand that,” he writes. “The hard truth, though, is that it takes more than four years to build a donor base and diversify sources of revenue to sustain a nonprofit.”
He notes that another high-profile online newspaper, ProPublica, recently hired fund-raising consultants to help it reach potential donors.
What do you think? How can nonprofit journalism ventures diversify their fund raising?
