The Future: Non-Profit News?

On September 30, the NY Times wrote a story headlined “Balancing Bottom Lines and Headlines” by Clifford Krauss about the St. Petersburg Times in which he wrote: “Many owners of other daily city papers sold them off years ago to try to avoid inheritance taxes. But The St. Petersburg Times was not sold; to guarantee local ownership and independence, its owner, Nelson Poynter, gave it away upon his death in 1978 to a nonprofit educational organization now called the Poynter Institute.
For newspaper publishing — an industry awash in uncertainty as it tries to adapt to the Internet — The St. Petersburg Times offers one possible model for salvaging enterprises that must, as all businesses do, respond to financial reality.”
Exactly. So here’s what I propose to save journalism and the news media from itself and the greed of its owners—officially and legally become non-profit organizations. The St. Petersburg Times and NPR are the models. Their missions are not to make their shareholders ever richer, but to fulfill a public service and “trying to provide independent, high-quality information and analysis to readers” and audiences.
Joan Kroc gave a $230 million endowment to NPR that helped it become more independent, so some of the super rich ought to take a page from Joan’s book and shift some of their philanthropic giving, if they do any, to the news media. In today’s (October 2) NY Times, in an article titled “For the Yachting Class, the Latest Amenity Can Take Flight,” John Tagliabue writes about mega-yachts that feature helicopters as accessories and that these water castles’ sales are up substantially worldwide. If someone can afford a 500-foot yacht with two helicopters, the rich bitch can certainly afford to set up a non-profit foundation for a mid-market newspaper or television station.
The news media have to be freed from the tyranny of the popular—the necessity of getting ratings or circulation in order to sell enough advertising to pay the bills. Popularity, or mass, translates into lowest common denominator—Paris Hilton and runaway brides—it’s not issues and ideas.
The first non-profit that needs to be set up is one for PBS. A couple of hedge fund people could give a couple of billion dollars each, which would make PBS independent of government funding (and, thus a lot more venturesome) and allow it to beef up production of the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” to make it less boring and more watchable.
Next, the NY Times. The Sulzberger family should get together with Arthur Junior’s good pal Steve Rattner and several other private equity and hedge fund people, buy all the publicly owned stock, and then set up a non-profit foundation to run the Times on the conditions that the Sulzberger family put all of its money except $2 million for each family member into the foundation and that Arthur never set foot in the building—give him an extra $1 million to stay away. The Times is heading toward being a non-profit under Pinch’s watch anyway, so why not make it official. With a non-profit’s obligation not to make money, the Times could continue its excellent reporting, not have to cut staff, and expand its web presence without worrying about hurting print circulation.
According to Mark J. Penn in Microtrends, the non-profit sector of our economy has outgrown the private sector at a healthy 2.5 percent clip. Young people entering the workforce enjoy the non-profit, or independent, sector of the economy because work in that sector usually has meaning and a higher purpose than pure profit, which is appealing because as Montaigne wrote, “The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.” Profits ain’t purpose, but serving the public is.
So let’s start urging people who are squandering their money on mega-yachts built for the self-absorbed to set up non-profit foundations for the news media that will serve the public good, convenience, and necessity and break the tyranny of the popular.