she was the city hall reporter at the Guelph Mercury, a newspaper outside of Toronto. Her research on the business of journalism has appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, and Digital Journalism.Konieczna applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Journalism Without Profit focuses on the details of foundation funding for nonprofit news. Which foundations have offered the most support, and why? Nonprofit news organizations have been proliferating in the United States for the last ten years in response to the failing business model for journalism. They include large, wealthy organizations that you’ve probably heard of like ProPublica, and tiny, on-a-shoestring projects that you probably haven’t. For all of them, foundation funding has been essential, at least at the start. Some nonprofit newsrooms have managed to earn a sometimes significant portion of their revenue from other sources. NPR sells programming to its member stations, and Mother Jones sells a magazine.Learn more about Journalism Without Profit at the Oxford University Press website.
Still, the groups I’m really interested in, the digital-native organizations that have sprung up in almost every state in the US to try to continue to produce quality journalism as the business model falters, remain heavily foundation funded. Understanding the magnitude and nature of that is key to understanding the structure of the field.
That’s why I see page 99 as a necessary but ultimately dry part of the book. I use these details of the field – how many news nonprofits are there? How long have they been around? What do they do? – to sketch out its dimensions. Page 99 does the support work necessary for the rest of my argument – the explanation of how the market never did support the journalism our democracy needs in the first place, and why it makes conceptual sense for public service journalism to be structured in a nonprofit field.
In all, the book attempts to make sense of a burgeoning field of nonprofit news organizations. While nonprofit news has been around at least since the Associated Press was founded in the 1840s, the idea of a field that connects these entities is new. Many of them are pioneering new, more collaborative ways of interacting with other journalists, other news outlets, and their audiences, and while it wasn’t clear what would happen to the field when I started this book – in the form of my dissertation – in 2009, it’s evident now that, in one way or another, it’s here to stay.
Still, I hope that when you start to learn about it, you start at the beginning, not at page 99.
--Marshal Zeringue
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