[Infowarrior] - Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

[Richard Forno]

November 18, 2008
Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/media/18voice.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

SAN DIEGO — Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest  
secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with  
conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that  
was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were  
forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main  
revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio  
stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but  
from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of  
a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site  
that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news  
outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation  
has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories  
they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original  
reporting by professional journalists — the province of the  
traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since  
it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the  
Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out  
in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary,  
gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its  
founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for  
national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete  
for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists  
around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news  
outlets.

“Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on  
redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and  
businesses on the hot seat,” said Dean Nelson, director of the  
journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “I  
have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, ‘This is the  
future of journalism.’ ”

That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the  
newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost  
of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust  
enough to sustain a newsroom.

And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public  
broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations  
supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a  
little advertising.

New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up  
to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative  
journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks  
into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for  
Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.

But some experts question whether a large part of the news business  
can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to  
lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.

“These are some of the big questions about the future of the  
business,” said Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for  
Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online “has to be explored and  
experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can  
support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are  
a far cry in resources from a city newspaper.”

The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future  
among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional  
media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an  
opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed  
journalists for them to hire.

“No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers,” said Andrew Donohue,  
one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. “We can’t be the main  
news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only  
have 11 people.”

Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older  
media. The executive editors, Mr. Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32,  
each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning  
newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique  
visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.

The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin  
Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month,  
but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local  
newspapers.

VoiceofSanDiego’s site looks much like any newspaper’s, frequently  
updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics:  
government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools  
and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and,  
through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.

But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it  
covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most  
news sites.

VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal  
scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a  
mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and  
city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.

A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of  
revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with  
frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had  
developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had  
received little news coverage.

“I kept thinking, ‘Who’s paying attention?’ ” Mr. Woolley recalled.  
“Why don’t we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?’ ”

In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who  
had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of  
VoiceofSanDiego, with Mr. Woolley as president, chief executive and,  
at first, chief financial backer.

Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy  
insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle- 
age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has  
been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and  
its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer  
Press in St. Paul.

MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million  
bankroll from Mr. Kramer and several others when it started last year,  
and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive  
about selling ads and getting readers to donate.

The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year,  
Mr. Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the  
competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it  
uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do  
frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.

If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a  
guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee  
shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career  
at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a  
desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.

In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small- 
bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face  
the loss of their homes to foreclosure.

With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid  
less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer  
contributors. It does not sell ads, which Mr. Bass says would be  
impractical.

“There’s room for a whole range of approaches, and we’re living proof  
that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply,” Mr. Bass said.

Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and  
commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news  
sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to  
nonprofit status.

VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young,  
hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what  
they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers.  
Mr. Donohue and Mr. Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year,  
according to the VoiceofSan Diego I.R.S. filings.

On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last  
year — everyone does double duty. Mr. Lewis writes a political column,  
and Mr. Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is  
growing and Mr. Woolley says he has become convinced that the  
nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he  
said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care.  
It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the  
market isn’t doing it very well.”