Can a year-end giving campaign save independent news in San Francisco?

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Of all the bad years for journalism, 2020 may have been the worst, with the usual woes — declining ad revenue, desperately competitive attention wars, not to mention profound trust issues — compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic’s complete disruption of anything resembling business as usual.

In San Francisco, neighborhood newspapers took it hard, as many local businesses that provided them with an ad-revenue lifeline — particularly restaurants — were shut down, some permanently.

In this gaping revenue void, local news publisher and journalism advocate Alexander Mullaney saw an opportunity for these neighborhood newspapers to work together.

In his formulation, local publications have much to gain from collaboration, and with good planning, competition doesn’t need to be an issue.

The ensuing fundraising campaign, Save SF News, has nonprofit fiscal sponsorship from Accíon Latina, a 501(c)3 arts and media organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District, and the parent of the pioneering Spanish-language newspaper El Tecolote, which is, in turn, one of more than a dozen newspapers participating in the fund drive.

As of this writing, Save SF News is more than $7,000 toward its year-end goal of $25,000. You can pile on by making a tax-deductible donation today, and learn more about the campaign below.

Watershed Media: It’s ironic that in the veritable birthplace of digital media — San Francisco and the Bay Area — local newspapers and news media serving local communities, what used to be called “hyperlocal,” are getting crushed by overwhelming competition for advertisers and attention from Google and Facebook. What inspired you and your peers to take a chance on banding together and collaborating on a group fundraising project?

Alexander Mullaney: The bottom-line-crushing pandemic and the success of Chicago Independent Media Alliance’s May 2020 campaign that raised $160,000 for more than 40 outlets made this a no-brainer idea and an easy pitch. Chicago Reader Publisher and CIMA leader Tracy Baim deserves so much credit for making the model. Now, the San Francisco Independent Press Association must figure out how best to implement it in San Francisco. Cross your fingers for us.

How is it that all the different news outlets in your coalition aren’t competing with each other, but rather collaborating? Wouldn’t they be stepping on each others’ toes, battling for subscriber revenue, etc.?

I’m sure there’s some competition for advertising and subscriber or membership revenue. I wouldn’t want it any other way! But no disputes have come up to date as far as I know. There’s only been a good amount of enthusiasm and camaraderie. All participants want more and better quality journalism — which is requisite for sustainability — and that simply costs money. 

How are things different for commercial vs. nonprofit news outlets in the greater community you’re working with?

This is a wildly expensive city. No matter the tax status, all publications are hurting, from what I know. 

How is the money being handled, and what will it be used for?

Donors can choose to support all publications, a selection, or just one. CIMA found that two-thirds of their donors supported all publications, which demonstrates the wider community’s support for all types of outlets. All proceeds go toward independent journalism.

What will people get in return for their donation to this campaign?

Independent journalism!

There are a variety of support programs for journalism, both from the nonprofit sector in terms of grants and service organizations such as News Revenue Hub, and also, in San Francisco, the Mayor’s Office for Economic & Workforce Development has offered small-business services. How are these programs working or not for small news outlets? What gaps are you trying to fill with Save SF News?

I can’t say how those programs are working citywide because I’m focused on the independent press rather than the entire media sector. I’d like the city government to take a cue from New York City and add media to its economic development program but I don’t know if it’s viable. 
With that said, I’m thankful for the neat work Renaissance Journalism out of San Francisco State University has done over the years.

Is this a one-off, or do you see any potential long term collaborative opportunities after this campaign winds up?

During our kickoff meeting, the participants said they want to make this an annual campaign. I’m planning to do it again next year. I’m sure there are other opportunities of course. It’s too soon to say.

Can you tell us a bit about your own background as a news publisher in San Francisco, and as an advocate for local journalism?

When I founded my publication as a monthly neighborhood newspaper in 2008, there were 17 other neighborhood newspapers. Now there are 8 neighborhood newspapers and two online neighborhood news outlets, including mine.

There really ought to be neighborhood-level coverage of Fillmore, South of Market, Haight-Ashbury, and so on. There really ought to be way more investigative reporting, especially in light of the widespread public corruption being exposed this year by the Trump DoJ. If this campaign helps a little, it’ll be worth it.

I must add a bright spot for me during this bleak year is that we now have a Chinese-English bilingual weekly operated by veteran reporter Portia Li.

Any final details you’d like to share?

I’d really like to thank Juan Gonzales, El Tecolote founder and chair of City College of San Francisco Journalism Department; Michael Yamashita, Bay Area Reporter publisher; and Mission Local founder Lydia Chavez for serving as a sounding board and providing encouragement to pursue this idea over the summer.

Also, we’re lining up several webinars to promote the campaign. Keen an eye out!

UPDATE:

Check out the writeup on the Save SF News webinar with the Wind Newspaper and Comment SF.

Sign up for the Dec. 31 webinar “Why SF’s Independent Press is Essential.

$10K planning grant awarded to NorCalMedia Co-op

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Renaissance Journalism supports study of media co-op to assist community news outlets

Dec 16, 2019

Renaissance Journalism has awarded a $10,000 grant for a study to determine whether the formation of a business cooperative can help some Bay Area news outlets succeed in today’s fierce media marketplace.

If the findings are positive, the study could lead to the creation of the Northern California Media Cooperative, a shared-services cooperative organization that would support member news organizations.

“The purpose of the co-op is to provide members with the volume and scale to cut costs and reduce risk, and the economic stability to support testing and implementing new revenue streams,” said journalist Josh Wilson, who has been championing the idea with media consultant Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and other media leaders. “NorCal Media is a unique effort in the news world, and distinct from the worker or member co-op model, because it is focusing on sustainability across groups of regional newsrooms.”

A diverse range of community news organizations, including commercial and nonprofit, have signaled interest, including the Westside Observer, Castro Courier, The Potrero View, San Francisco Bay View, Mission Local, The Mendocino Voice, San Francisco Public Press, Bay Area Reporter and El Tecolote. San Francisco City College’s Department of Journalism, Stakeholder Media, Watershed Media Project and the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops have also been involved in the discussions.

READ THE WHOLE NEWS BRIEF

Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Fixing Journalism’s Ability to Promote Civic Good Should Be the Focus of Philanthropic Giving”

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Low-income people, mulitracial neighborhoods, and others are losing access to the news they need to improve their communities.

By Josh Wilson, Chronicle of Philanthropy, November 2017 (read the PDF)

For more than a decade, with the news industry under deepening financial strain, grant makers have invested millions in technology, innovation and business model experiment, eager to harness the restless vigor and highly profitable Silicon Valley start-up ethos on behalf of our struggling free press.

Yet today, the post-election spike in newspaper subscriptions notwithstanding, critical indicators of journalism’s public-interest mission are in retreat. News deserts, “fake news” and highly profitable partisan media are proliferating, while legacy news media’s twin-horned crisis of trust and sustainability only deepens. Nor are we making much progress in replacing almost 240,000 newspaper jobs that disappeared from 2001 to 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Perhaps it’s time for some existential questions. Is it actually the business of philanthropy to try to save the news industry? Shouldn’t we be focused instead on saving journalism as a public-interest practice — and as charitable work?

Small Independent News Outlets have Outsized Impact

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By Jo Ellen Kaiser, The Media Consortium

Google, Facebook and Twitter were hauled in front of Congress last week to explain how Russian bots were able to spread fake news on their platforms.

The concern—and a very real one--is that these bots and fake news sites had a significant impact on the 2016 election.

Fighting fake news, however, is not the only or best way to ensure that our content ecosystem prioritizes real news. This week, a groundbreaking article in Science proves that a better way to secure a media system that works for democracy is to strengthen independent news outlets.

The five-year long study published this week in Science, directed by Harvard Professor Gary King, shows that even small independent news outlets can have a dramatic effect on the content of  national conversation.  King, along with his now former graduate students Ben Schneer and Ariel White, found that if just three outlets write about a particular major national policy topic – such as jobs, the environment or immigration – discussion of that topic across social media rose by as much as 62.7 percent of a day’s volume, distributed over the week.

Over 60 percent of the participating outlets were members of the Media Consortium, the organization I direct. The Media Consortium outlets that had the highest participation rates in the Science study were, in order: Truthout, In These Times, Bitch Media, The Progressive, Earth Island Journal, Feministing, Generation Progress, Ms. Magazine and Yes! magazine. The median outlet size was The Progressive, with about 50,000 subscribers.

Individually, none of them is a New York Times or CNN. In fact, too often, philanthropic foundations refuse to support these outlets because they are “too small” and “don’t have enough impact.” What this Science study proves is that when independent news outlets work together to co-publish stories on the same topic in the same week, they can have a mighty effect.

We expected independents would have a big impact on national conversations, for several reasons. First, independents have strong and loyal followers who are eager to talk about the content they read and view at their favorite outlets. When Bitch, Feministing and Truthout together publish stories on reproductive health, they have a social reach of over a million followers.

But independent media followers are not just thumbs-up people. They not only comment and repost on social, they donate to these organizations and attend events in real life. These are people who want to participate in national conversations about topics they care about, from immigration to climate change to school reform. So it makes sense that they would push those conversations on social.

Second, studies coming out over the past five years have demonstrated that collective efforts make a bigger impact than stand-alone efforts. When even small outlets join together, they can have an effect larger than any of them would individually. We’ve seen that recently with the publication of the Paradise Papers and other large-scale collaborations.

Our outlets implicitly understood those effects: The Media Consortium was founded in order to build a collaborative network. In fact, when the researchers started working with us to figure out what they could randomize, it was we who suggested the experiment be built upon randomized timing of collaborative publication.

Finally, we have faith in the American people. Yes, everyone likes a cute cat photo or a bit of salacious gossip. But people care at a very fundamental level about the schools their kids attend, about their own reproductive choices, about their communities, neighbors and friends. They hunger for stories that impact their everyday lives. And those are the stories they will talk about and share. In fact, they will increase their sharing of stories like these by 62.7 percent when the stories originate on outlets they trust.

Trust matters on platforms that too often provide space for fake news. Increasingly, people will look at what outlet is providing them with that news. While trust in corporate news has gone down over the past few years, trust in independent news is strong.

The meaning of the Science study is simple: If we want to foster robust conversations about national policy, we need to continue to support independent news outlets.

This groundbreaking work was supported in part by Voqal.

Quick Interventions: Media Links of Note

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The Medium Is The Metaphor: Lookit all these neat horticultural metaphors for managing information and trust in a digital economy! (Active Voice)

Church & State, Together Again: At the New York Times, business “realities” are eating away at the editorial firewall. (CJR)

Hatred & Ignorance On Demand: Is it just too easy to link this hateful incitement video from the NRA (YouTube) together in the same sentence as a story about recent swastika graffiti at my childhood elementary school (Patch), with an item about those people who thought NPR’s tweeting of the Declaration of Independence was anti-presidential propaganda (Washington Post)?

You Get The Media You Pay For: National Enquirer buys rights to Trump accuser story, then spikes it. (Wall Street Journal)

You Can Have My Free Press: A coal company is suing HBO’s John Oliver for defamation (Boston Globe), and “conservative” talk-show host Michael Savage calls for a government takeover of media (Media Matters).

When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Fingers: Real-estate parody site McMansion Hell returns despite Zillow threats. (Gizmodo)

No, Seriously, Come Fucking Take It: “To those who demand that Al Jazeera be shut down. We too have demands.” (Al Jazeera English)

Neal Gorenflo: Why Don’t Journalists Start Co-Ops?

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Conspicuously absent from the booming grassroots-sharing economy is the professional journalism sector. For some insight into this conundrum, I spoke to Neal Gorenflo, the executive director and co-founder of Shareable.net — a nonprofit solutions-news outlet covering innovations in resource sharing, new economies, and cities. Neal’s work also gets him in circulation as an adviser to mayors, communities, and civic organizations worldwide. He’s currently promoting the latest Shareable anthology, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Watershed Media: It’s been said that journalists come from too libertarian a business environment (commercial mass media) to work in co-ops or collectives. It’s true that besides the Associated Press, there aren’t any notable/consequential news co-ops out there. Do you have a sense of why this may be the case?

Neal Gorenflo: Associated Press is not just a symbolic representation of cooperatives in the news industry. It’s a pillar of the industry, so shouldn’t be dismissed so easily. It should be regarded as an example to be built upon. It could also be a platform to build out from both up and down the value chain. And for all I know, there are many other examples. For instance, there is Positive News in the UK which recently converted to a cooperative.

The most important thing I’ve learned about cooperatives since starting Shareable is that it’s a much larger and more diverse sector than 99 percent of people think. It’s a vast universe unto itself. Tragically, public ignorance of them is vaster.

And I would start with questions that explore strengths rather than weaknesses, like what conditions in the news business make it ripe time to form news cooperatives?

WM: In that case, let’s talk about platform co-ops. What sort of opportunity does a platform co-op approach represent for news media, and for individual working journalists, who are already enterprising, self-motivated and trained communicators?

NG: First, we need to define what is meant by the term platform cooperative. Imagine Vox was owned and governed by its writers through a cooperative structure where each writer-member had one share, one vote. That would be a platform cooperative.

As to their prospects in the news industry, I think they have potential. Cooperatives tend to thrive in well-understood industries, and there are many journalists seeking jobs. Also, digital publishing doesn’t require a lot of capital, so it’s likely that members’ initial investment would be enough to get started, at least in a modest way.

Cooperatives could also likely compete effectively. They typically operate at a lower cost than traditional businesses because they don’t have an expensive management and investor layer to pay. This allows them to pay workers competitively while maintaining a cost advantage. This could help them compete in an industry with falling revenues.

This said, there has to be awareness and the will to pursue this option. It takes a lot of patience and persistence to get cooperative enterprises off the ground. There’s the extra overhead of an unfamiliar ownership and governance structure to deal with in addition to core business challenges, but once you get over the hump, cooperatives can be a big advantage.

WM: You say that digital publishing is not capital intensive. How does that break down? What sorts of financing strategies could journalists turn to for capitalizing a new co-op?

NG: It’s worth revisiting the fact that digital publishing doesn’t require a big, expensive printing plant and distribution network like traditional newspapers. There are also free online publishing tools from free websites to open source audio and video production software packages. You can also speak to sources around the world for free using Skype or Google Hangouts. These, along with other online collaboration tools, makes it possible to run a news operation without a newsroom.

So a good bit of the basic infrastructure cost has gone to zero. This makes it possible to spend more on reporting and reporters. That lends itself to a worker- and/or a consumer-cooperative financing and governance model.

The financial barriers to entry are low enough that reporters and/or their readers can self-fund a news organization. A multi-stakeholder cooperative — where there workers, consumers, and investors own and govern the cooperative together — might be the way to go.

I made it sound easy, but there are also new challenges like mastering search engine marketing, social media, and competing against other attractive mediums like video and online gaming. It might be cheaper to start a news organization, but it might be harder to stay in business. The media landscape is much more dynamic than in the golden age of newspapers. You need to be nimble, have ready access to specialized talent, and be super responsive to readers if not bring them into the news production process.

WM: You mentioned the opportunity to involve readers in the news production process. We’re seeing lots of engagement-driven stuff like that out there — Hearken, for example, aims to turn audiences into forces that influence newsroom decisions. But we’re still focused on attention in that model — and thus shy of a consumer or buyer co-op, which requires not just attention for whatever’s currently trending, but also intention by audiences to support something they need that may not be trending. What is the next step for audience engagement and empowerment in the civic-media equation?

NG: Well, the full package of audience engagement might look something like this — reading, sharing content, contributing to the production process in a variety of ways, and then having a say and a share in the actual enterprise. So a system that lets readers climb that ladder of engagement in a self-directed way and change their pattern of engagement when needed seems worth trying if we value independent media. The good news is that all the parts of this model exist, but haven’t been put together in one place yet.

WM: It’s surprising that there isn’t more co-op activity around journalism and mass media. Do you have any prognostication about how these alternative models might gain more traction?

NG: While there may be other examples like Positive News, I don’t know them. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a cooperative trend in media. I just don’t see it yet. It’s worth exploring further.

One strategy that’s being pursued in other industries is co-op conversion. This is an option workers at failing factories have pursued all over the world for decades. Retiring business owners are also increasingly selling their businesses to their employees. This is a big trend as boomers retire. Who knows, co-op conversion could work more broadly in the news business too.

If we’re talking about media in general, then take a look at Stocksy, an online stock photo marketplace owned by its 900 contributing photographers. They have been operating for a few years, are doing around $10 million in annual revenue, and recently distributed surplus (the equivalent to profit) to members-photographers for the first time. Their site is gorgeous. It appears to be a well run business. It’s one of the best examples for other media businesses to explore.

As to the future, it’s eternally TBD. I believe journalists have the capacity to forge their own destiny. They are in many ways already. Platform cooperatives are one more tool in the toolbox. It’s up to them to use it.