Arianna Huffington recently announced her plan to help save “serious investigative journalism” with a nonprofit addition to her successful news blog. As newspapers around the country cut their investigative teams, if not their entire staffs, the Huffington Post is now accepting job applications for the nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund.
Huffington joins journalists around the country who are using the nonprofit business model to rescue an important casualty of the economic crisis: investigative journalism. Community specific and other in-depth investigations can no longer be afforded by diminished newspaper budgets. As a result, local and national reporters are leaning on the non-profit model to fund this type of journalism which most of them see as indispensable to democracy.
- Photo courtesy of Carnegie.org
“People are recognizing the decline in investigative reporting and the dramatic drop in reporters covering Washington and local governments,” said Zachary M. Seward, assistant editor of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. “These things were never very profitable but people are recognizing that reporting on local town hall meetings is essential for the civic public good.”
Jacob Bayless, of Santa Rosa, CA, is using the digital news model to launch a nonprofit community news organization called The Empire Report. Bayless’s grassroots website joins the newly launched Jersey City Independent, Minnesota’s MinnPost and the Voice of San Diego in the recent rise of nonprofit, community-based journalism websites.
“The reality is that it is far more credible not to have to answer to the profiteers,” said Bayless, referring to the influence of corporate advertising on commercial journalism. “At the most gut level, we started the site because Continue reading
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