All entries tagged: cross-subsidy

A for-profit argument for a nonprofit model

There’s a great new post at Free Press’s Save The News project. It’s from Cindy House, formerly of the now-deceased Rocky Mountain News and now of the Rocky Mountain Independent. In it, she talks about the Independent’s business model and why the founders chose the for-profit path.

House’s post is worth reading because the three-pronged model she describes is truly innovative. The first two elements we know a lot about: advertising and memberships. The third is something not normally associated with newsrooms: The Independent plans to develop a consulting business that will offer “Web design, search engine optimization and editing/writing services to other businesses.”

Although House doesn’t use the word “subsidize” in connection with journalism, that’s exactly what she’s talking about. As she says, the owners hope the consulting business will “bring in much-needed capital.” She adds: “We keep our expenses low so that whatever revenues come in go right back into content development.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely the argument for the nonprofit model. Keep reading »

11 months ago No comments
 

Bill Baker: Is there a nonprofit future for American journalism?

By Edward J. Delaney

William F. Baker, the longtime executive at New York’s PBS stations, is temporarily here at Harvard as a senior research Fellow at the Kennedy School’s the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Not long ago, he led a discussion whose title was “The Future of Journalism,” but which — like a lot of those talks these days — spent a lot of time on the industry’s current problems. Here’s a four-minute highlight reel, followed by some notes about the proceedings:

Keep reading »

1 year, 7 months ago 4 comments