Faced with declining circulation and advertising, as well as millions of dollars in lost revenue, the journalism industry is facing a well-publicized crisis. The threatened closure of The Boston Globe, the closure of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the folding of dozens of magazines and local newspapers across the country represent the industry’s struggle to find a new business model to adapt to its evolving, technology-addicted readership.
The Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has set out to find a solution, recently issuing a report titled Philanthropic Foundations: Growing Funders of the News.
The report – authored by David Westphal, a senior fellow at CCLP and former Washington editor for McClatchy newspapers – discusses the potential role for philanthropic organizations and foundations in serving "as a firewall against the disappearance of critical news and information," said the report.
Featured in the report are perspectives from philanthropic, nonprofit, and foundation leaders, as well as journalism and education professionals, interviewed as a follow-up to a 2008 meeting on the topic held by the USC Annenberg School, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
"When we had the meeting last year, we saw a need," said Geoffrey Cowan, dean emeritus of the USC Annenberg School and CCLP director. "But now we’re in a state of desperation. The collapse of the traditional economic model has increased both the need for nonprofit journalism, and also the receptivity toward it."
The findings – which include proposals about journalism divisions of NGOs, collaboration between nonprofit foundations and for-profit news organizations, university investment in news businesses, and seed money for startup news enterprises – will be presented at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which will take place in Boston in August.
Newspaper revenues declined 17 percent last year and 25-30 percent in the first quarter of 2009, according to the CCLP. 