The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

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  yogeshk05/02/08 Report as spam
  1

  Informative Article

  This is great and informative article. David, really appreciate it.

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  yogeshk05/02/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

  David this is really great article.

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  hotweir05/04/08 Report as spam
  3

  Thank you!

  It is nice to hear from people who enjoy this kind of blogging, as I often push the envelope beyond what conventional wisdom dictates "business writing" is all about. From my long career in the private sector, I know that executives and others inside companies have broad-ranging interests and should not be condescended to, as if all they care about is the stuff any MBA could crank out! Not true! I have had far more execs approach me to ask about opportunities in the non-profit world than the other way around.

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  koenjin05/02/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

  It is great for us outside the US to be able to listen to NPR and read the Nation
  on their websites. Go global!

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  hotweir05/04/08 Report as spam
  5

  Outside US readers

  Thanks for visiting! I treasure readers from around the world. This is a parochial society filled with people focussed only on themselves. It is often said that there is an "other America" beyond the war-mongering, voracious monster that so offends people everywhere else, even as they remain wondrously hopeful of emulating out financial success. A key in understanding this "other America" is to follow institutions like those I've written about here. The NGO/NPO community may be only about 5% of our national GNP but it is 95% of our social conscience.

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  danogram05/04/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

  Maybe it's just me, but looking at the list of ???journalist??? organizations sited, I wonder if there might be another message here. The commercial value of these outfits is not there; their appeal seems to miss the main stream of the US market in which they operate. After all, if their product was in such demand, wouldn't they easily become independently profitable? Can one be successful entering a global arena while living on subsidies to survive at home? Communities throughout this country have long subsidized symphonies, museums and such... most people are comfortable with that. We feel there is a cultural value in the arts that needs the sustenance and we are generally happy to provide it. The wide field of news reporting, including journalism, is not the same thing. Maybe it's just me, but I suspect that the list you've reported on has long drifted from concern about creating a product with wide appeal, in favor of generating material deemed ???excellent??? by a limited few.
  
  In short, I rely heavily on others more knowledgeable and gifted to help me understand what is valued in the arts. But I understand very well what I value in media and journalism, and I frequent the media that provides it for me. Sometimes I actually buy things from their commercial sponsors when I do.
  
  Free enterprise and the competition it generates excites excellence. I don't believe that non-profit is necessarily a good business model for jounalism.

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  hotweir05/04/08 Report as spam
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  But...I object

  You see no need to rely on skilled journalists to find out what is happening in the world? Why separate the arts from one of the most difficult of all professions -- investigative reporting? To be straight, there is no subsidy here. people voluntarily support these groups just as others do their churches or the arts. They do not cost any taxpayer anything. Most staff earn far below their market value.
  
  Yous is the kind of logic that is bringing us environmental ruin, failing schools, and poverty. The next thing you'll say is the poor have only themselves to blame. Wake up and read these publications.
  
  You might learn something!

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  danogram05/06/08 Report as spam
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  What a delightful can of worms you open!

  To learn requires challenge and the worms of environmental ruin, failing schools, and poverty are among the most fertile of challenges. But, for my part, I will continue to look for credibility, which seems to me overly challenged in these publications.

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  S.Howard-Sarin05/05/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

  One of the luminaries in early tech media (Bruce Koon) jumped from the sinking ship of Knight-Ridder to our local public radio operation. Maybe he knew something.

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  hotweir05/05/08 Report as spam
  10

  Bruce Koon

  It is true. Bruce is now radio news director at KQED, after Knight-Ridder sold all of its newspaper and web assets to McClatchy. But I also know of all manner of radio and newspaper people going in the other direction!

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  AMPorterfield05/07/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

  An old friend and former TV investigative reporter (from a time when that wasn't almost oxymoronic), Charles Lewis, gave a talk at Harvard on the strength of non-profit journalism. Recommended reading, at www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/working_papers/2007_3.pdf.
  
  While the non-profit model certainly frees an organization from demanding shareholders, analysts, quarterly foci, etc., it's naive to think that a non-profit is free of all business issues. But there is another aspect: non-profits have a kind of gravitas that lends credibility to their work. Neocon criticism of NPR notwithstanding, it's harder to prove a bias when you've got donors from all walks of life. And, with the power of the internet, you don't have to convince a skeptical editor at a newspaper to get your story published.

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  hotweir09/27/09 Report as spam
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  RE: The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, and CIR: The Non-Profit Business Model

  You are spot-on, Andrew, that NPOs are still businesses -- and they need to be run as such. I've heard journalists (most of whom have never worked on the business side) speak of grants as "easy money." There is nothing easy about raising grants, and nothing easy about sustaining a non-profit business organization. There is an advantage not having to pay certain taxes, but that often offset by poor business models, lack of diverse revenue streams, and a lack of professional management, from what I've seen over the years.