But this doesn’t mean the parent company of the three news outlets, Philadelphia Media Network (PMN), will become a nonprofit.
Advertisement
“The landmark agreement we have reached with The Philadelphia Foundation offers an innovative solution to the real challenges facing print journalism”. That, in turn, can support public-interest reporting at The Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com. And while the arrangement has some rough parallels in the industry, it also amounts to an iexperiment with a unique ownership structure for local media-major papers operating under the auspices of a leading community foundation.
“Sorry”, tweeted Christopher Anderson, City University of NY associate professor and author of Rebuilding the News (Temple, 2013).
The owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and their website has announced he has donated the news organizations to a newly created nonprofit institute.
The move, which came after the PMN announced last November plans to lay off 46 journalists, was the the latest retrenchment in a decade of cutbacks, buyouts, layoffs, and management and ownership upheaval. He’s a former investigative reporter and executive editor of the Seattle Times.
“The timing of this couldn’t be better for us”, he said. “A lot of it will be based on the timeliness, relevancy-all of those core areas of developing investigations”. Like the Institute for Journalism in New Media, the Poynter Institute’s mission is to help lead instruction and innovation in the field of journalism. They can use it to fund the journalistic enterprise, or give part or all of it to the institute.
Sarah Bartlett, the dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, sits on the board of the new institute in Philadelphia. (Philly.com has a breakdown of the new structure here).
He said the Institute will leave the journalism to the news people, and he doesn’t think funders will affect coverage.
Local Newspaper Guild President Howard Gensler, a gossip columnist, holds out hope but thinks a $100 million endowment might be needed to stabilize the operation.
That’s partly why he agreed to serve on the institute’s initial board of managers, to participate in a research-and-development effort “that doesn’t exist in any newsroom in the country”.
He said he didn’t believe in inherited wealth, and that giving money away responsibly is hard work. “In this particular case, we as an institute have no agenda other than supporting quality journalism”.
Advertisement
The owner of Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers and their joint website, philly.com, has handed them off to a nonprofit created to help them survive the digital age with help from foundation grants, university partnerships and other boosters.
