Shipwrecked by the sea change in their industry, many journalists are looking to philanthropy and academia as safe harbors. Numerous nonprofit ventures have been launched; others are on the drawing board. We are in the early stages of an era of experimentation, innovation, and cross-fertilization. The movement to nonprofit models has been so swift that we are only just beginning to wrestle with threshold questions about how such arrangements may affect the practice of journalism.
For the purposes of this essay, I will consider the Chicago News Cooperative, but the questions I raise apply to the entire emerging world of nonprofit journalism. The Chicago cooperative is largely staffed by former Chicago Tribune editors and reporters, and it received start-up funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Its board includes, among others, Newton Minow, a prominent lawyer and former chair of the Federal Communications Commission; Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books (and CJR’s vice chairman); Martin Koldyke, businessman and former chair of WTTW public television; and Ann Marie Lipinski, vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago and a former editor of the Tribune.
Since mid-November 2009, the cooperative has contributed two pages of local content on Fridays and Sundays to the Chicago edition of The New York Times, with some of its articles running in the national edition. It plans to launch a revamped Web site and is expected to provide content to other outlets, such as WTTW.
With both the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times having made severe cutbacks, the cooperative assembled its own newsroom to cover the city and state. Putting aside the issue of whether this model is cost-effective and sustainable, a key question is: Will its funding design give rise to persistent inducements to self-censorship?
This question was brought to a point for me by a piece by James Warren in the January 10 edition of the Times. A former managing editor at the Tribune, Warren writes a column that appears twice a week. (Full disclosure: prior to his taking the Chicago News Cooperative column, Warren and I had several exploratory conversations about a possible collaborative journalistic venture.)
Against the background of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s recent political woes—the lost Olympic bid, a deepening fiscal crisis—the theme of Warren’s column was that the mayor and the city have something to be proud of: the University of Chicago.
Warren takes as his text a recent book by Jonathan Cole, the former provost of Columbia University. The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected is an ode to America’s research universities. In conversation with Warren, Cole singled out the U of C as “our closest approximation to the idea of a great university.” Warren closes the column with the observation that “there is reason to be proud and protective” of the university.
From one perspective, this is an unexceptional column. From another, it’s unsettling, when one considers that Ann Marie Lipinski, Warren’s former editor and a board member of the news cooperative, is a vice president at the university. It’s also worth noting that Cole’s book was edited by another board member, Peter Osnos, and published by PublicAffairs, the publishing house he founded.
There is nothing improper about Warren’s column. For sins in past lives, columnists are condemned to struggle every few days to be engaging and provocative. It’s a difficult dance to do. In view of their unceasing hunger for ideas and material, it seems only fair to exempt them from various forms of conflict of interest. In any case, Warren subsequently appended to the column (on the Times’s Web site) an acknowledgment of Osnos’s role as publisher of the Cole book, though not the nature of Lipinski’s position at the university.
But the important question here is not the issue of transparency. Rather, the question is: In view of how the news cooperative is constituted, will it bring sustained critical journalistic scrutiny to bear on the University of Chicago?
I agree with Mr. Kalven that with grants, journalists need to err on the side of biting the hand that feeds in order to keep public discourse alive. But I'd like him to clarify how this is different from the old challenges of placating advertisers and subscribers? The only difference he cited was the "uncharted territory" of dealing with grants, which seems unsubstantial to me. The old system is in crisis; it's a bad time to be afraid of the new. Yet Mr. Kalven acknowledges that he's setting up a nonprofit funded by grants himself. So I suppose he means to support these ventures and put journalists on their guard--but against what?
#1 Posted by Jenny, CJR on Tue 25 May 2010 at 02:54 PM
As the editor at The New York Times responsible for recruiting the Chicago News Cooperative to supply local coverage for our papers distributed in the Chicago area, I am particularly disappointed in the ungenerous – to borrow the author’s term – tone of Jamie Kalven’s article.
He raises a specious concern about CNC’s ability to report independently about issues of interest to its donors and board members and then offers no evidence that his fear is well founded. I can see that he has a genuine concern about the way that the University of Chicago conducts itself as a neighbor in Chicago. And I can see that he’s quite knowledgeable about the MacArthur Foundation’s views about public housing. But I don’t see that he asked anyone at CNC about what it’s doing to insulate itself from the influence of its donors and board members. More to the point, I don’t see that he’s adduced any evidence of an influence on CNC’s content – or even read it.
This guilt-by-association thing cuts many ways. For example, CNC has a very close relationship with The Times. We talk to its editors daily. Our editors and theirs kick CNC copy back and forth before it’s published. I’d readily issue a Gary Hart-style challenge to Mr. Kalven to find evidence that CNC’s relationship with either MacArthur or the University of Chicago is anything close to that intimate.
Perhaps that’s why our influence on CNC’s reporting is so much stronger. Or the influence of CNC’s editors: Jim O’Shea, Jim Kirk and David Greising. All of them, like The Times, are committed to reporting without fear or favor on a wide range of Chicago institutions. And all of us have our reputations riding on whether we do just that.
After my copy of CJR arrived in the mail – I’m a paying customer, and a donor on top of that, but apparently have little influence over what you write – I went back to review some of the articles we’ve published from CNC just in the last couple of months. I found tough, original reporting on the neighborhood and housing issues that Mr. Kalven’s analysis suggests we’d be missing. Articles like:
“Suburbs Unite in Quest for Federal Housing Aid, but Are Shut Out,” by Juan-Pablo Velez, May 7, 2010; “Unexpected Repairs Rattle Owners of New Condos,” by Daniel Libit, April 23, 2010; and “Problem of Vacant Houses Resists Easy Solution,” by Jim O’Shea, April 4, 2010.
CNC is covering immigration (“Deportation’s Brief Adios and Prolonged Anguish,” by Meribah Knight, May 9, 2010; “Agencies are Stretched in Efforts to Aid Refugees,” by Meribah Knight, April 16, 2010), gang violence (“A Gang War Destroys Lives and Prods Peacemakers,” by Don Terry, May 2, 2010), city schools (“Schools Test a New Tool for Improving Evaluation of Teachers,” by Crystal Yednak, April 9, 2010) – the list goes on and on. We are delighted, too, with the broad-shouldered coverage of local politics we’re getting consistently from the CNC newsroom – not least in columns by Jim Warren.
I deeply regret the opening that we created last January by failing to disclose then-CNC Chairman Peter Osnos’s tie, as publisher, to the Jonathan Cole book on which Warren built a column praising the University of Chicago. (Full disclosure: My undergraduate degree is from Columbia, where Cole has long taught sociology; my eldest daughter is pursuing a doctorate in sociology; my second-oldest daughter is a Columbia junior. Time to break out “The DaVinci Code” and start tracing the connections.) The moment that omission came to our attention, we corrected it. And we did not repeat that mistake: When Emma Graves Fitzsimmons wrote on May 21 about University of Chicago housing research partly funded by the MacArthur Foundation ("A Wish for More Community in Mixed-Income Units"), CNC's funding from MacArthur was disclosed. To my eye, and that of CNC's editors, there was no trace of MacArthur influence on that reporting.
There are so many real problems in Ameri
#2 Posted by Jim Schachter, CJR on Sat 29 May 2010 at 07:59 AM
I've been in Chicago since 1980 and have founded or led 10 nonprofit enterprises in the arts, community development and civic engagement. I have to second Kalven's concerns about the close relationship between the Mayor's policies, the business community which often supports and staffs them and the funding community which frequently funds them.
I was a co-organizer of No Games Chicago (http://www.nogameschicago.com), a coalition of volunteer activists and concerned citizens from around the city who successfully opposed the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. This was an all-consuming, all out effort by the Mayor and his top people and was led by Pat Ryan, former Chair of AON Insurance. I can tell you that Chicago's civic organizations - many of whom are funded by MacArthur, refused to take a critical look at the bid and the media here were all echo chambers for the mis-information put out by the 2016 Committee
Twenty local foundations, including MacAthur, gave the 2016 Committee over $3 million. This at a time of the worst financial situation and greatest need for social service we've ever seen in Chicago. 13 media outlets are also listed in the roll of 2016 donors. Pat Ryan gave $100,000 to the mayor's 2007 re-election effort. Mr. Ryan was Citizen of the Year at the Civic Federation in 2007 and is a major donor. The Civic Federation was selected by the City Council to review the 2016 bid. It issued a report that concluded all is well with the finances and underpinnings of the bid. The City Council voted 49-0 to endorse the "blank check" required to be a finalist city and made Alderman Ed Burke the overseer of the city's Olympic Commitments. Mr. Burke's law firm has nine clients who have given a total of at least $1 million to the bid committee.
Julia Stasch is just one of many former Daley staffers serving in major civic organizations. People can connect the dots. I personally talked to over a dozen leaders of civic organization who refused to take a public stand on the bid - even though they privately had grave doubts - because they feared loosing grants and city contracts.
I know of instances where people and organization leaders were threatened, seduced and promised all sorts of post-games goodies.
Bottom line - I am deeply concerned about an old-boys network controlling our news. I have grave reservations about the MacArthur funded news effort -staffed with some of the same people who were part of the uncritical 2016 cheering squad.
A better solution would be a citizen powered news effort - where the news gatherers are trained to follow the money in city government - taxes, TIFs, contracts and campaign contributions - and place it all on an easy-to-read web platform. I'd call this effort The Citizens Financial News Service.
Frankly, I do not trust Ms. Stasch to help me discover the real facts behind something as big as an Olympic bid backed relentlessly by her former boss. I don't trust the Chicago civic eco-system to critically report on the NEXT scam backed by the Mayor, Alderman Burke and blessed by the Civic Federation. In fact - that scam is already in the wings - it's called the Central Area Plan (see http://tinyurl.com/248798q).
No, we taxpayers are totally on our own. If we don't take the time to dig and tell the truth and connect the dots, the REAL story of Chicago’s finances and priorities will not be told.
#3 Posted by Tom Tresser, CJR on Tue 1 Jun 2010 at 11:23 AM
Actually, the CNC piece on the Chicago Housing Authority that Jim Schachter cites is a good example of some of these issues - discussed at length here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/curtis-black/the-emnew-york-timesem-in_b_603458.html
#4 Posted by Curtis Black, CJR on Tue 8 Jun 2010 at 01:47 PM
Any method of covering a city is going to run into conflicts of interest. Commercial journalism faces pressure from its advertisers, who don't even pretend to share the journalistic mission.
The best we can hope for, I think, is to have a mix of corrupting pressures that don't push all reporters in the same direction. So if nonprofit newsrooms face different pressures from profit-making ones, that's about as good as it gets.
#5 Posted by Doug Muder, CJR on Fri 11 Jun 2010 at 08:20 AM