http://www.miller-mccune.com/media/the-bottom-line-for-nonprofit-news-4725/ Nationally Acclaimed Politics, Science and Culture Coverage Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:00:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.miller-mccune.com/media/the-bottom-line-for-nonprofit-news-4725/#comment-49 Michael Stoll Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:58:57 +0000 http://blog.miller-mccune.com.s72010.gridserver.com/2008/03/04/the-bottom-line-for-nonprofit-news/#comment-49 Ryan,Congrats on a thorough and thoughtful article. The public-media sector is growing, but it, too, needs its watchdogs, and you've done a service by showing how honorable journalism experiments might stall for lack of long-range planning or business skills. The obvious answer to this is for foundations and philanthropists to help these media startups begin to apply some of the business-world savvy they have acquired in recent years as they have begun to specify and demand measurements of success from all their grantees.The other major need is for research and experimentation into nonprofit models that can generate at least part of their income from the marketplace. This is the heart of the question about "sustainability." Many of the entities you mentioned are staking their future on online advertising. The effort I'm involved in in San Francisco, which we're calling the Public Press (http://www.public-press.org), is an experiment that shuns advertising but relies on a subscription-and-membership model for daily print and Web news. Our venture is no different in that it will rely on seed money to get started. But our hope is that we will get closer to sustainability by generating a marketable product directly to readers, not to advertisers, whose news priorities differ from the public's in many ways.A business consultant warned me recently than "99.9 percent of all startups fail." With this in mind, we will need at least 1,000 of these ventures to ensure that the public-media sector successfully expands to fill the voids left in the recent retrenchment of commercial journalism enterprises. Ryan,Congrats on a thorough and thoughtful article. The public-media sector is growing, but it, too, needs its watchdogs, and you’ve done a service by showing how honorable journalism experiments might stall for lack of long-range planning or business skills. The obvious answer to this is for foundations and philanthropists to help these media startups begin to apply some of the business-world savvy they have acquired in recent years as they have begun to specify and demand measurements of success from all their grantees.The other major need is for research and experimentation into nonprofit models that can generate at least part of their income from the marketplace. This is the heart of the question about “sustainability.” Many of the entities you mentioned are staking their future on online advertising. The effort I’m involved in in San Francisco, which we’re calling the Public Press (http://www.public-press.org), is an experiment that shuns advertising but relies on a subscription-and-membership model for daily print and Web news. Our venture is no different in that it will rely on seed money to get started. But our hope is that we will get closer to sustainability by generating a marketable product directly to readers, not to advertisers, whose news priorities differ from the public’s in many ways.A business consultant warned me recently than “99.9 percent of all startups fail.” With this in mind, we will need at least 1,000 of these ventures to ensure that the public-media sector successfully expands to fill the voids left in the recent retrenchment of commercial journalism enterprises.

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