Tag: Lenfest Institute

Taking advantage of Jeff Bezos’ folly, publications tout Harris endorsements to sign up new readers

What is proving to be a debacle for The Washington Post is simultaneously turning into a boon for other news outlets. A week after Post owner Jeff Bezos killed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, a number of other publications that endorsed Harris say that subscriptions are on the rise.

The Post lost 250,000 of its 2.5 million digital and print subscribers after the paper announced that it would no longer endorse candidates for political office. Bezos compounded his problems with an op-ed in which he defended the decision and whined about how hard it is to be a billionaire newspaper owner.

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Among the publications taking advantage was The Philadelphia Inquirer, which fortuitously published its endorsement of Harris last Friday, the same day that word of the Post’s non-endorsement was getting around. The Inquirer’s endorsement quickly made the rounds on social media — and, according to Sara Guaglione of Digiday, the paper immediately experienced a bump. She wrote:

After publishing its endorsement of Harris on Oct. 25, The Philadelphia Inquirer gained over 4,200 new digital subscribers, “about three times a typical week for us and our biggest week of new starts ever,” Inquirer publisher and CEO Lisa Hughes said in an emailed statement. The Inquirer also saw “a bump” in individual donations to its journalism fund with The Lenfest Institute, she added. Donations to The Inquirer’s High-Impact Journalism Fund are up about 15% since the endorsement, according to a company spokesperson, without providing exact figures.

The Seattle Times published its endorsement of Harris this past Tuesday, a day when it could take full advantage of the outrage that had broken out over Bezos’ action and by a similar action at the Los Angeles Times ordered by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Under the headline “Hell, yes! The Seattle Times edit board endorses Kamala Harris for president,” the paper’s publisher, Frank Blethen, and Kate Riley, the editorial-page editor, devote nearly as much space to disparaging the Post and the LA Times as they do to touting Harris’ credentials. (The Blethen family owns the Seattle Times.) Blethen writes:

We take our journalism and community service very seriously. We have been preparing our fifth generation for Times leadership when I step down at the end of 2025. And members of the sixth interned in our newsroom this summer.

So it is with consternation that I and editorial page editor Kate Riley learned that the publishers of two of America’s most venerable newspapers on both coasts decided not to weigh in at all, even though their editorial boards were preparing Harris endorsements.

In contrast to the Philadelphia and Seattle papers, The Boston Globe endorsed Harris back on Oct. 18, too early to take much advantage — but it’s trying nevertheless.

“Jim Dao, our editorial page editor, has been actively sharing our position on endorsements this week,” said Globe director of communications Carla Kath by email. “We are pleased with our growth in subscribers over the past few days with new subscribers indicating that they subscribed because we maintained our tradition of endorsements.” In a follow-up, though, she added, “We are not sharing numbers at this time.”

Digiday’s Guaglione reported that The Guardian has also benefited from the Post’s folly. The Guardian endorsed Harris on Oct. 23; after Bezos’ cancellation became public, Guardian US editor Betsy Reed sent an email to readers asking for donations. Guaglione wrote:

By Oct. 28, U.S. readers had pledged roughly $1.8 million to the Guardian, according to a company spokesperson. The Guardian brought in $485,000 in reader donations that Friday, a U.S. daily fundraising record. Saturday brought in even more — $619,000 in reader donations.

I’m among The Guardian’s new donors. I actually canceled the Post months ago after my employer, Northeastern University, began offering free digital subscriptions to faculty and students. Otherwise I would not have canceled the Post despite my anger at Bezos — but I did figure that the moment was right to show support for another news organization. (I was also a weekly media columnist for The Guardian from 2007 to ’11.)

During the 2016 presidential campaign and throughout the Trump presidency, news organizations benefited from an increase in subscriptions, donations and audience. Although a second Trump presidency would be far too high a price for our democracy to pay, we may be seeing the early stages of that happening once again if the worst comes to pass.

Clarification: The Seattle Times endorsed Harris on Sept. 1; that editorial is behind a paywall. The “Hell, yes!” endorsement is a follow-up, and is free.

Local news round-up: Cuts in Tampa, innovation in Maine and a new editor in New Bedford

The old Tampa Bay Hotel, now part of the University of Tampa. Photo (cc) 2007 by Ebyabe.

I’m back from vacation, and this morning I have a round-up of some items about the state of local news. Unfortunately, my top story is not good. The Tampa Bay Times, a news organization that does it the right way, is nevertheless facing a 20% cut to its payroll.

The paper, which has won 14 Pulitzer Prizes over the years, will offer buyouts to its 270 full-time employees, a number that includes 100 journalists. Top executives will take 10% pay cuts through the end of 2024, with chair and CEO Conan Gallaty taking 20%.

The Times has long since given up on daily print; it currently publishes print editions on Wednesdays and Sundays, and is digital-only the rest of the week.

What’s distressing is that the Times has an admirable business model. It’s a for-profit paper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a highly regarded journalism-education organization. The original idea, though, was that some of the Times’ profits would be used to subsidize Poynter. Those profits have long since dried up, forcing Poynter to raise money on its own. That model is the opposite of a newer hybrid, The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute, which was specifically set up to support the Inquirer and other news organizations.

The Times writes that “print advertising and circulation have declined steadily and digital revenue growth hasn’t made up for the shortfall.”

With other major Florida newspapers in the hands of bottom line-obsessed entities such as McClatchy (the Miami Herald) and Alden Global Capital (the Orlando Sentinel), it’s vital that the Tampa Bay Times survives and thrives.

The Maine event

I had not realized that Reade Brower was still in the newspaper business until I received a press release earlier this week announcing an innovative venture on the coast of Maine.

Brower sold The Portland Press Herald and its affiliated newspapers last summer to the National Trust for Local News — then turned around and helped assemble a company called Islandport Media. Now he and another veteran publisher, Kathleen Fleury Capetta, are combining four newspapers into the weekly Midcoast Villager, which will debut in September.

The four papers are the Camden Herald, The Free Press, The Republican Journal and The Courier-Gazette. Islandport’s holdings also include The Ellsworth American, a respected weekly newspaper that will not be part of the merger.

When I hear news like this, I worry that it’s a cost-cutting move and that the new entity will concentrate more on regional news than hyperlocal coverage. The press release, though, says that the company has been hiring, and will supplement the paper with targeted community newsletters. Brower and Fleury Capetta have something else in mind as well:

The publication will further invest in the community by opening the Villager Café in downtown Camden in 2025. The cafe will offer breakfast, lunch and coffee, but will also serve as a community center that hosts events related to local journalism, brings people together to talk about complex issues, and showcases local talent with concerts, readings, discussions and more. People are hungry for social connections; the cafe and the publication will bring people together and provide a greater sense of belonging for community residents.

This is a phenomenally great idea, reminiscent of the burgers-beers-and-news formula unveiled several years ago by The Big Bend Sentinel in Texas. Civic engagement and news consumption are intimately tied together, so giving residents a reason to gather and talk about local issues will surely help the newspaper as well.

“We really believe that we just have to save local news, and this is an effort to do that,” Fleury Capetta told Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan.

Let there be Light

There’s some very good news at The New Bedford Light, a high-profile nonprofit that covers the South Coast of Massachusetts: Karen Bordeleau, a former executive editor of The Providence Journal, has been named editor. She’ll work alongside the current editor, Andy Tomolonis, until he retires next year, according to an announcement by CEO Lean Camara.

Bordeleau is a fellow graduate of Northeastern University’s journalism program. Not to reveal her age (or mine), but back in the 1970s we both worked as co-op students at Rhode Island’s Woonsocket Call, which, sadly, was merged into The Times of Pawtucket last October.

Congratulations to Karen — and to the Light, which has acquired a first-rate editor to succeed Tomolonis and, before him, founding editor Barbara Roessner.

Alden buys four papers in Pennsylvania. You’ll have no trouble believing what happened next.

The historic Scranton Times building. Photo (cc) 2022 by Jeffrey Hayes.

Last summer came horrifying news from Scranton, Pennsylvania: the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital was buying the Scranton Times-Tribune and three sister papers from the Lynett family, the local publishers going back to 1895. The sale was taking place even though those members of the family who actually ran the papers opposed it. They were outvoted by other members of the family who simply wanted to cash out and get on with their lives. Ellen Clegg and I talked about it at the time on the “What Works” podcast.

What happened next was predictable and depressing. Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple traveled to the Scranton area recently and filed a long, sad report about what he found (free link). The lowlights:

  • The news staff, already down to 40, a steep decline from 90 in the late 1990s, was immediately cut by another 10, with employees offered voluntary buyouts if they would just go away.
  • Newsrooms in Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton and Pottsfield were put up for sale. The Scranton Times’ headquarters was abandoned in late November, with journalists being told that most of them would be expected to work at home.
  • Some customer service calls were outsourced to the Philippines.

Almost immediately, Wemple writes, editorials about local and state issues were replaced with generic national content, which is exactly the opposite approach that researchers Joshua Darr, Matthew Hitt and Johanna Dunaway found is helpful in reducing political polarization. As Darr told Ellen in 2021:

It’s important for people to be able to express their opinions on national politics, and there are myriad ways to do that. But I don’t think there’s necessarily a good reason for local newspapers to devote some of their precious op-ed page space to things that aren’t local. I think they should be maximizing their comparative advantage in the marketplace by giving people things that they can’t get anywhere else.

There’s no question that the Pennsylvania papers were facing real challenges. As Wemple reports, paid circulation and advertising were both in a tailspin, and the Lynett family understandably was tired of subsidizing losses. But it didn’t have to end like this. Perhaps the best solution would have been for a local nonprofit institution to purchase the papers, as is the case at another Pennsylvania paper — The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit entity owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute.

Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, has proposed tax incentives and other measures to prevent newspapers from falling into the hands of cost-slashing chains. Unfortunately, such steps would not have come in time to save the Lynett papers.

Sadly, based on Wemple’s story, it doesn’t sound like much of an effort was made to find a buyer that would have operated the papers for the benefit of the public rather than for Alden’s wealthy investors. I just hope that some of the journalists who have lost their jobs will fight back by starting their own venture, as is happening in community after community across the country.

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With Chicago Public Media’s acquisition, the Sun-Times will soon go nonprofit

Photo (cc) 2011 by Seth Anderson

There’s been some confusion over Chicago Public Media’s acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid that is the city’s number-two daily newspaper. For example, The New York Times reported that “the ownership structure would be similar to that of The Philadelphia Inquirer, a big-city paper that the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism has run since 2016.”

Well, no. The Inquirer is a for-profit newspaper owned by a nonprofit organization. If the Inquirer itself were a nonprofit, it would be barred from endorsing political candidates. In fact, the paper continues to endorse candidates and published an “Endorsement Guide” as recently as last fall.

What’s happening in Chicago is different. The ownership of the Sun-Times will be converted to nonprofit with its own board, according to WBEZ, the broadcast arm of Chicago Public Media. The Sun-Times itself reports that the paper will “convert from for-profit to nonprofit status.” That would make it the second major daily paper to become a nonprofit, following The Salt Lake Tribune. Recently the executive editor of the Tribune, Lauren Gustus, reported that the paper is healthy and growing under nonprofit ownership.

As I mentioned, there is one disadvantage to nonprofit ownership: news organizations can’t endorse candidates or advocate for certain legislative actions without endangering their tax-exempt status. Of course, there are plenty observers who see that as a feature rather than a bug. For instance, David Boardman, chair of the Lenfest Institute, greeted the news that the Sun-Times will no longer be able to endorse with this:

But endorsements can be useful, especially in smaller races to which voters may be paying minimal attention. Besides, it’s an infringement on free speech. Such a rule didn’t even exist until Lyndon Johnson rammed it through the Senate in order to silence political opponents back home in Texas.

In any event, with Alden Global Capital disemboweling the long-dominant Chicago Tribune, the announcement that WBEZ and the Sun-Times will soon be covering the region with a combined newsroom is good news. And it shows that people and institutions are willing to step up when market failure undermines local news coverage.

A for-profit newspaper asks its readers for donations in the name of its journalists

Several readers called this Washington Post piece to my attention over the weekend. It’s about a fundraising drive recently held by the Tampa Bay Times to offset some of the advertising revenue it lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Post reporter  Elahe Izadi observes that the idea isn’t entirely new. The Seattle Times has engaged in community fundraising drives, and The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate (one entity) received $1 million over the summer from the Ford Foundation. For that matter, The Boston Globe pays for some of its education reporting with a $600,000 grant from the Barr Foundation.

What makes the Tampa Bay project unusual is that the paper asked for people to donate in support of individual journalists, by name. That makes me a little uncomfortable, and I hope the next time they do this they abandon that particular wrinkle.

As you may know, the Tampa Bay Times, a for-profit newspaper, is owned by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism education institute. Back when Nelson Poynter melded the Times and the institute together, the expectation was that the newspaper — rolling in cash — could use some of its revenues to support the institute.

Needless to say, that stopped a long time ago. The Times has struggled for the past few  years, and has cut back its print edition to twice a week. It’s still a great ownership model, though, emulated several years ago when Philadelphia Inquirer owner Gerry Lenfest donated his paper to the nonprofit Philadelphia Foundation. After Lenfest’s death, the organization that was set up to own the Inquirer and make investments in journalism was renamed the Lenfest Institute.

By the way, I really like the front page of today’s Tampa Bay Times. Let’s just hope they’re not fundraising off a commemorative issue later this week. Go Sox!

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Spurned by Tribune, Stewart Bainum moves ahead with nonprofit news in Baltimore

Baltimore. Photo (cc) 2014 by Patrick Gillespie.

Among the worst outcomes of Stewart Bainum’s failed bid to purchase Tribune Publishing is that he lost out on an earlier deal to buy The Baltimore Sun and donate it to a nonprofit organization.

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital had originally agreed to spin off the Sun to Bainum after buying Tribune’s nine major-market dailies. That deal fell through when Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, balked at Alden’s terms and tried to buy the entire chain.

So it’s very good news that Bainum appears to be moving ahead with a nonprofit venture that would compete with the Sun. Rick Edmonds of Poynter reported earlier this week that Bainum is advertising for a chief product officer who’ll work for a “well-funded startup” aimed at becoming “a new paradigm for digital first, cross-channel local media.”

The project will include the web, mobile, terrestrial and satellite radio and video, both on television and online, according to the ad, which adds that the “vision is to be the leading provider of news and lifestyle content in the Baltimore area.”

Bainum was originally willing to pay $65 million for the Sun. Assuming that money is still on the table, this should be a well-funded regional news product. Bloomberg and the Lenfest Institute are involved, too, though Edmonds suggests their role will be minimal.

One aspect I find interesting is the cross-platform nature of the project. The biggest challenge facing online-only media is getting the word out that they exist. As a former newspaper executive once told me, the problem with dumping the print edition in favor of digital is that print is essentially a billboard for digital. If print goes away, you disappear to non-subscribers. Bainum might avoid that problem by moving into radio and television as well as digital.

I also wonder whether there’s an underlying strategy to wrest the Sun away from Alden. Given the way the hedge fund is already decimating its holdings, which include the Chicago Tribune, New York’s Daily News and the Hartford Courant, there is little doubt that the Bainum project will be a better, more comprehensive news organization than the Sun on the day that it debuts.

If the Sun’s audience and advertisers (yes, nonprofits can accept ads) move en masse to Bainum’s venture, Alden might prove willing to walk away.

Previous coverage.

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Tiny News Collective to provide funding to six local news start-ups

Six local news projects will launch or expand after winning a competition held by the Tiny News Collective — a joint venture of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers and News Catalyst, based at Temple University. News Catalyst receives funding from the Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute. According to the announcement:

Thanks to a partnership with the Google News Initiative, each organization in the first cohort will receive a $15,000 stipend to help create the capacity for the founders to get started. In addition, the GNI has funded their first year of membership dues in the Collective and LION Publishers.

The projects range from an organization covering education news in part of Orange County, California, to an outlet with the wonderful name Black by God, which seeks “to share perspectives that cultivate, curate, and elevate Black voices from West Virginia.”

Forty organizations applied. Among the judges were Kate Maxwell, co-founder and publisher of The Mendocino Voice, a news co-op that is one of the local news projects I’m following for a book I’m co-authoring with Ellen Clegg.

The Tiny News Collective strikes me as a more interesting approach to dealing with the local news crisis than initiatives unveiled recently by Substack and Facebook. Those require you to set up shop on their platforms. By contrast, the Tiny News Collective is aimed at helping community journalism entrepreneurs to achieve sustainability on their own rather than become cogs in someone else’s machine.

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The Philly Inquirer will outsource its printing to Gannett

Philadelphia City Hall. Photo (cc) 2016 by Dan Kennedy.

It’s one thing for the chain-owned Hartford Courant to outsource its printing. It’s quite another for an independent major metro like The Philadelphia Inquirer to do so.

The Inquirer, recently shorn of its online comments, is owned by a well-funded nonprofit organization, the Lenfest Institute, and it continues to be reasonably well-staffed. Nevertheless, Kristen Hare of Poynter Online reports that the Inquirer will sell off its suburban printing plant and outsource its production to a Gannett-owned facility instead.

The print edition of many newspapers has become such a small part of their operations that printing simply isn’t cost-effective unless they’re able to take on outside customers. No doubt they’re celebrating at Gannett, since the Inquirer deal means less time that their presses will be idle. But when the Inquirer’s shutdown takes place later this year, 500 people will lose their jobs.

You can be sure that Boston Globe owners John and Linda Henry are looking at this move closely. The launch of the Globe’s printing plant in Taunton in mid-2017 was plagued with problems, and after they were fixed the Globe found itself with fewer outside printing jobs than it had expected. With digital far outpacing print, at some point it may make sense simply to sell the Taunton plant and print the Globe elsewhere.

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Saving local news: Some ideas from philanthropy, business and technology

Photo (cc) 2016 by Dan Kennedy

Could the example of the late Gerry Lenfest save Tribune Publishing’s newspapers from the avaricious clutches of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital?

About a half-dozen years ago, Lenfest, a billionaire investor, unexpectedly became the owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and its related media properties. It’s an incredibly convoluted story that I tell in “The Return of the Moguls,” but essentially he had acquired a piece of the Inquirer with the intention of flipping it, and he ended up instead with the whole thing.

Lenfest’s next move saved quality journalism in Philadelphia: In early 2016 he donated his media properties to the Philadelphia Foundation, which in turn set up a nonprofit that, after his death, became known as the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Today the Inquirer is in far better shape than many metro dailies.

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Jim Friedlich, executive director and chief executive of the institute, argues that Tribune newspapers could be saved if deep-pockets philanthropists acquired them and then emulated Lenfest — or simply ran them as for-profit enterprises, as with John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune. Friedlich writes:

An Alden purchase of all of Tribune doesn’t have to be a fait accompli. In fact, the threat of such a deal represents an opportunity for civic-minded local investors across the country, who could use this case not only to save a critical local news institution, but to reinvent it.

Soon-Shiong continues to be a major Tribune shareholder, and I recently wrote that he should consider rescuing the chain, which includes papers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America.

***

As we know, local news is in crisis, and that has produced a considerable amount of ferment. Most of the attention right now is on Alden’s bid for a majority share of Tribune, which involves regional rather than strictly local news organizations. But there’s a lot happening at the grassroots as well.

For instance, Sarah Scire reports for the Nieman Journalism Lab on an ambitious effort to provide local news start-ups with the support they need to launch and continue operating. Imagine a journalist who’s been laid off by a corporate-owned newspaper and who wants to start something at the hyperlocal level. Where to begin?

According to Scire, the Tiny News Collective takes care of a lot of the back-end details that journalists are usually not trained to attend to themselves. “The project,” Scire writes, “will offer entrepreneurial journalists a tech stack, business training, legal assistance, and back-office services like payroll for around $100 a month.”

The Tiny News Collective, a collaboration between News Catalyst and LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, is hoping to have a hand in starting news projects in 500 communities, half of them covering underserved populations.

***

Also worth watching is the Crosstown Neighborhood Newsletter project in Los Angeles — an effort to make smart use of data in order to produce a multitude of newsletters, each aimed at a tiny slice of the public. The editor, Gabriel Kahn, a professor at USC Annenberg, writes that Crosstown — “a collaboration between software engineers, designers and journalists” — recently launched 110 such newsletters in one day. He explains:

Our formula starts with data. We collect data about everything we can in Los Angeles, from traffic and crime to COVID-19 cases and building permits. Much of this data is hiding in plain sight, housed on local government dashboards that are hard to navigate. We divvy up the data by neighborhood. One citywide dataset about parking fines becomes 110 stories about how many more or fewer tickets were issued in each neighborhood during the COVID lockdown.

Crosstown reminds me of EveryBlock, a project started in 2008 by the pioneering data journalist Adrian Holovaty that was also heavily dependent on publicly available data. EveryBlock never really caught on, and it shut down in 2013. But far more information is online today than was the case a decade ago, and the tools for presenting it have improved considerably. It could be that the time for Holovaty’s idea has arrived.

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Can nonprofit ownership be an answer to the crisis facing local newspapers?

Photo (cc) 2004 by Cool Hand Luke.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

A little gallows humor seems like an appropriate way to greet the news that The Salt Lake Tribune — the largest daily newspaper in Utah — will seek permission from the IRS to become a nonprofit entity. So cue the snare drum:

Q: What’s the difference between a for-profit newspaper and a nonprofit newspaper?

A: A nonprofit newspaper might actually be able to figure out a way to make money.

Hiyo!

But hold the snark. Because even though nonprofit status would not relieve the Tribune of the obligation to figure out a way to pay for the journalism it provides, this might be the most hopeful step in newspaper ownership since The Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister properties were donated to a nonprofit foundation in 2016.

The Salt Lake plan would actually take the Philadelphia model one giant step further. The Inquirer remains a for-profit paper even though its owner, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, is a nonprofit organization. What the owners in Salt Lake hope to do is reorganize the Tribune itself as a nonprofit, enabling it to raise money in the form of tax-exempt contributions from large foundations as well as from (to borrow a phrase) readers like you.

“The Tribune is a vital community asset and should be owned by the community,” said publisher Paul Huntsman, the brother of former ambassador and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

The slide at daily newspapers everywhere has been precipitous, but it’s been especially acute at the Tribune. The newsroom has plunged from 148 full-time employees in 2011 to about 60 today. (Huntsman bought the paper in 2016 and eliminated more than 30 positions a year ago.) Print circulation, according to the Nieman Lab, fell from 85,000 in 2014 to just 31,000 in 2018.

The situation in Salt Lake City is complicated by the Tribune’s joint operating agreement with a second daily, the Deseret News, which is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That agreement expires in a year. So it will take a while for the dust to settle.

Despite the success of our three national papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, in charging for digital subscriptions, the outlook remains dire at the regional level. Although Boston Globe owner John Henry surprised everyone last December when he said his paper had achieved profitability, the Globe’s financial situation is still murky. Elsewhere it’s Armageddon. As The Wall Street Journal put it in a recent examination of local newspapers: “A stark divide has emerged between a handful of national players that have managed to stabilize their businesses and local outlets for which time is running out.”

As the advertising revenues that traditionally subsidized journalism have dwindled, newspapers are looking more and more like what economists refer to as a “public good” — that is, a service that benefits all of us whether we pay for it or not. The fire department is a classic example of a public good because we all need it, yet few of us would pay for it voluntarily. That’s what taxes are for. But what do we do about a newspaper whose exposé of corruption in city hall, for example, benefits “free riders” who don’t pay as well as those who do?

That’s where the nonprofit model comes in. At its best, nonprofit ownership can break the reliance on revenue from advertisers and readers by getting others to pay for it.

Take, for instance, the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit, online-only news service that has received considerable support from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven since the Independent’s founding in 2005.

“My view is that one of the things that connects people is a common base of information about what’s going on in this place. That it’s actually a very powerful connector,” the foundation’s president and chief executive officer, Will Ginsberg, said in an interview for my 2013 book “The Wired City.” “And it’s therefore a very powerful ingredient in creating a sense of community.”

From the moment that the internet began undermining the economics of journalism, the paramount question for newspapers has been: Who will pay? If The Salt Lake Tribune is successful in winning IRS approval, we’ll have a chance to see if civic-minded foundation leaders and philanthropists might be one answer. It’s already working at smaller projects such as the New Haven Independent and at public broadcasting operations. It’s worth finding out if it might work for large regional newspapers as well.

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