First, a palate cleanser that’s relevant to the subject of this post from reader T: Bill Burr telling a journalist to do their job.
Second, barring anything unforeseen, my wife and I will be at the Hands Off 4/5 rally tomorrow at the Colorado State Capitol. If you’re going and you’d like to meet, shoot me an email ([email protected]) and hopefully we can meet up. Here’s a link to all the protests planned tomorrow.
Now onto the topic of the post. Many Democrats are frustrated with the perennial inability of the party, big donors, or others to establish a real alternative to right-wing media. We can go through all the reasons, and they include the traditional reliance on legacy media, campaigns being spun up and down without thinking about leveraging the social media and other infrastructure created in them, the pernicious influence of consultants, and the natural reluctance of candidates to spend on anything that isn’t on the clear path to their election.
If we’re going to urge the party to create its own media ecosystem, we need to know the price tag and feasibility. I found some numbers in an odd place — the obituary of the founder of the Texas Tribune, John Thornton.
In 2008, in his first journalism venture, he founded The Texas Tribune, recruiting Evan Smith, the president and editor in chief of Texas Monthly, to run it as his co-founder alongside Ross Ramsey. John assembled $4 million in seed capital, and contributed over $2 million to the organization in its founding years. The Texas Tribune would become the gold standard in nonprofit news, garner broad recognition in the industry, and inspire the founding of dozens of similar organizations in other cities and states.
A decade after starting the Tribune, Thornton co-founded the American Journalism Project, afirst-of-its-kind “venture philanthropy” to raise money and fund local newsrooms across the country. He brought an investor’s discipline — ambitious, strategic, and built for growth — to a civic mission. Alongside co-founder Elizabeth Green, he recruited prominent national philanthropies to support local news at the very moment it was teetering. The premise, as he often reminded staff, was that every dollar the American Journalism Project gave local news outlets would generate three new dollars in local annual recurring revenue. His theory worked: The first 22 organizations funded by the American Journalism Project have, on average, doubled in size since they received their grants; collectively, they have added over 200 journalists to their staffs. The American Journalism Project has raised more than $225 million to fund local news and now supports a portfolio of 50 nonprofit newsrooms in 36 states.
Call it $250 million for 50 nonprofit news outlets. I’m sure that’s over a few years, so call it $30 million/year. That’s a rounding error on what Democrats spend on elections.
I don’t have a bigger conclusion to draw here, but I thought it was an interesting number.
