Why Happy Talk Isn’t the Answer for Local News

As I talk to people around the country—newsroom leaders and funders both—they are essentially unanimous that this is a challenging time in philanthropically-supported journalism, especially at the local level, although not only there. The revenue outlook is mixed, the federal defunding of public broadcasting has created a crisis and an opportunity to which some are responding more effectively than others, and institutional funders are particularly facing a range of pressures, most notably rising needs almost all across the range of their interests and previous commitments. This is not to say that there isn’t important progress being made by some players and on some fronts—that is also surely true.

But I worry that an instinct to engage in what I can think we can fairly characterize as “happy talk,” which has long afflicted institutional foundations and those most dependent on them, does not serve the sector well at this moment, and this week I want to explore that.

Are things really all good?

To read most foundation newsletters and announcements in and around journalism, you would think that we are just moving from strength to strength. When prospective grantees do this, I understand—no one is likely to win support by highlighting setbacks or disappointments. But foundations like to boast they have the freedom to take risks, and many risks, of course, will not pan out. No institutional funder would suffer in any important way from acknowledging an occasional failure. Indeed, as I have long urged, publicly and privately, there is much potentially to be gained from learning from unhappy experiences, and that should more than justify discussing them more openly than we generally do. This remains almost entirely a missed opportunity.

Even worse than studied silence about failure, however, is happy talk about what, in reality, is a mixed picture. Which brings me to this year’s INN Index, released by the Institute for Nonprofit News last month and received warmly. Also uncritically.

The heart of my concern with the very encouraging INN data—local nonprofits experienced 14% average and 11% median revenue increases last year! more than 80% have seen significant three-year revenue gains!—could be the result of the survey’s response rates. As the study reports, 444 INN member newsrooms were asked to participate. Of these, 407 responded and 376 completed the survey, 357 of them with revenue data. But only 236 provided revenues for the current and previous years, which leaves comparable revenue from only just over half of those to whom questionnaires were originally sent, and comparables from fewer than two thirds of those providing revenue information in the current year.

 

A year ago, LION Publishers reported even more robust results—15% median annual revenue gains!— which they tell me was based on data from 70% of members, but was consistent with eventual data from the full membership.

If we make what seems to me the reasonable assumption that people with better stories to tell are more likely to respond to such surveys, those response rates should make you very queasy in drawing overall conclusions from the data being reported. INN CEO and exceutive director Karen Rundlet told me, “We don’t see any basis for a suggestion that members who are doing better financially are more likely to report their revenue.” She noted that answering the survey is required for participation in INN’s annual NewsMatch program, although an INN staffer acknowledged that “we just ask that members do their best to provide responses to Index questions.” Chris Krewson, executive director of LION, told me they have mandatory annual revenue reporting at the time of membership renewal and that “I do not agree with your premise, that members are too embarrassed to report… lower number[s]…. That’s not happening.”

A cautionary benchmark

The recent annual impact report from the American Journalism Project, which has access to data from all of the grantees it carefully selects and funds, and which quite intentionally makes grants only to what it considers the most promising local newsrooms, further buttresses this concern. (Disclosure: I do some consulting for AJP.)

The AJP report indicates that 14% of their grantees saw revenues shrink, compared with just 6% of local newsrooms and 12% of state and regional newsrooms for the INN Index. (AJP also reported that 29% of their grantees saw audiences decline, while one quarter lost newsletter subscribers.) It seems overwhelmingly likely that the AJP grantees would be over-performing the run of INN and LION local members, not under-performing them.

Exaggerating how well things are going has a number of pernicious effects beyond just being mistaken. It can be quite dispiriting for newsroom leaders facing acute challenges, who may be led to feel that they are more alone than they, in fact, are. It can give a false sense of comfort or even luxury to newsroom staff, who are then shocked when forced to confront bad news from layoffs or other cost constraints. It can lead to insufficient credit being accorded those who are succeeding—because if everyone is, that’s not a big deal.

If foundations and trade associations are going to present a misleadingly cheery picture of the field, we surely need journalists and other commentators to be more skeptical. Optimism is congenial, but Pollyannaism ultimately does no one any good.

To be sure, not all the widely-reported data on our industry is upbeat. The State of Local News annual survey, also released recently, best known for charting “news deserts” and now published by Medill, is quite bracing. (I continue to wish it took better account of local TV stations, which are often cited as the leading source of local news, and which might avoid findings like this and help explain why news deserts are less often perceived by the people who ostensibly live in them.)

I don’t have numbers of my own to quantify where we stand on the overall revenue picture for local nonprofit newsrooms. I can’t prove that the numbers being bandied about by some others are wrong. But I think they are, and they surely don’t align with the vibes I get in my travels. There are many ways our field could do with more rigor. Charting our progress more carefully is almost surely one of them.

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