A session at the 2010 International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin put three American non-profit news organisations side by side, each paying for itself a different way.
Scott Lewis, chief executive of Voice of San Diego, started from the unbundling of the newspaper: once readers assemble their own bundle of information, a site has to produce something they want in it. Voice of San Diego decided early not to duplicate what others already did. Its mission had begun as investigative journalism for the city and was moving towards civic participation. Funding came from donations, philanthropists, corporate memberships and for-profit distribution of content; 1,080 people had given money, and the target was 10,000 donors by 2013.
Jim O’Shea, co-founder and editor of the Chicago News Cooperative, described a site launched to fill the news gap in the city with six full-time reporters plus freelancers. It started with $500,000 from the MacArthur Foundation and a contract to supply Chicago news to the New York Times. The model rested on philanthropy, sponsorship, some advertising and, above all, membership at $2 a week; O’Shea acknowledged that the 30,000 to 40,000 members needed for self-sufficiency would be hard to reach. “Money is, and remains, our major challenge to stability,” he said.
Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune said the site had launched the previous November because “public service journalism needed saving.” It raised $4m in 2009 against a budget of just over $2m a year; its 1,600 members gave $96 on average. Twenty-five weeks after launch it had passed 3.8 million page views, 40% from outside Texas, and its data pages drew two and a half times the traffic of its stories.
The open question was whether this was a specifically American model, dependent on a philanthropic tradition other countries do not share.