The first panel on day two of the 2011 International Symposium on Online Journalism got a blunt answer. “We don’t know,” said Lisa Frazier, president and chief executive of The Bay Citizen, one of the newer nonprofit startups.
The Bay Citizen had launched in 2009 with 27 people in editorial and innovation. It was reaching 150,000 unique visitors a month, plus another 61,000 readers through stories carried in the Bay Area editions of the New York Times on Fridays and Sundays. Frazier pointed to a literacy micro-site and a bicycle accident tracker mapping crashes across San Francisco, which had led some riders to change route. Local news coverage had declined by 60 per cent, often replaced by wire copy. The site, she said, could work as a “test kitchen” for journalism, technology and business models: “We have to fail fast.”
John Thornton, chairman of the board of the Texas Tribune, was more upbeat but no more certain: “We haven’t proven sustainability for nonprofit news, but we are gaining on it.” The Tribune was taking 50 million page views a year and $1.5m to $2m in corporate sponsorship against annual costs of around $3m, and had raised more than $8m from wealthy individuals and foundations.
Gustavo Gorriti of IDL-Reporteros in Peru ran an investigative outfit of five on a $200,000 foundation-funded budget, publishing on corruption, drug trafficking and bad policing using free tools and WordPress. Advertising and sponsorship were closed to him because of the stories he ran. He wondered aloud whether there was room for fair trade journalism.