Project for Excellence in Journalism

Assessing a New Landscape in Journalism

Non-Profit News

July 18, 2011

As traditional newsrooms have shrunk, a group of institutions and funders motivated by something other than profit are entering the journalism arena. This distinguishes them from the commercial news institutions that dominated the 20th century, whose primary sources of revenue -- advertising and circulation -- were self-evident.

Who are these new players in journalism? Are these sites delivering, as they generally purport to be, independent and disinterested news reporting? Or are some of them more political and ideological in their reporting? How can audiences assess this for themselves? In short, what role are these operations playing in the changing ecosystem of news?

A new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a detailed look at a portion of this new cohort of news providers-sites that cover state and national news. The study examines some four dozen sites across the country, all of them launched in 2005 or later, that offer coverage beyond the local level to state and national news. That group includes national news sites such as Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, which receives money from more than a dozen foundations and has a staff of more than 30.¹ It also includes lesser-known news sites such as Missouri News Horizon, whose funding is less clear and covers Missouri state government with a staff of three journalists. The study analyzes the funding, transparency and organizational structure of these sites, and also the nature of their news coverage.²

(There is a larger universe of community-level non-profit news operations perhaps even more diverse in nature. That group is beyond the scope of this analysis, but does bear further study.)

The 46 national and state-level news sites examined -- a group that included seven new commercial sites with similar missions -- offered a wide range of styles and approaches, but roughly half, the study found, produced news coverage that was clearly ideological in nature.

In general, the more ideological sites tended to be funded mostly or entirely by one parent organization -- though that parent group may have various contributors. They tended to be less transparent about who they are and where their funding comes from. And they tended to produce less content -- in some cases generating one or two stories per week produced by a single staffer.

Sites that offered a mixed or balanced political perspective, on the other hand, tended to have multiple funders, more revenue streams, more transparency and more content with a deeper bench of reporters. The six most transparent sites studied, for instance, were among the most balanced in the news they produced.

In terms of reach, the most popular site in the study, The Daily Caller, is a commercial enterprise with a clear ideological orientation. Of the non-profit sites, it is harder to generalize. One of the most popular sites in the study was the Washington Independent, a liberal site, but it has since ceased publication.³ In many other cases, sites with more balanced coverage, such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, are among the most trafficked in the sample.

These are among the findings of the study, which examined 46 news websites and an additional 68 institutions and individuals that provide the primary financial support for those sites. Researchers analyzed a total of 1,203 stories sampled from the month of September 2010 and conducted an audit of the sites and their chief supporters between the months of May 2010 and September 2010.

Read the full study and view special online features of the report at journalism.org

1. Among ProPublica's funders is The Pew Charitable Trusts, which provided the group with a two-year grant of $1 million in June 2010. The Pew Charitable Trusts is also the primary funder of the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

2. Sites formed around a single issue, like the Hechinger Report, or those comprised primarily of opinion or aggregation, such as Arkansas News, were excluded from this study. So were sites that were fundamentally local in nature, covering one community, such as Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, or the Bay Citizen. Also excluded were sites that produce on average less than one original story per week. See About the Study for more on the parameters of the sample.

3. In a November 2010 note to readers, editor Aaron Wiener explained that as foundation support began to dry up in the midst of economic recession, The Washington Independent's expenses were unsustainable, and its parent, the American Independent News Network, ended publication.