Can non-profit media retain independence?

One morning many years ago, toward the beginning of my newspaper career, I spotted a man standing outside a local car dealership. A large, hand-lettered sign was draped around his neck. I don't remember exactly what it said, except that the word "lemon" featured on it.

We talked. It turned out he'd bought a car, discovered it was no good and couldn't get any satisfaction when he complained. I took his picture and headed back to the office, where I put in a call to the dealer.

You can probably guess what happened next. Rather than respond to my message, the dealer instead called the publisher to remind him of how much advertising he bought. So much for my story on the man with the lemon sign.

I mention this not to torment my old newspaper. Instead, I want to challenge the notion of independence, a word that is invoked these days whenever the fate of the newspaper business comes up.

You may have heard that the news industry has run into some trouble lately. In Britain, newspapers are trying a variety of different strategies. London's Evening Standard is going free in the hopes of saving on distribution costs and drumming up more advertising. Rupert Murdoch's The Times and Sunday Times are taking the opposite approach, announcing plans to charge for online extras such as access to special events.

Plummeting circulation

In the US, newspaper circulation is plummeting, and advertising revenues have fallen off a cliff. Which is why those who are concerned about the survival of public-interest journalism (not necessarily newspapers) are increasingly interested in the non-profit model, under which journalism would be paid for mainly through tax breaks, grants from charitable foundations and contributions from the public.

The non-profit model has certainly worked well for public radio, probably the healthiest American news medium these days in terms of its finances and audience reach.

But there's an argument against non-profit journalism, too. What the government giveth, the government can taketh away. A news organisation dependent on a few large charitable grants may be loath to offend the source of its funding. Besides, grants often come with strings attached: if a funder pays for, say, health-care coverage, another beat may go uncovered or under-covered. And, at least under current law, a non-profit news organisation cannot endorse political candidates, a loss the public would probably miss not at all, but which nevertheless represents a substantial impingement on the first amendment's guarantee of a free press.

Last week I had a bird's-eye view of the debate over non-profits when I took part in a panel discussion on the future of journalism. The lead speaker was Princeton University professor Paul Starr, a strong proponent of the non-profit model. Starr said all the right things, making it clear that non-profit status should not, for example, favour newspapers over websites, and that the law should be amended so that non-profits could support political candidates. He pointed out that postal subsidies dating back to the earliest days of the republic were key to the emergence of the American press.

Yet my fellow panelist Marty Baron, the editor of the Boston Globe, immediately invoked the "i-word", telling the audience he opposed subsides. "I feel very strongly about our independence, and we have to maintain that," Baron said.