Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with a new study that looks at the new universe of nonprofit journalism. The study looked at who is publishing news under the legal structure of a 501(c)3 exemption. After all, “nonprofit” signals a tax status, not a belief system or a commitment to any particular fair and balanced set of ideals, journalistic or otherwise.
In 1910, nearly 60% of cities had competing daily papers, but today that completion of viewpoints has all but disappeared. More than two-thirds of independently-owned newspapers have disappeared over the last 35 years with more than 200 publishing companies disappearing over the last 20 years. Vin Crosbie, a noted Syracuse University professor and consultant, has predicted that more than half of the approximately 1,400 daily newspapers publishing in the country today could be out of business by 2020.
Newspaper publishers have reduced daily newsroom staffing by more than 29% from since 2001 as circulation and advertising revenues have plummeted over the last decade. Every year there are fewer and fewer newspaper reporters covering state capitols and city halls, while the number of states with newspapers covering the U.S. Congress full-time has dwindled from 35 in 1985 to just 21 in 2010.
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. The emergence of these new online news sources is significant since a national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Dec. 1-5, 2010, found that more people cite the internet than newspapers as their main source of news.