the future of newspapers
Steve Coll, who wrote one of the more depressing books I’ve run across in recent years, Ghost Wars, lets fly with his theory on the future of print journalism in this piece from the New Yorker. I’ll spoil it for you: Non-Profit.
In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so. Ever since I left the Washington Post, in 2005—after twenty years there that included a stint in management—and particularly since I joined the nonprofit world at the New America Foundation and started learning about the management and fund-raising issues at tax-exempt organizations, I have been mulling over this idea: that only by turning the Post into a nonprofit trust and raising a university-size endowment to support the newsroom could the paper retain the vitality it requires to serve as a successful watchdog over our constitutional system.
via War and Piece
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