Newspapers Should Go Non-Profit?

After a weekend at the AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference in Washington D.C., I’m surprised and interested to have been forwarded this piece from a reader of the JFP. How dire is the market for newspapers these days? According to this OpinionJournal piece, they might want to think about going non-profit.

Not-for-profit status might be one possibility. Instead of having billionaire moguls as proprietors, we could try to turn them into philanthropists who found nonprofit organizations to buy and operate their local papers. At least one such example exists: the St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Foundation as a result of a bequest by Nelson Poynter.

Ironically, one of the big worries for alternative newsweeklies is the rush of advertising that, at least in some markets, seems headed for the Internet. Still the weekly model is insulated somewhat from the onslaught of the Internet, since the reasons for picking up weeklies is different from the reason for subscribing to dailies, and those reasons seem to be trending toward flat to up in many markets. Narrative news, second-day stories and entertainment listings are still handy in print format.

The ultimately goal, though, is to have a piece of the Internet pie, and have that piece focus on the local. With large newspaper powerhouses (like the Gannett/USA Today paper in our market) cutting staff and throwing cub reporters into the fray, it creates a vacuum for some entity to fill — often the alt-weekly or a similar publication — by throwing some quality reporting and analysis at key stories that are of interest to a locale and to a younger demographic. That’s the hope, anyway…for us, in Jackson, it’s proven out.

That, and…of course…a solid Internet strategy.