Davis is CEO and executive director of the Investigative News Network (INN), a consortium of nonprofit public-interest and investigative news organizations.
Davis: The Investigative News Network was founded in 2009 as a nonprofit, but our objective is to look for the collective opportunities to support nonprofit, investigative and public-interest journalism because of the increasingly important role that it plays in a media ecosystem where commercial media has, for economical and other reasons, pulled back from fulfilling unique responsibilities at the state level. That is not to say, of course, that there’s not great investigative journalism and public interest information being produced by commercial media; there of course still is. But, particularly in areas outside of the coasts, at the state levels, around particular topics, there’s a vast wasteland, and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] identified in their report in 2011 that nonprofits have the potential of filling some of the gap in a collaborative, cooperative environment. INN was founded as an organization to help increase the chance of that happening.
When we started, we were 27 members strong, and we are now 100 members strong. If you look at the membership, our top 5 percent versus the rest of the members, there is a massive disparity in the amount of funding, the head count, and what they are producing versus the 95 percent below that. There are a number of factors there, not the least of which is that foundation money tends to go where foundation money has been, and it has been very hard to get seed, startup or bridge money for organizations.
When INN was started, a number of foundations were interested in funding these nonprofit experiments, but quickly, as foundations do (with no malice here), they move on. Knight has been instrumental, as well as others, in starting a lot of these outlets around the country but do not feel responsible for ensuring their long-term success and they feel “let the market decide.” INN is very much involved in helping what we feel are very important organizations, not only to stay in business but also to achieve their mission, [we’re helping] new organizations start up in an environment that is both tougher and easier. It’s tougher because there is less money to start up, but it’s easier because we now have great documentation about best practices.
There are a lot of tools through INN, like setting up a world-class WordPress website that is mobile-ready in about 24 hours for members. If you are a member, we also host for free. We have editorial collaboration. We also have preferred insurance rates for media insurance and other things. We do a lot of the back office and support. We are also doing a lot of training. This is my segue to your question.
We have a training program called the Community Journalism Executive Training Program. If you go to the website newstraining.org, you will see videos from the curriculum of CJET. The reason CJET exists is because so many of these nonprofits are being run, not just started but run, by people who have never touched a P&L [profit and loss statement] before—people who feel that math and economics would never be a part of their career because that’s why they became a journalist, who feel very comfortable doing journalism but extraordinarily uncomfortable in running and marketing their business. We have to do professional training for these folks that are learning on the job. When you are dealing with a weak sector with limited funding, it’s troubling and difficult when these folks feel very much like a fish out of water when it comes to the business side of things.
Meanwhile, the foundations are saying [the nonprofits] can’t just rely on the foundation money, but need memberships and another revenue strategy. Most of these organizations were never started with that in mind and are now having to retrofit that into their venture. I know there is a lot of interest in the term “entrepreneurial journalism,” and I know there are certain well-known educators who think that a nonprofit is abhorrent, but the truth is, that whether it’s a nonprofit organization, or a low-profit, mission-driven type of corporation, it’s highly likely that folks that are going to be graduating in 2020 will never work in a traditional news organization as we know it. It’s highly likely that they are going to want to be entrepreneurial or coached to be entrepreneurial, but they are not graduating with the right business skills. They are also at schools where things like self-promotion, activation and social media are considered to be, at best, a dilution of the purity of the journalism function. I spend a lot of time trying to break people of really bad thinking because it’s killing them. I know of no other medium—and I’ve worked in film and entertainment, home video, music, video games—and I don’t know of any other medium where so much work is put into producing a product or service without any understanding, guidance or money put toward the marketing, distribution or activation of that content. It’s just insane.
DL: You build it, and they will come.
Davis: The irony to me is that if a journalist writes a book, they have no trouble doing a book tour. They don’t do any tours around investigative projects, which can cost them as much time and effort, or more, as a book can. I think while it’s great that everyone is talking about the infusion of technology and programming into journalism schools and thinking, we have to get these people ready for the market. We have to get them excited and thinking innovatively and creatively about not just writing for an audience but cultivating an audience and having a different relationship with their readers and audience than they would have in a static, traditional media.
If there’s one thing I can bring to your conversation, it’s the need for cross-differential marketing and social skills and a cultural rejection of this notion that somehow it’s impure or dilutes the ethics of a journalist. I think it’s far less ethical to rely on so few funding sources in the long term than it is to be able to reach, cultivate and monetize an audience that appreciates and understands what you do for them.
DL: So most journalism students don’t realize that the metric of their success has to include eyeballs or community building.
Davis: It also needs to include business acumen. One has to look at the cost/benefit analysis of the project and what you hope to achieve. There needs to be a culture of metrics. One of the things we are doing at INN right now with Knight money is managing an innovations fund. Going up to $35,000 to give nonprofits some funding for business experimentation. I cannot tell you how many times we’ve had to explain what we mean by experiment. You have a problem, a hypothesis, a theory of the result, you do it, measure it, and then explain what happened. That is a very foreign concept for most journalists and that shocked me.
The problem is that a lot of this shows they can do investigative journalism outside of the big organizations. Very few of them realize that what they have been doing is starting a business. A lot of them say they are doing the journalism part for 50 hours a week and then raise money on the weekends and it’s very hard. Both are full-time jobs and you can’t do both well for very long. If you look at local, independent online news publishers, their attrition is very high because they are one- or two-person operations and if they get sick or go on vacation, the cycle is dark. I took journalism in school but I’m not a journalist or a publisher. I think my role is to teach people how to keep the lights on and achieve impact and cultivate audience and create a brand that people cherish and appreciate and want to support and see it reflective of their needs. Then we will have longevity and not depend on third parties like foundations or advertisers to subsidize this because we will have achieved impact on the very people we serve. It sounds idealistic.
When we think of journalism schools, and we’ve all run into this, but thinking about the traditional schools which may be more academic than they are practical, I think it’s almost a loaded term. Whether you call it a journalism school or a community information school, there is a need for professional, collected, curated presenters and frankly, organizers of the community, in order to make sure we are informing our citizenry.
This is another thing that investigative journalism overlooks. Being the disinfectant of society means that we need to produce people who know how to delve into very difficult things, collect information and then make it consumable by people who do not have the time or experience to do so. I believe we absolutely must not, out of fashion, throw the baby out with the bathwater. How to position it and where it goes and lives is less relevant to me because, frankly, I don’t have to worry about running a school. I think schools must continue to produce the professional class of information producers, aggregators and sort of visualizers. In college, I did a communications studies major, which was a combination of journalism, radio, TV and film journalism theory. That has helped me tremendously in my career. I think that it’s highly applicable, but I think when people think of J-schools, they think of institutions that are churning out people who are being taught by people who aren’t reflecting the reality of the market today. It’s an increasingly globalized world. [Journalism] involves community organizing, activation, reflection, engagement, social, business acumen, technology skills. We are talking about creating content-centric digital entrepreneurs and people who work in places that entrepreneurs create. I think it would be a travesty if we were to run away from that. That said, I also think that this may not be the place for the academics, the people that are more interested in analyzing the subscription habits for one culture over forty years, which I think is interesting and needed, but I don’t think that’s what we are talking about here necessarily.
DL: There are certainly research institutions where the faculty spend their time analyzing subscription habits, but what I hear is that you don’t think that is the purpose of a journalism school.
Davis: Certainly not the sole purpose. Schools may say they are only focused on certain aspects of it and that’s certainly legitimate. I’ve guest lectured at a number of schools like Berkeley, LSU, and Columbia. I went into a level-one class at LSU and there were 600 people in the room. That was a class about news literacy. We teach civics in high school still but we don’t teach news literacy. We don’t talk about how journalism fits into the American culture very well; in my opinion, every college student should be made to go through an information and news literacy class. There isn’t much difference between Googling something and going to the NYT website. You’re going to find the information in different ways but people need to be asking questions like ‘what is the source? What’s the agenda here?’ How do we educate our citizens so they are active in getting more than one opinion of something and not just sitting in front of the cable TV and getting spoonfed the stuff they want to see? If you look at hackers and how that’s been adopted as this cross-disciplinary but very important layer of cultivating new thinking about specific cultural problems, we’re in that game.
DL: What does that mean?
Davis: The way I look at our job now, is to not look behind us or look at particular media, but how do we come up with mashup-type ideas to address societal problems and get information to people so they can be informed and active citizens.
The problem I also find is that there’s an economic incentive for people to get through class and majors as quickly as possible. Unless your major requires you to take specific courses, you aren’t going to take them….I think a curriculum that is looking at how business issues are addressed in media is a very different thing than going to a standard entrepreneurial class where you come up with an idea and market it. Why would you do that? You are better off making things and sending them to Google.
As we shape the information systems for the next hundred years, in my opinion, it’s unlikely that we will see anything or anybody that is supposed to be a publicly traded conglomerate media organization. It’s more likely that we will have news coming as a tangent out of something that is intended to do something totally different, like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. I have a kid who is twelve and eleven, and YouTube is by far their number one source of news.
Take [Jeff] Bezos, as one example. He wants to make The [Washington] Post an intellectual challenge, but his big one is to make Amazon the biggest company in the world. He didn’t sell Amazon to focus on The Post. The Postis a side project. That’s the fundamental difference between the oligopolistic owners today and the puritans before, where they did this to make money and have power. I think folks like Craig [Newmark] from Craigslist are motivated by keeping something going they think is important. I don’t hear anyone really focused on hard news as an angle. I think the closest thing right now is BuzzFeed. What they have done is taken what they’ve learned from the viral things they have produced to use that knowledge and funding to subsidize real, hard news. I think that’s a good model. Regardless, we are going to fill the information gap. We need a lot more content and information entrepreneurs. They tend to be the ones that start things so that the Bezos and others can buy them and fund them.
One of the ideas that I’ve had for a while, and I’m not the only one, is what can we do to with a model like Peace Corps where we pay for their J-school, and provide them with websites and business training, and in return they agree to go into market for the underserved and inform the communities. For me, there’s real promise there. A few of the big philanthropists could easily make that happen and I think we could come up with a business model to wean them off that money. Even with my membership, if only The Texas Tribune, CPI, ProPublica, CIR, etc., survive, we don’t have the nonprofit news movement. There are too many massive new centers out there that need to be filled that can’t be filled by just a handful of these nonprofits; they will become a layer.
DL: How does the universe of media nonprofits news organizations work, as a new layer across or under the traditional for-profit model, when there’s not enough of them?
Davis: We have 100 members; I think Pew identified 182. I get calls every week from people interested in doing them in their neighborhood. There are not enough of them now but there is keen interest if they can make a living doing this. This is where it doesn’t fit very well with the IRS traditions they want to see fostered, which is charities where most of the work is done by volunteers, most of the money comes from charitable donations, earned revenue is completely deemphasized, and that is at odds with what foundations want. The nonprofit-ness of this is also an artifact of the tax code rather than a reflection of what we are talking about here, which is an organization driven by its value to the community rather than its value to shareholders. Those audiences can be vertical, geographic, subcultures, ethnic or anything else. They can be sliced and diced many ways.
DL: I think the nonprofit model provides a living for the people doing the work, does it not?
Davis: It does if they execute well and they’ve done their homework. I’m going to put a giant asterisk there, and I’ll come back to it. What we’re finding out is that there are some revenue streams. The days of advertising giving you 90 percent of the revenue and subscriptions giving you 10 percent of the revenue and the journalist not needing to worry about that side of the house are gone. What we are seeing now is a lot more revenue diversification; people pick up as many grants as they can. They are looking at earned revenue, which is very difficult.
As Clay Shirky has said, newspapers had the time, resources and the motivation to reinvent themselves and didn’t. To think that nonprofits that are grossly underfunded can outthink newspapers is preposterous. The earned revenue piece of it can be a red herring and a nice thing to have, but I think the foundations have made an error on focusing on it too much. I think the promise is being able to modify the audiences you serve. That’s subscription, membership, application, events, tickets, directories and all sorts of things.
The asterisk, by the way, and no one is talking about this and it’s a problem, is that effectively, foundations are saying you need to replace our money and we think it’s going to be market driven. Where the philanthropy will continue to be needed will be the information being delivered to communities that do not have the wherewithal to support their news and information. They’re often the ones that need the most information. We’re talking about people of color, people in rural areas, no internet connections or smart phones. These are the people that are most often victims of abuse but have the least access to news and information in our society.
I’m not going to say what foundation, but one of my members is in New Orleans, The Lens. If there’s one American city, besides Detroit, that we could point to that absolutely needs more information, as a city that has a long history of poverty and all sorts of horrible things, it’s New Orleans. The Lens lost two major funders in one month, basically one-third to one-half of their total operating budget. The foundation said they had given them all they were going to give them and said if the market says you are going to die, then there’s nothing we can do about it. I think that’s criminal. Some markets are going to need support.
I think of consortiums and what I modeled my organization on, one being the NBA. The NBA works because teams in lucrative markets subsidize the teams in less lucrative markets. We don’t do anything like that. We have some issues but getting back to the J-school question, the only way we are going to figure this out on the long-term is graduating more information and news entrepreneurs and people who aren’t afraid to do the 360 functions required to achieve impact.
DL: And you would do that by creating a journalism school environment taught by professionals rather than researchers? If you could start one from scratch, who would be in it?
Davis: I think it needs to be cross-discipline. I think you need people who are entrepreneurial in spirit who are already journalists and are digital-centric. You need people from social sciences, computer sciences, business schools, tech schools and make sure we are graduating people with a good grounding in multidisciplinary skill sets. Even if they aren’t doing it all themselves, at least they know what they are looking for in the people who would do this for them.
DL: There’s a school that has now decided that they have four required courses and then the students choose the other classes because the faculty don’t know.
Davis: I still think we need to give structure to the students. I spent a little time working with a university in Belgium, at least a company that came out of it. Unlike here, some European schools own the IP and they incubate companies from students. I think that’s an amazing model. If the student comes up with an idea, they help fund them and staff them, and then if they are successful, then the school owns a piece of the IP.
DL: One of the things that someone suggested was an accelerator model at least for one year. You would bring the students in and they would operate, surrounded by professionals, to develop whatever that project may be. They would be surrounded by people who are current and relevant while doing the work. That’s what I hear you saying.
Davis: That’s exactly what I’m saying. I also think we need to acknowledge that not everyone wants to run a company. Some people want to learn skills so they can work at a company, collect a paycheck, bring up a family and not work 100 hours a week. I still think the cross-disciplinary thing works because if we are talking about graduating data journalists or social media journalists, there is some proficiency that I think degrees should be formed around. There’s no doubt in my mind that in the next 15 years, media will look different from what we have now, but we are still being culturally bound by the newspaper gestalt. The TV/news model doesn’t translate to digital. We haven’t even touched upon the integration of journalism in film, or what we know as documentaries. Documentaries are now becoming more multimedia and looking more like long-form journalism. I do think it’s a multidisciplinary model but with specialization that’s required.
I’m not coming at this to try to figure out what is going to be the next Facebook or Twitter. I’m trying to figure out how to keep our people free. How do we have thousands of entities that are entwined miles deep serving very specific audiences in ways that create a patchwork that people can delve into at their level of interest? I want to see less consolidation around a few brands and a lot more highly valued local brands as well as national brands. What we are seeing in government in the move toward decentralization and personal liberty is also being affected at the community level, but because our industry is in such turmoil, we are looking at scale and what’s happening is we are going in the direction opposite from where the culture is going. It’s only going to accelerate its demise. There’s a reason CNN is not doing well. It’s trying to take the middle of the road, this-could-work-for-anyone kind of approach, and people aren’t tuning in.