John Solomon had grand plans for the digital future of the Center for Public Integrity. But there was always a catch…
And dozens of new organizations have begun moving in on the Center’s turf. (In fact, since 2004, the number of nonprofit investigative newsrooms climbed from four to roughly 30.) Among them was ProPublica, which launched in 2008 and quickly leaped over the Center to become the nation’s top nonprofit investigative outfit.
.. The report urged the Center to diversify its funding sources, up its digital game, and extend its reach by finding more attention-grabbing stories.
.. First, instead of publishing a few dozen stories a year, the Center would transform itself into a destination news site, which reportedly would publish between 10 and 20 original stories each day. This was expected to create a surge in Web traffic, which the organization would parlay into a bounty of advertising. According to internal Center documents, the organization aimed to sell $635,000 in advertising (the Center called it “underwriting”) by year two.
.. The idea was to offer access to this platform as a premium for an NPR-style membership. In the first year alone, the Center projected it would sell 50,000 memberships at $50 a piece, for a total of $2.5 million—a bold target, given that the largest membership-based news organization, Minnesota Public Radio, has only about 127,000 members, a base it took MPR decades to build.
.. Kaplan says he worried that embracing what he called “Solomon’s dubious revenue-generating schemes” would tip the organization back into financial chaos, and that the demands of churning out multiple stories each day would make it all but impossible to do the kind of deep reporting the Center was founded to do—a grave loss to journalism as a whole.
.. Arianna Huffington says the $2 million figure was aspirational rather than a firm target, and never part of the formal merger agreement. As for traffic, she says Huffington Post only agreed to use “commercially reasonable efforts to cause at least 200,000 visits to the website per month
.. during Solomon’s tenure the site had been set to refresh every 5 minutes, which artificially inflated pageview numbers. When the refresh feature was rolled back, traffic dropped.
How (Not) to Pitch
This Slate piece giving advice to entry-level job applicants in journalism about how to get their cover letters noticed made me think I ought to share a similar advice piece for new freelancers I put together for a women in media list-serv I’m on, inspired by the frequent and unnecessarily life-complicating errors of form I’d seen come in over the transom over the years, and some frequently asked questions about what can be an opaque process to newbies. Here are some basic rules to live by for people on the outside looking in.
Try to Interview Google’s Co-Founder. It’s Emasculating.
In public comments, Mr. Page goes out of his way to say the opposite, describing Google more in terms of a nonprofit than a gigantic corporation. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, he said he wished there were a vehicle for people to donate money to their company so that it could be used for projects that had some kind of social purpose.
How to Cover the One Percent: Web Reporting
When donors approach a nonprofit, “they’re more likely to say not ‘How can I help you?’ but ‘Here’s my agenda,’” Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, told me. Mainstream news organizations haven’t caught on to this new activism, he said, adding that most of them are into covering “the ‘giving pledge,’” by which the rich commit to giving away at least half their wealth in their lifetime. David Callahan, the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a website that tracks this world, says that “philanthropy is having as much influence as campaign contributions, but campaign contributions get all the attention. The imbalance is stunning to me.”
.. As John Cassidy observed in The New Yorker, “The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate.”.. As a number of the above examples suggest, much of today’s philanthropy is aimed at “intellectual capture”—at winning the public over to a particular ideology or viewpoint. In addition to foundations, the ultrarich are working through advocacy groups, research institutes, paid spokesmen, and—perhaps most significant of all—think tanks. These once-staid organizations have become pivotal battlegrounds in the war of ideas, and moneyed interests are increasingly trying to shape their research.. Naked Capitalism, an influential financial blog, recently ran a long post about how private equity companies “are far more obviously connected to an undue concentration of wealth at the expense of workers and communities” than are CDOs (collaterized debt obligations) and the other finance instruments that once drew such attention... as Susanne Craig reported in the Times in 2012, the company has exerted “enormous influence as a behind-the-scenes adviser to troubled governments” in places like Greece and Ireland. When seeking to analyze the health of a bank, the US Treasury Department often turns to BlackRock, leading a senior bank executive to call it (in an article in Vanity Fair) “the Blackwater of finance, almost a shadow government.”.. They described how in the spring of 2012 Google—facing possible legal action by theFTC over the dominance of its search engine—played a behind-the-scenes part in organizing a conference at George Mason University, to which it is a large contributor. It made sure that the program was heavily weighted with speakers sympathetic to Google and, according to the Post, it arranged for many FTC economists and lawyers to hear them. In the end, the commission decided against taking legal action. Just why could be a good subject for inquiry. Today, Google is working hard to protect its right to collect consumer data and to that end has sought the support of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation. The type of string-pulling described by the Post goes on routinely and deserves more routine coverage... As a 2014 Oxfam briefing paper explained, most of Slim’s wealth derives from his having gained near- monopolistic control of Mexico’s telecommunications sector when it was privatized twenty years ago... Earlier this year, Slim more than doubled the number of shares he owns in The New York Times Company (to nearly 17 percent), making him its largest individual shareholder (though the Sulzbergers retain control). It’s interesting to note that Slim rarely appears in the paper’s news pages. On the surface, this seems a glaring conflict of interest.