BackIs there room for non-profit media?
India has not developed a tradition as yet of not-for-profit journalism, as a viable option to the for-profit media business
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Two recent developments at The New York Times (NYT) and Time Inc., which publishes Time magazine, underscore the fact that financing has become and will remain the number one issue affecting the future of journalism as we know it. Even as the shift to digital formats continues to be a priority for old, established news organizations, paid news is migrating to digital journalism. Reporting on itself, NYT said in an article on 31 December 2013 that in the new year the paper planned several initiatives including the use of native advertising, which is paid content.
And reporting on Time Inc., the magazine business of Time Warner, being spun off into a different company, nytimes.com said on 29 December that the new company would ask the newsroom staff at Time Inc.’s magazines to report to the business executives, to create revenue opportunities and stall declining subscription and advertising sales. The same article also talks of service journalism, which seems to be another name for news-you-can-use, doing brand promotions within editorial copy, in some of Time Inc.’s non-news magazines.
That Indian journalism is in a financial crisis is self-evident: Last year saw at least seven editors quit their publications for various reasons, or lose their jobs because their publications folded. At a conservative estimate some 700-plus journalists and media industry workers lost their jobs, including those retrenched from Tehelka when it was engulfed in a year-end crisis. At the end of the year the Chennai high court stayed the SRM Group from asking around 40 staffers hired for an English channel (which never began) to either accept pay cuts or leave.
We can either spend another year discovering how much the old model is disintegrating or we can explore alternatives. There are two issues here: the sustainable financing of news media, and the decline of journalism which serves the public interest, as quality newsgathering seems to become increasingly unaffordable. You only have to look at TV news channels today to see how reporting from the country’s hinterland has almost disappeared.
State-owned public service broadcaster Prasar Bharati, meanwhile, has fallen far short of providing either the kind of journalism or the entertainment that people in various income groups need.
In the West, not-for-profit journalism has become a solid, established tradition and newer ventures keep coming up. In the US, the UK and other European countries, where the majority population has its basics taken care of, philanthropy has the room to focus on public service information and investigative journalism. The Pew Research Center conducted research in 2012 on how the genre was faring. It concluded that non-profit journalism is a growing, but fragile part of the US news system.
They surveyed 172 non-profit digital news outlets, launched since 1987. Older ones such as NPR were not included. Their editorial focus ranged from investigative journalism to the coverage of health and environment. More than half of them (54%) however cited business, marketing and fund-raising as the greatest areas of staff need. Financing is always the number one issue, be it in commercial media ventures or non-profit ones.
India has not developed a tradition as yet of not-for-profit journalism, as a viable option to the for-profit media business. The motivation and funding for it is not there. The enabling tax laws are not there. Endowments are not common here, since there is no inheritance tax for the progeny of the wealthy. If any are created by India’s rich, they tend to be at the Ivy League institutions in the US.
A ProPublica was set up to do investigative reporting, financed majorly by philanthropy. But if we have the senior and middle level journalistic talent available to launch a ProPublica here, for example, who will take the lead and create a sustainable business plan for the venture? Do top level Indian journalists, used by now to rather fat salaries, have the initiative and drive to create public interest entrepreneurship?
More than half the US non-profits received foundation revenue which constituted more than half their total operating revenue. But foundation revenue for journalism in India scarcely exists, and foreign foundation funding is fraught with uncertainty. What then might the future look like for a growth in non-profit journalism here?
My own hunch is that a corpus approach is more sustainable than a seed grant approach where the seed may blossom, but long-term nurture in the form of sustained funding remains highly chancy thereafter. High networth individuals are increasingly willing to fund media ventures. A new law requiring companies to commit funds to corporate social responsibility also opens an avenue of opportunity for corpus financing.
Two long-established examples of newspapers run by non-for-profit trusts are the Chandigarh Tribune and the Janmabhoomi group of newspapers run by the Saurashtra Trust. While the Tribune is better known, the latter runs three newspapers, Janmabhoomi in Mumbai, Phoolchap in Rajkot and Kutchmitra in Bhuj. Visiting the last on the Western tip of the country, one found a 68-year-old daily newspaper that is perfectly viable and profitable enough to give all staff a 20% bonus every year. “We have a people-oriented editorial policy not driven primarily by circulation or advertising," says assistant editor Nikhil Pandya. “We don’t go in for schemes to enhance our circulation." Later entrants Divya Bhaskar and Gujarat Samachar have not been able to dislodge its supremacy.
Last month the Oorvani Foundation, a Bangalore-based non-profit trust, announced that it will “promote and develop deep-diving journalism on governance, citizenship and society in India at the city, state and national levels". That’s a first, and it is too early to know how it will fare. But the Centre for Science and Environment’s Down to Earth magazine, backed up by a research institution, has endured, and may be a good model to study.
Sevanti Ninan is a media critic, author and editor of the media watch websitethehoot.org. She examines the larger issues related to the media in a fortnightly column.
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