August 2020 – CGW's Blog

“Ability to deliver for clients” can’t be anathema for news organizations

Leading a small news organization puts me at an unusual crossroads: I’m as close to our sources as I am to our customers. In my experience, most of those interested in financially supporting Technical.ly know their stuff. Of course, there are exceptions, but on the whole, they’re better informed than average.

Yet I often encounter a default assumption among journalists: To demonstrate independence, many instinctively treat those who financially support their news organization worse than those who don’t. This creates perverse dynamics. I’ve had potential advertisers tell me they avoided sponsoring us because they feared their independent coverage would be perceived as bought-and-paid-for.

This is a dangerous place for news organizations. It’s a cultural tic that likely developed during an era when newsrooms operated as monopolies, flush with resources, and could afford to brush off financial supporters.

But that’s not where we are today, and it’s not where we should want to be.

I push my newsroom on this point: You don’t have to treat financial supporters better, but you certainly shouldn’t treat them worse. As a publisher with an entrepreneurial mindset, I see it as part of my role to find ways to acknowledge and thank those who support us. But I won’t force it.

What I will insist on is this: the “ability to deliver for clients” cannot be anathema for news organizations. If society equates a news organization leveraging its “halo effect” with content marketing, we’re missing the point.

Technical.ly’s reporting is guided by truth, not business objectives. That’s journalism. But attracting advertisers, sponsors, and investors whose goals align with ours isn’t a problem—it’s smart. The danger lies not in seeking aligned partners but in twisting journalistic goals to fit theirs.

Independence doesn’t require antagonism. It requires clarity of purpose.

Three emerging approaches to local journalism

It’s no longer quite right to say journalism as a whole is imperiled by the internet-age. In the last decade, powerhouse national outlets have made the business model leaps. Other important and influential national and global organizations gather and produce valuable information for the civic good. Their concerns are now with truth and partisanship and objectivity. These are heady issues but they’re not directly revenue problems.

This is different from publishers with a geographic focus; previous business models don’t comport simply with web-powered scale. Local journalism is very much in crisis. I know this personally and professionally, so I follow trends closely with an applied viewpoint

I’ve long thought that we at the news organization I cofounded a decade ago are something of an outlier, trying to approach local reporting through a for-profit, multi-local strategy. (I wrote here about why Technically Media is not a nonprofit). Recently though I’ve noticed that we may fit into one of three broad approaches I see tackling local news.

This is made clear by the strengthening of the country’s superstar national commercial journalism providers as the collapse of the dominant local forms continues apace. Web-powered scale has laid bare that national and local outlets are in entirely different categories.

There was a crowd of us, now we are almost none

From an eyewitness account of the Black Death of the 1340s:

“There was a crowd of us, now we are almost none. We should make new friends, but how, when the human race is almost wiped out; and why, when it looks to me as if the end of the world is at hand? Why pretend? We are alone indeed. You see how our great band of friends has dwindled. Look, even as we speak we too are slipping away, vanishing like shadows. One minute someone hears that another has gone, next he is following in his footsteps.”

[source; first spotted in this video at 33:42; not Agnolo di Tura]

(Photo by Mads Rasmussen via Unsplash)