Over the past decade the single-subject news model has risen in prestige and legitimacy within the media establishment. A recent crowning moment was the awarding of a 2013 Pulitzer Prize to InsideClimate News, a single- subject website covering environmental issues. With a combination of consistent investigative reporting and scientific expertise, its journalists covered a previously underreported ecological disaster on the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in a report that revealed the pervasive weakness of pipelines carrying heavy oil products into the United States. The success of InsideClimate News represents the peak upside of singlesubject news outlets. The potential benefits are high: single-subject websites can dramatically raise the supply of high-quality journalism, covering complex and chronic issues that are widely neglected in mainstream media. To the publisher, the niche news model represents an unprecedented opportunity to serve a hyper-focused audience, capturing the market and building a community among return users. To the beat reporter, niche news outlets can represent a return to public service journalism, fact-based and in-depth work of the highest caliber. In short, the sites provide an opportunity for focus in an age where mainstream newsrooms can seldom afford the luxury of consistently covering a niche issue.
But there are also downsides and difficulties buried within the trend. Even with a lower cost base, startup news outlets struggle with the financial viability of digital news. Outside of foundation funding, consistent revenue streams are hard to find, although some of our participants have taken innovative steps toward business development. With business models themselves in a state of creative flux, the boundaries for ethical fundraising are being tested as publishers look to uphold objective and neutral journalism. In the interim, many single-subject news operations are being sustained and self-financed by a passionate founding team and often a dedicated corps of volunteers—an admirable but rarely sustainable underpinning. There are potential pitfalls implicit in this media fragmentation. The credibility of any given news report has always rested on a two-part formula: the credibility of the journalist, as well as that of the news outlet. In the emerging single-subject model, startup outlets lack the institutional guarantee and practical spot check that a major media outlet provides. Consistency and continuity are less assured as news startups build sustainable financing from scratch. For some publishers there may be less of an incentive to maintain neutrality, as niche news sites can find support among an impassioned and often opinionated audience bound by groupthink toward a particular agenda. The counterpoint to that downside risk has been brand building at the startup level, as seen in the earned credibility of digital publications like SCOTUSblog and Homicide Watch, which later evolved into sister sites Homicide Watch Chicago and Homicide Watch Trenton. Since their earliest days, these online news outlets have made a significant contribution to the knowledge pool, adding heft to the media landscape within their topical
domains. Their success represents the gradual growing up of news startups. A previous Tow Center publication called it “the institutional rebirth”1 of the news industry, through mature digital news outlets. That leaves open a broader question of systemic risk to the media ecosystem. If the in-depth reporting of whole topics is left to individual news sites, then the media system becomes more reliant on those niche providers. The mainstream press may functionally outsource whole topics to niche providers outside the boundaries of their oversight and accountability. The system would then narrow its supply chain and limit its ability to cross-check information; as a result it would become more difficult to discern whether that niche outlet, and by extension the system at large, is providing complete and unbiased coverage of an issue. We do not yet see this taking place, but we do see manifestations of the sequence at an early stage, as single-subject websites become the go-to source for a multitude of bigger news outlets borrowing their coverage. For all those reasons—for their upside potential and downside risk—single- subject news websites are a critical field of study. These startup outlets will proliferate and pepper the media landscape. They are already reshaping the information ecosystem, adding depth and addressing the deficits in the mainstream media market. They need to be well understood and placed within the universe of journalism as they become a norm in the digital age. 1 C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky. Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present (Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University, 2012): p. 46.