Nonprofit News
Nonprofit news used to mean The Associated Press and NPR. Both are clearly news organizations, but they don’t rely on advertisers for funding. Today, we’re seeing a new crop of digitally native journalism sites funded by philanthropy and operating as nonprofits. Some are simply using a new funding source to produce traditional journalism. Others are using foundation funding to produce or bankroll reporting with a strong point of view, often focused on a specific premise–like the Marshall Project’s assertion that the U.S. justice system is broken and needs fixing or FirstLook’s commitment to exposing violations of privacy and civil liberties carried out in the name of national security. It’s a digital expression of an old-fashioned, muckraking tradition and “a huge change for the better for people who want to go deeper,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.
Paralleling the creation of some point-of-view news enterprises is the growth of communications efforts by advocacy organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, where I have worked since 2008. As traditional newsrooms have closed or reduced their foreign news operations, many of their journalists have moved to fulltime jobs with advocacy groups tackling international issues. These are the same groups that once depended on mainstream media to get their research out to a wide audience. They still pursue coverage in local newspapers and radio, on cable news shows, or placement of a timely op-ed in the Washington Post. But their in-house communications departments are now likely to have staff capable of producing their own multimedia packages, which may reach audiences first via the organization’s own website or through YouTube.
In the week before the start of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, for example, Human Rights Watch released a video about Russian vigilante groups attacking gay men.143News outlets picked up the story, and Reddit and Buzzworthy helped the video reach three and a half-million views in a little over two weeks.144
Some of the communications staff at Human Rights Watch who work on stories like these are veterans of the news and documentary world. So are some of the researchers in the field, like Letta Tayler, senior researcher for terrorism/counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch and a former foreign correspondent for Newsday.
As a journalist, Tayler covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and detainees at Guantanamo Bay, among other post-9/145 stories. Her focus at Human Rights Watch is on human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of counterterrorism. She researches and writes detailed, heavily documented reports like “Unpunished Massacre: Yemen’s Failed Response to the ‘Friday of Dignity’ Killings,” which calls for, among other actions, international sanctions on Yemeni officials deemed responsible for the killings of anti-government protestors during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.146 The same research is often the basis for shorter pieces, without the calls to action, which Tayler writes for Salon, Foreign Policy, Global Post, and others. “We’re becoming a little more like journalists, and journalists are becoming a bit more like us,” said Emma Daly, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times who is now communications director at Human Rights Watch. “We try to use journalistic techniques. Journalists use nonprofits for funding, and even for specialized reporting.”