Latest / Journalism 2050 / Nonprofit news outlets have proliferated, but it's too soon to dismiss profitable models for journalism

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Nonprofit news outlets have proliferated, but it's too soon to dismiss profitable models for journalism · Journalism 2050

0:08
SPEAKER_03: Hello, I'm Emily Bell, Director of the Tau Centre for Digital Journalism.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: And I'm Heather Chaplin, founding director of journalism and design at the New School.
0:18
SPEAKER_03: And this is Journalism 2050, the podcast where we look to the far future of journalism.
0:23
SPEAKER_03: That's 25 years from now.
0:25
SPEAKER_03: 24 years from now.
0:28
SPEAKER_03: And we also look a little bit at the present and the past of journalism to try and find out where we are, uh, where we're going, and how we got there, what we should do next.
0:38
SPEAKER_03: And this week I'm very excited to introduce our two guests who are again in keeping with the theme of the show, Transatlantic.
0:46
SPEAKER_03: We have Yoshi Herman, who is the founder of Mill Media in Manchester in England.
0:51
SPEAKER_03: Welcome, Yoshi.
0:52
SPEAKER_03: Hi Emily, thanks for having me, guys.
0:54
SPEAKER_03: And we have Varnen Murrageon.
0:57
SPEAKER_03: Did I get that right, Varnen?
0:59
SPEAKER_04: Not meaning you get that right, you got it perfect.
1:02
SPEAKER_03: Oh, thank you.
1:03
SPEAKER_03: We have uh Varnen Murrageon, who is the executive director of the Sarhan Journal, which has been very much in the news because it is a non-profit operating out of Minneapolis, uh, where I'm sure that wherever you are in the world, you have been following what's been happening in the city, and we're going to get into that uh in a minute.
1:24
SPEAKER_03: Um, the subject today is profit versus non-profit.
1:28
SPEAKER_03: Um, this was a subject that actually Yoshi and I fell into an argument about in a weird country house before Christmas, which makes us both sound more glamorous than we actually are.
1:40
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and we had such an intense debate that we said, let's take this to put to a podcast.
1:47
SPEAKER_03: Um but there's a lot to unpack here because it is about what is good for journalism going forward.
1:54
SPEAKER_03: How do we maintain resilience and how do we maintain independence in really challenging times?
2:01
SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna hand over to Heather because this is something you're thinking about a lot as well at the New School.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean it's interesting because anybody who's been following the future of journalism for the last 20 years that it's that it's been going on has seen this rise of nonprofit newsrooms in the US.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: And it's often presented as the bright spots, is like, oh, everything's going to hell.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: But listen, there's this great nonprofit that started here that's doing this, or there's nonprofit here that's starting doing that.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: And Emily and I have talked about how it can often be hard to discern the sustainability of them, to use that horrible philanthropy word.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: Are they gonna last?
2:44
SPEAKER_00: Are they having impact?
2:46
SPEAKER_00: How do you even measure these things at that scale?
2:48
SPEAKER_00: So we thought it would be interesting to bring in people both who are working on the nonprofit and the for-profit in the sort of next generation of local news and try to see what's going on and what are some different ways that we can move forward making sure that there is local news in the future.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Vonen, I would love to start with you because you, man, you have no excuse.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: You are you are not a journalist.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: What the hell were you thinking getting into journalism at this time?
3:17
SPEAKER_00: You're an engineer.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: You could be off somewhere living large, making money.
3:20
SPEAKER_04: It's a great industry.
3:23
SPEAKER_04: Let's call it that way.
3:24
SPEAKER_04: Um, thanks for the question, Heather.
3:26
SPEAKER_04: Yes, I am an engineer.
3:27
SPEAKER_04: Um, I am a naturally speaking, uh, I'm inherently interested in business models of different types of industries.
3:34
SPEAKER_04: I've just uh been fascinated with that.
3:36
SPEAKER_04: Um, even though when I was uh since I was a kid, since I was an engineer.
3:41
SPEAKER_04: Um the reason why I fell into this work is it marries two things.
3:46
SPEAKER_04: Um A, I believe journalism um is public good.
3:52
SPEAKER_04: The industry, the work that it does, done when it's done well, serves the better interest for public.
3:59
SPEAKER_04: And that means something a lot to me.
4:00
SPEAKER_04: I think a lot of journalists can it resonates a lot with journalists.
4:03
SPEAKER_04: I'm interested to see if I can correct the code on how to make this work from a business perspective.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm an engineer, but I also have somebody thinking about that.
4:13
SPEAKER_04: Um no, I would say everyone's thinking about it, and so I so I don't want to take too much credit on that.
4:18
SPEAKER_04: I did also have an uh complete an MBA, and so that just all those all those um experiences allowed me to say, hey, why don't we figure out how to make it work for Sahan?
4:31
SPEAKER_00: So on a more serious note, we do want you to be talking about the the business model and and how you're cracking the code, but you also are in Minneapolis covering an immigrant community that our president has described as garbage.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: Um so can you tell us a little bit what it's like right now, and then maybe we can segue into what that has to do with cracking the business model?
4:54
SPEAKER_04: The the skirmishes, the intensity, the fights, they happen in pockets, certain parts of the neighborhood.
5:01
SPEAKER_04: Um it's very possible if you visit the city and you turn off the news and have no social media, nothing, you will not know nothing any if there's anything's going on.
5:12
SPEAKER_04: You could kind of live your life like that.
5:15
SPEAKER_04: Um but if you travel into certain neighborhoods, it gets really intense and there's a lot of the protests.
5:24
SPEAKER_04: We do have large protests actually during the weekends, you know, over highways and whatnot.
5:29
SPEAKER_04: But surprise surprisingly, we've had visitors that come from out of state and they're like, Oh wow, I was like, there's nothing going on here, you know.
5:37
SPEAKER_04: Now I should check that is granted it's been de-escalated these past few days, so let's keep that.
5:43
SPEAKER_04: Let's I think we should have that as context as well.
5:46
SPEAKER_04: So um from people's day-to-day lives, that's you can feel it from an impact perspective.
5:53
SPEAKER_04: In in in small, in meaningful ways, significant ways, in small peculiar ways.
5:58
SPEAKER_04: Small peculiar is I would say restaurants are half-staffed, restaurants are also uh going businesses is going down.
6:07
SPEAKER_04: Uh, we had we were trying to order lunch for our entire team.
6:11
SPEAKER_04: We had Block Club Chicago uh reached out to us.
6:14
SPEAKER_04: Our friends from Chicago say, hey, you guys are going through a hard time, what can we do for you?
6:18
SPEAKER_04: We're like, hey, buy us lunch.
6:19
SPEAKER_04: They're like, fantastic.
6:21
SPEAKER_04: It was challenging to find a restaurant that could cater for 23 people at that time uh for lunch because there were a lot of restaurants that were you know half-staffed and maybe closed at times.
6:32
SPEAKER_04: Schools are closed.
6:34
SPEAKER_04: Um if schools feel threatened that ICE agents are around, and this this does happen, this is happening.
6:40
SPEAKER_04: Um, schools will just close and they'll make an announcement that we are just going to do online or we're offer offering online options.
6:47
SPEAKER_04: So um those are small things that happen but have real impact on day-to-day lives.
6:54
SPEAKER_04: If you're a parent, if you are a student, right?
6:57
SPEAKER_04: Um we are seeing people concerned about going to hospitals or clinics because of concerns of being um arrested there.
7:07
SPEAKER_04: I think the saddest thing is the the part about people who don't visit food shelves, if you're already right, um needing support and help and you're not afraid to do that.
7:19
SPEAKER_03: How do those two things fit together?
7:21
SPEAKER_03: So, in other words, how does a community which has completely changed how it functions together, particularly in terms of how it witnesses and records and documents things?
7:34
SPEAKER_03: Um, and you're journalists who are on the ground doing the same thing, but in a very different scale and presumably working with I just think that this is so interesting.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: That's such a good question, and so near my heart in terms of how do the sort of community networks plug into a newsroom in moments of crisis.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: But I I almost wonder can we first just lay out on a more basic level how is the newsroom responding to this moment?
8:05
SPEAKER_04: So I'll uh I'll start by explaining what Sahan Journal does.
8:08
SPEAKER_04: We are a nonprofit newsroom.
8:09
SPEAKER_04: So Sahan Journal is a nonprofit newsroom serving immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota.
8:15
SPEAKER_04: Uh we produce trusted, accessible journalism that helps people understand how policy, power, public systems can affect their daily lives.
8:24
SPEAKER_04: Um our reporting is grounded in lived experiences.
8:28
SPEAKER_04: Um our staff um represent the future generation of Minnesota, so it's a very diverse staff.
8:34
SPEAKER_04: That's this that's this stick that journalism gets beaten often, that is very old and white and male, and we are young and not as white and not as maleish.
8:44
SPEAKER_04: Um and so, but that's part of that's who we are.
8:47
SPEAKER_04: We represent uh the newsroom reflects and represents the future of Minnesotans.
8:53
SPEAKER_04: So that in a nutshell is Sahan Journal.
8:56
SPEAKER_04: And let me talk a little bit about what Sahana Journal, how we are experiencing this past five-six weeks.
9:03
SPEAKER_04: It's a few things.
9:05
SPEAKER_04: A I can totally empathize, not empathize, I understand my stuff.
9:12
SPEAKER_04: The moment is probably the reason why they joined Sahan in the first place.
9:17
SPEAKER_04: If there was any movie background, Hans Zimmerman score of someone like rising to the challenge, this is it for someone for a reporter who's joining Sahan.
9:28
SPEAKER_04: Like you can do good reporting anywhere, right?
9:30
SPEAKER_04: Oh, and Minnesota is blessed with um several good publications and news media outlets, several, but ours is the only one that's 100% dedicated to issues impacting communities of color and immigrants, and you join Sahan because of that.
9:44
SPEAKER_04: And so I as an executive director, as the leader of the organization, uh I'm very, very blessed that I have uh staff that that that are rising and calling to the moment.
9:56
SPEAKER_04: My issue is and they're running on adrenaline.
9:59
SPEAKER_04: You know, they are we produce they are producing three times the normal amount.
10:04
SPEAKER_04: We produce anywhere between 10 to 12 a week content.
10:08
SPEAKER_04: We are close to 30 a week for the past four or five weeks.
10:11
SPEAKER_04: And I do not know any occupation that can survive doing three times as much um without doing burnout, right?
10:19
SPEAKER_04: And they are also not covering restaurant openings or how to make your garden prettier, they are covering pretty hard stuff.
10:28
SPEAKER_04: The reporters come from the community, and so there are some there's an added layer of complexity and nuance when it comes to that thing, right?
10:36
SPEAKER_04: It's like I I I described it in a post I made a while back.
10:39
SPEAKER_04: It's like a surgeon really good at your job, but now you have to operate on your father.
10:43
SPEAKER_04: Now that will never happen, but you have to operate on your father, right?
10:47
SPEAKER_04: Or reporter talking about a crime scene or a murder scene, and it's on the street where the reporter learned how to ride a bike.
10:53
SPEAKER_04: So it's never, it's never it's never just doing your job.
10:56
SPEAKER_04: There's this added layer of emotions that they're bringing to the job, right?
11:02
SPEAKER_04: And so it's aware it I I can tell and we've anticipated that it will wear heavily on the and stuff, you know.
11:12
SPEAKER_04: And we've talked a little bit, we can talk a little bit about some of the mental health wellness programs that we've we have uh instituted since then.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And and are there ways in which the reporting is being directly affected by the business model, since that is sort of like would you be handling any of this different if you were a for-profit organization?
11:33
SPEAKER_04: No, no.
11:35
SPEAKER_04: Here this Minneapolis is an example of when journalists journalism.
11:42
SPEAKER_04: Journalism is just rising to the moment.
11:45
SPEAKER_04: They are rising to the moment.
11:46
SPEAKER_04: Journalism, um, and we're going to go a little bit into how they are working with community members, but whether you're for-profit, whether you're local, I mean Al Jazeera, Guardian, and BBC are in Minneapolis.
11:59
SPEAKER_04: Like, this is a uh it's an unusual moment.
12:03
SPEAKER_04: It's George Floyd all over again, right?
12:06
SPEAKER_04: And some of the strongest and best news coverage is happening right now, regardless of your profit, uh stat uh your you know your tax status or or frankly the size of your newsroom.
12:21
SPEAKER_04: Uh from from the the the network.
12:24
SPEAKER_04: You you asked uh Emily was asking a question about how all these individual networks have been springing up the support at the moment, right?
12:31
SPEAKER_04: Um we I journalists have been leaning on the information from them to understand where eyes have been, you know, maybe showing up, what kind of support are there stories to be told.
12:46
SPEAKER_04: I think there's a there is a caution there that we we don't want to be part of exposing them, and frankly, we are not in it's not like we are members of those networks at itself, right?
12:59
SPEAKER_04: Uh we pick up a lot of stuff on social media, frankly, uh that will say, Oh, something's happening over here, and that's where we'll be, you know.
13:06
SPEAKER_04: So from a network perspective, um I don't I I don't think I they've been as a big source of like news tips, but there's certainly a story, a story on their own.
13:19
SPEAKER_04: Now, um the the rise, the the dramatic rise of just everyone being a from uh photographer and a videographer right now.
13:28
SPEAKER_04: That's the that's the amazing piece here that it's happening, right?
13:32
SPEAKER_04: And I think wouldn't it be amazing if any of the atrocities that are happening around the world is captured that way.
13:43
SPEAKER_04: Um because we're what we're starting to see from our audience perspective, and I think you guys the the pretty beautiful shot that needs to be taken by your award-winning photojournalist.
13:54
SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, it's great, but it's not necessary.
13:58
SPEAKER_04: You literally sometimes you can use a a person uh the person with a shaky hand capturing an atrocity on the camera is the most impactful news, right?
14:07
SPEAKER_04: And and so what I'm seeing is that we are and when I say we, I don't think it's just a hand.
14:13
SPEAKER_04: I think a lot of the reporters out there from other outlets are doing the same thing that they're leaning on communities um coverage, coverage, I'm gonna say coverage, to form part of the news.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
14:26
SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, which is which has been a new, I think it's a new dynamic, really is a new dynamic.
14:32
SPEAKER_03: Just before I go to um Yoshi to talk about the for-profit model, um, because it I think these two things are going to relate, in terms of your independence and robustness and resilien and and sustainability, what kind of magnitude of um increase have you seen in your income?
14:51
SPEAKER_03: Because I would imagine that you have seen, and and where is that coming from?
14:55
SPEAKER_03: Is that is that local or is that inter is it is it international?
14:58
SPEAKER_03: Is it national?
14:59
SPEAKER_03: What's uh what's the story?
15:01
SPEAKER_04: Um yes, uh I I don't know how to see whether it's fortunately or unfortunately, but we are seeing a a rise in donations, we are seeing a rise in membership.
15:12
SPEAKER_04: Um I think I spoke this morning to my staff and she mentioned that we um our our numbers from new donations and members in this month alone covered uh last six months of last year.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
15:25
SPEAKER_04: Right.
15:25
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so the the the content has been strong, but the support has been strong uh from individual donors, members, and also from funders who who are who are you know who understand the the severity and the significance of the moment.
15:42
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna say it's a good segue to uh Yoshi who you founded Mill Media in 2020.
15:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:48
SPEAKER_03: Um and your I was quite taken aback actually by your fervence with when we were arguing about it lines.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: In the country house.
15:57
SPEAKER_03: In the country house.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: Country house dinner.
15:59
SPEAKER_03: I was gonna this is not gonna help our American um audience.
16:03
SPEAKER_03: Were you shooting pheasants in between?
16:05
SPEAKER_03: There was a bit of that, you know.
16:06
SPEAKER_03: There was a tiny bit of that pheasant sheep.
16:08
SPEAKER_03: We both had guns, certainly.
16:09
SPEAKER_03: There was some but I was quite taken aback, not not so much taken aback, but to me, tell me a little bit about why you set up Mill Media in the way that you did as a for-profit.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
16:20
SPEAKER_03: Uh because if you look at particularly the US market, you I think when the not in um the INN, which is the trade body for non-profit news, started, it was in 2009, which is actually not that long ago.
16:34
SPEAKER_03: And it had 27 outlets in it.
16:37
SPEAKER_03: Now it's got something like 430 something.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
16:41
SPEAKER_03: So it would feel as though you are maybe zagging when everybody else is zigging because the for-profit model has been actually under pressure and failing.
16:50
SPEAKER_03: So so tell me a little bit about why you approached MIL that way, what you do at MIL, and and why you think that uh profitability is a better path to independence and resilience.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, first of all, I just want to say how amazing it is that the work that you guys are doing, Vaughn, and how much respect we have for what your team's doing in incredibly difficult circumstances.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: Um When I started um this company, it it was a few years after I had gone to a newsgeist conference.
17:22
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember the Google used to have these big news Heathers' hands are in the air?
17:28
SPEAKER_03: We may have to invite you back onto our newsgeist group therapy uh podcast, which we will be doing at the end.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I won't get into it too much, but I think it was 2017.
17:38
SPEAKER_03: These are Google, these are Google News Initiative meetings.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: It was a big meetup, I think it was sponsored by the Google News Initiative and Night, and it was in um Phoenix, Arizona.
17:46
SPEAKER_01: I think it was 2017.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: And it was the first time I'd been to a media conference where local news was on the agenda, um, because I hadn't been to that many conferences by then.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: And I was incredibly struck by the sense that you got from the speakers and from the people who were asking questions.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: The overwhelming sense was that the market would not provide high-quality local journalism anymore.
18:10
SPEAKER_01: And if we wanted to have high-quality local journalism, it is going to have to be a philanthropically funded model.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: And I I went away from that thinking, okay, so things must be terrible.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, it it must be basically impossible to get the market and get people to pay for local journalism.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: And I think then when it came to me having a gap in my life, um, I my father had died not long before.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: I was kind of it was the pandemic, I was hoping to write a book.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, I was based in the Czech Republic trying to write a book about my family's sort of hot history in the Holocaust, and then the pandemic started, and I had a gap in my life.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: And that gap, I was I I just kind of came back to that news guys thing.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: I was thinking, are those people right?
18:49
SPEAKER_01: Like, is it true that people will not pay for local journalism anymore if you do it in the right way?
18:55
SPEAKER_01: Is it true that the only solution to this massive societal problem, arguably one of the great societal problems we have right now, the collapse of local news?
19:03
SPEAKER_01: Is it really true that the only way to tackle that is via enormous grants from philanthropic organisations created by billionaires in the 1920s or whatever?
19:12
SPEAKER_01: And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I don't think that can be right.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: I think there have to be 50,000 people in Manchester who pay for the FT or they pay for The Guardian, they pay for the Times, they pay for The Economist, they pay for the New York Times or The New Yorker.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: Why couldn't they pay for a local version of that?
19:28
SPEAKER_01: Something that's high quality, highly differentiated, gives them a point of view, um, gives them a sense of um journalism that is making an impact in their city.
19:39
SPEAKER_01: And so when I started the company, I mean it wasn't a company, it was me on my own.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: There was no company.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: I was writing one story a week via an email newsletter on Substack.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: I published one, two or three thousand word story a week.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: And because people responded so well to it, thousands of people joined up in the email list within the first couple of months, then hundreds of people started paying, then I hired my first employee, then I hired a second, etc.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: And now we're on 23 full-time journalists across the company.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: I think what it showed me as I went along is that there is much more of room to create market dynamic or market-led local journalism than people were giving credit for.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: Now, you use the word for-profit.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's slightly misleading in a world where you're never going to make huge profits in this.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: Right.
20:20
SPEAKER_03: Well, I was gonna ask you about that.
20:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, which is maybe we should define the term like for-profit.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, for-profit um sounds like a sort of enormous corporate giant's um creaming loads of extractive uh margin out of you know, that's not the case.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: But after five and a half years of doing this, if you take away the two newest launches we've just had in London and Glasgow because they're so new and we're obviously investing in those cities, all of the costs of our journalism and all of the costs of our operation are covered by income we get from readers.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: And those readers pay to get extra journalism every week, but they also effectively pay so that the whole city can have the benefit of high-quality journalism that it wouldn't get if they weren't paying.
21:00
SPEAKER_03: So is it free to the rest of the city?
21:02
SPEAKER_03: So it's a so that's I, you know, my background largely at the Guardian.
21:07
SPEAKER_03: Uh, we were told for the longest time by uh analysts and people like that that we didn't really have a proper business model because we had an endowment model that cross-subsidized the journalism.
21:20
SPEAKER_03: And yet the Guardian is actually pretty robust, and because it has this, but it but it's everything that comes into the company is put back into the journalism.
21:32
SPEAKER_03: You say it gives you the idea for profit of you being um, you know, when you say the mill owner, that's that's got very bad historical uh that's got very bad historical um uh resonance in Manchester.
21:47
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
21:47
SPEAKER_03: Uh but but you're not, you know, you're not sort of saying, well, um I need to buy my next uh lid.
21:53
SPEAKER_03: So uh I'm gonna make the prices up.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: What I'm saying what I'm saying is that, I mean, at the beginning of the conversation.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Heather referred to two things, impact and sustainability.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: I think it's absolutely been proven over this past 10-15 years in the US, where the huge focus has been on nonprofit news.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: I think it's clearly the case that these outlets can have tremendous impact.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: We've just heard a story of unbelievable impact, right?
22:18
SPEAKER_01: The second question is about sustainability.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: And what sustainability means is can you continue to have that impact in five years, ten years, twenty years, because you have created an operation where the income covers the cost of the journalism?
22:31
SPEAKER_01: And my answer to that would be that I think there are not many cases yet, either in the UK or the US, where philanthropic funding of non-profit local news outlets have created sustainable organizations that will be around here for many years to come that can be independent, that can be robust, that can be durable.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: And I saw a column in the New York Times recently, it was a few weeks ago, I think you sent it to me actually.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: And it was about the crisis that's happening in Pittsburgh at the moment.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: The Post Gazette in Pittsburgh is very sadly looks like it might be closed in May.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: That's one of the oldest newspapers in America.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: And in that article, um the woman who wrote it works for one of the big foundations.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: And she um she basically said there's a new business model for local news and it's non-profit.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: And to me, like that that's not a business model.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: Like philanthropic funding is a sort of injection of cash so that you can do something with it, but it's not an ongoing business model.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: So I went, I kind of like very quickly Googled, I think there were 12 different outlets that she'd mentioned in the article.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: And I basically just, you know, in a spreadsheet, I just tried to work out what of the because obviously they're non-profit, they have to publish all of their figures.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: So I just tried to work out what percentage of their costs are covered by income, whether it's advertising, whether it's memberships, whether it's um subscriptions, whether it's events.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: For one of them it was 2%, um, for one of them it was four percent, um, for one of them it was eleven percent, for one of them it was twenty-four percent.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: There was almost no engagement in that New York Times article with sustainability, right?
23:57
SPEAKER_01: And these outlets that she mentioned, I don't want to name them or anything, because they're obviously doing amazing journalism, they're having an impact.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: Some of them have won Pulitzer prizes, like we're sitting in the Pulitzer Hall or something.
24:07
SPEAKER_03: The biggest impact, yeah.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: But are those outlets likely to be around in five, ten, twenty years as independent, durable, commercially sustainable outlets with this current business model?
24:20
SPEAKER_01: I think that's very unlikely.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: And I think the moment that we all should have sat up and taken attention, almost like the sort of bear sterns moment of this you know, non-profit philanthropic funding era was the Houston landing last year.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, a title in Houston that was created with unbelievably good intentions, that did incredibly good journalism, but that spent twenty million dollars of philanthropic money and went bust after two and a half years.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: Like that should be a sort of warning sign.
24:50
SPEAKER_04: Is this I I I I I think it was Heather that brought it up, so I'm I'm I don't want to take credit for this, but I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to maybe unpack around the definition of non-profit and for-profit.
25:02
SPEAKER_04: So there's this there's this line that everyone's used, it's just a tax status, and that's absolutely true.
25:07
SPEAKER_04: There's a tax status behind it, right?
25:09
SPEAKER_04: One pays tax, one doesn't pay tax.
25:11
SPEAKER_04: I and I Yoshi, I appreciate how you you talked about sustainability.
25:15
SPEAKER_04: Regardless of your tax status, you gotta have enough money to pay the bills, it doesn't matter, right now.
25:20
SPEAKER_04: One status allows you to gain dollars um um revenue from a group of folks that none of them, which is philanthropy.
25:28
SPEAKER_04: Um, so that's let's all that's all in agreement.
25:31
SPEAKER_04: Um, we are all in agreement.
25:32
SPEAKER_04: I just have a few questions so that we are all on the same page here.
25:36
SPEAKER_04: Um do you and this is not a good or bad question, Yoshi.
25:39
SPEAKER_04: So it's forgive me if I sound No, no, go ahead.
25:42
SPEAKER_03: He likes he likes to fight the fight.
25:46
SPEAKER_03: He likes to fight Varnan.
25:48
SPEAKER_03: We can Yorchi.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: No crack on Varnen.
25:54
SPEAKER_04: But do you do you have a paywall, for example, Yorchi?
25:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so about half of what we publish is totally free, including a lot of the sort of more public interest things that we publish, and half of what we publish is paywalled.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:06
SPEAKER_04: Okay, so not judging good or bad, but I will say um I could be wrong in this, but any non-profit newsroom in the United States, if they proposed or even suggested the idea for paywall, um would be extremely problematic.
26:27
SPEAKER_04: So um I I think and I think it's very, very important to delete to call that out.
26:36
SPEAKER_04: Because um the way we the way non-profit is uh newsrooms are doing it right now, or whether you have one member paying ten dollars a month, or whether you have a hundred thousand members paying ten dollars a month, everything you have is real, uh free, I'm sorry, right?
26:54
SPEAKER_04: And I I appreciate while I mean so this is not necessarily my stance, but I I do appreciate the idea of a paywall because if you really want something, you care about something, you pay for it, and that allows you to continue to do your work.
27:09
SPEAKER_04: But I think that might be problematic and antithesis to what how nonprofits are set up here.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: Possibly if I could just comment if I if I could comment on that one.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: One of the most successful examples of non-profit local journalism in the in the US in the past few years is building the Baltimore banner.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: So the the philanthropist Stuart Bainum inver has invested about$50 million into this operation.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: And it has built up remarkably robust revenue.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: They did about$18 million of revenue last year.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: And they are one of the few mentioned in that New York Times article that actually, if you run their numbers, they're covering a large proportion of their costs with income.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: They have income from subscriptions, they have income from um ads, etc.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: But they do have a paywall.
27:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I pay for I pay for the Baltimore banner, and they are they are one of the few that seems to have got to the point where uh that that they're almost sustainable.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: That he's hoping, I think, to be to for it to be a breakeven operation within a year or two.
28:01
SPEAKER_03: So it's something um that we're also talking about here.
28:05
SPEAKER_03: We're talking about shifting definitions, so as Varnan quite rightly says, there's a slightly different um implication, particularly in the the United States with tax datas, because you get uh tax breaks if you give money to non-profits.
28:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:21
SPEAKER_03: So that's something which is an incentive, right?
28:24
SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think that also Varnan is right about the idea that if you now put up a paywall in the states, there's a sort of almost like visceral reaction against it.
28:32
SPEAKER_03: But you're right, the bottom wall banner does have a paywall, um, flexible paywalls, uh, metered paywalls are are helping people, I think, get over the idea that this is not an organization that is trying to wall off important things from the from the wider community.
28:47
SPEAKER_03: But it does make me think about, you know, in America at the moment we're going through this really specific democratic moment where having very detailed, very quick uh local news is uh really existential for some communities.
29:01
SPEAKER_03: And so you've suddenly got this very engaged national uh conversation about this.
29:08
SPEAKER_03: Do you think, first of all, that that is likely to happen at all in the UK?
29:14
SPEAKER_03: And do you think it's possible that those pressures actually mean that we do have to flex how we present ourselves as you know, so sustainability becomes the thing, but the word profit is actually becomes almost kind of like a dirty word in those circumstances in that context, because it's like you're profiting from a genuine crisis of democracy.
29:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a really good question.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: I hadn't thought about it exactly like that.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: I think in a situation where there's something so awful happening in a local area and you are the people covering it, you're never going to pay all that.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's always gonna be kind of free journalism.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: I think the the question about sustainability is is probably better than the one just purely about profit or non-profit.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: What we're generally talking about with non-profit, in particular in the US, is we're talking about the type of funding it gets.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: And so a the vast majority of the dollars that a lot of these non-profits are spending are not dollars that they brought in, they're dollars that they were given by in grants.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: And so generally, when we're talking about non-profit, we're talking about enormous philanthropic grant making.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: So on a local level, we've talked about the Houston landing.
30:21
SPEAKER_01: I'd be interested in something like the markup.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: That was a very ambitious project.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: Again, I think that had about 20 million going into it.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: And you know, they weren't able to make the sums work.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: So I think And Craig Newmark is now no longer investing in Germany.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Right.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Right.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: Or if we think about the hundred or so million that went into the intercept.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: The intercept is still going, I think, but at a vastly smaller um r level than it was before.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: So I I think your put your your question about democracy is are people profiting if they are putting up a paywall in it in a democratic moment?
30:52
SPEAKER_01: Let's think about Manchester last year.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: The mill in Manchester, our publication, broke the biggest investigative story of the year, which was that a local public university was essentially involved in quite serious financial corruption.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: That investigation by my colleague Molly, not only has it won a bunch of awards, which is an inside baseball way of looking at it, it has led to a police investigation, house raids, the resignation of the vice-chancellor who was running the university for 20 years, and now also the resignation of the chairman of the board.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: Now, is it better for local democracy in Manchester that that story was produced or not?
31:29
SPEAKER_01: I think it's better that it was produced.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: Would it have been produced if we didn't have a way to get money from some of the more affluent people in Manchester?
31:37
SPEAKER_01: No, it would not, because our model is based on that.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: And so the accountability in our local democracy that's been created by that story or by the story the year before that that led to the mayor's advisor having to quit, because again, a piece of investigative journalism that we did, those wouldn't exist if we didn't say, we are going to charge for some of our journalism, we're going to make a lot of our public interest journalism free, and we're going to create a model that is genuinely financially sustainable.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: The mill has been financially sustainable for two years or three years now, and it will be on an ongoing basis.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: And when you make the distinction between money brought in from a philanthropy and money brought in from readers, are you basically saying that the philanthropy money is inherently more fickle?
32:15
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell, I'm saying it's not revenue.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: It's like a it's like an investment.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: If the job but I guess I'm maybe I don't understand why it's so different.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: If, as Von and says, you have to pay the bills on some level, why does it matter where the money is coming from?
32:28
SPEAKER_00: Unless it's that you think it will not continue to pay.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: No, exactly.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: That's the thing.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: So so I know if I've got um 10,000 paying subscribers in the company, I can accurately project for the next year or so how much money I'll be making.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: They're monthly payments, yeah, annual payments, etc.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to make sure that's the same.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, totally.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: The problem for a lot of these media companies, if you look at the the the Houston landing, one family or one family foundation in Houston, after a couple of years, decided this isn't making much of a public or this isn't quite doing what we expected it to do.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: Right.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: It's not making much commercial revenue.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: I think it was in the hundreds of thousands of commercial revenue after a 20 million investment.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: They didn't want to fund it anymore and the whole thing collapsed.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: That is going to happen in an increasing number of cases because when you speak to foundation people privately at the moment, they do not say what they're saying publicly.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: They say we are very concerned that the type of funding that we have been putting into journalism for the past ten years in the US is not turning into sustainable journalistic organizations.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: And I think we should all be concerned about that.
33:25
SPEAKER_03: So I do so I was wondering, is it is it a philanthropy problem, Vaughn?
33:29
SPEAKER_03: And I want to bring you back in here.
33:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I wanna.
33:31
SPEAKER_03: Because I'd I'd really love to hear your thoughts about that.
33:34
SPEAKER_03: And without throwing your funders under the bus.
33:37
SPEAKER_03: Nobody is expected to do that.
33:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm not gonna say nobody is expected to do that on this podcast.
33:42
SPEAKER_03: She says hastily as somebody funded by that's pretty myself.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: But it it's true, everybody knows that they're you know, they get distracted by the new thing and that it's not necessarily something you can rely on.
33:54
SPEAKER_04: Yep.
33:55
SPEAKER_04: One thing that I'm I'm as Yoshi, I don't know if it's the British accent or whatever, but man, you are really compelling.
34:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's the accent.
34:08
SPEAKER_04: I was amended to put like an audio filter and like so that it sounds over.
34:13
SPEAKER_04: Anyways, um very compelling argument, Yoshi.
34:17
SPEAKER_04: And um and I but what I'm wondering if we are having this conversation a little bit too binary here.
34:27
SPEAKER_04: I I think we all have to acknowledge that for-profit, they're no perfect systems, first of all.
34:33
SPEAKER_04: I think we have to acknowledge that, right?
34:36
SPEAKER_04: What we and I think the other question that I would like to say is I think we need to ask ourselves in what context does it make sense for a for-profit to exist and a non-profit to exist?
34:47
SPEAKER_04: I I think that's that's a piece that we have to ask ourselves.
34:51
SPEAKER_04: Um I I'm not saying I'm not saying we need to change the way we're talking about this, but I I I think that's a little bit missing.
34:58
SPEAKER_04: Because this there is such a thing as for-profit and non-profit.
35:02
SPEAKER_04: I I'm with you, Yoshi, that there are some things that are absolutely crucial.
35:07
SPEAKER_04: You gotta put it out, and it's critical for the local businesses or community, no paywall out the door.
35:13
SPEAKER_04: And then I don't know, we have some we'll figure something out that requires a paywall for the ones that are invested, blah blah blah.
35:20
SPEAKER_04: We'll figure it out.
35:21
SPEAKER_04: But there's a part of me that feels there'll be a revolt in my staff, there'll be a revolt in the budget.
35:25
SPEAKER_04: Why would there be a revolt?
35:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm interested in that question because I think that is the question.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: Why would there be a revolt?
35:30
SPEAKER_01: Correct.
35:31
SPEAKER_04: I I I and I I I'm I'm gonna duck away from the questions.
35:36
SPEAKER_04: Just go back to something that the the point I was trying to make.
35:38
SPEAKER_04: I think the context is very important here, for profit and non-profit.
35:42
SPEAKER_04: I used to work for uh before I joined Sahan, I used to work for Pillsbury United communities, and uh we built the first non-profit grocery store in Minneapolis.
35:53
SPEAKER_04: North Minneapolis is a food desert, one of the largest food deserts in the country at that time.
35:59
SPEAKER_04: And this particular site has been had a grocery store for the last 30 years, for-profit.
36:05
SPEAKER_04: You know, dynamics change, generations change, blah blah blah blah blah.
36:08
SPEAKER_04: And it's all it has failed.
36:10
SPEAKER_04: So we came in, and the the theory that I the the process that got us there was that there's something in life in a particular area, geography, condition, community, where for-profit systems just will not work.
36:26
SPEAKER_04: Just will not work, right?
36:28
SPEAKER_04: And so, under those conditions, you need a partnership of philanthropy, government to provide what whatever kind of incentives and private businesses to combine to do something for the better good, right?
36:41
SPEAKER_04: And so I would say a non-profit model would work in that instance because for-profit has failed.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: So I totally agree, by the way.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a great point.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: And and if I'm looking at the local news landscape, the place that I think ongoing philanthropic funding, I literally for like decades to come, where it's needed, would be the small town in Alabama where you have no newspaper at all.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: It's a genuine news desert.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: There's terrible corruption going on, there's awful sort of rezoning stuff happening, and there's gerrymandering.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: And what you actually need there is you need an outlet that is not going to be funded by local subscriptions because there isn't a local sort of middle class to pay for it.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: That is where I think the money should be going.
37:22
SPEAKER_03: So actually, so I think that is raises a really interesting recent example, which is the New York Times has just opened and in announced its opening in the investigative unit in the South here.
37:36
SPEAKER_03: And I I think that goes to this point about um, and we are journalism 2050 on this podcast about this.
37:44
SPEAKER_03: Are we in fact talking about the same thing here in the future, which is understanding that we have to have a redistribution of wealth in the system somehow, whether it's your richer readers, Emily, you're a communist, I knew it.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: I knew it.
38:03
SPEAKER_03: Unite continue.
38:08
SPEAKER_03: And and philanthropy is that the Googles and the Facebooks that I've been and the and the AI companies where I've been saying, I don't think that this is a transactional.
38:17
SPEAKER_03: This shouldn't be a transactional.
38:19
SPEAKER_03: This needs to be about who needs it, you know, who needs it for democracy.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
38:26
SPEAKER_01: So I think that is the very understandable and and and virtuous instinct that has led to, by my calculation, about two and a half billion dollars worth being invested from philanthropic sources into um non-profit journalism in the past 10 to years.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's totally understandable what people say.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: There's a market failure in certain places, very low-income communities, et cetera.
38:50
SPEAKER_01: We need, as the foundations, you know, the foundations of money that were put together by the billionaires of the of the of the iron age, of the of the railways, we have to step in and try and do our bit.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: I think the problem is when you try to build a media organization from the ground up, so I started on my own, right?
39:08
SPEAKER_01: I had no investors, it was just on my own.
39:10
SPEAKER_01: You what you have to do is you have to have a mentality of how do I get an additional 20 people to pay me next week?
39:17
SPEAKER_01: How do I get an additional 50 to pay me the week after, just like lots of people are doing on Substack.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: Your mind is constantly focused on what is it that gets people to pay?
39:25
SPEAKER_01: Now, that doesn't mean you're not doing public interest journalism.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: We all are journalists who want to do fantastic public interest journalism, but you also need to find a way of doing some stories that are going to get people to pay.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: Let me give you an example.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: Two weeks ago, we did um a great piece of public interest journalism in Manchester that led to the resignation of the chief executive of a local council.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: It was to do with a scandal that we revealed had happened at Manchester City Council.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: But a few days after that, we published a piece about who is doing the anti-business sort of graffiti around various businesses, this sort of vigilante.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: It was a bit of a talking point on the local Reddit.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: Everyone's wondering who's doing it.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Now, we worked out who it was.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: We wrote a fun piece about it and we paywalled that.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: The public's not losing out by that being behind the paywall.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: But we have sort of developed the muscle of like, what can what will get people to get over the line on the paywall?
40:13
SPEAKER_01: And then what how can we get our journalism out to the largest audience possible?
40:16
SPEAKER_01: And I think the problem with giving a newsroom two million, five million, twenty million in the case of some of these things, is that they never answer the question that you ultimately have to answer as soon as possible, which is how do we get people to love what we do so much that they're willing to pay?
40:31
SPEAKER_01: And I think you can delay that for like five or ten years because of the philanthropy.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
40:37
SPEAKER_03: We're tag team dis disagreeing with you here.
40:39
SPEAKER_03: So great.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I don't know that I disagree.
40:45
SPEAKER_00: I just don't know that I agree.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: I I don't know that I believe that that is the only motivation.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: So for example, I could, as somebody who fundraises, I am very motivated to get those dollars.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: Like that's why I'm kind of challenging this premise that that it's only the subscription dollars that are really going to motivate me.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: But so I'd like to hear what you have to say.
41:10
SPEAKER_04: Can the nonprofit guys uh answer for the forfit guy?
41:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, jump in.
41:15
SPEAKER_04: I I I happen to lead a nonprofit newsroom organization.
41:22
SPEAKER_04: But I believe, but I'm in complete agreement with Yoshi here.
41:28
SPEAKER_04: Like we have to produce content that people will want to invest, will invest their money in it.
41:35
SPEAKER_04: Because right now, investing time doesn't really matter.
41:38
SPEAKER_04: You can just flip through something in two seconds.
41:40
SPEAKER_04: But if you pay five dollars or ten dollars or whatever this this amount is, it it does change the editorial decision, it does change how you write.
41:50
SPEAKER_04: It doesn't mean that you're writing fluff pieces, it doesn't mean that you but you you are making the extra effort to understand what the audience needs, and I think that that can be missing in journalism because there's this uh I don't want to sound uh virtuous again, but hey, whatever I write is important and people need to read it.
42:12
SPEAKER_04: I mean, people walk around like I I felt it like this.
42:15
SPEAKER_04: My LinkedIn post, I put it out there, a hundred likes.
42:17
SPEAKER_04: I'm like, oh I'm saying like I can imagine a reporter with 5,000 people reading their stuff or 10,000, like they must think they're God.
42:25
SPEAKER_04: So, but I I I do agree with Yoshi though, like where there's four there is an there might be an element in a nonprofit where the the interest in answering Yoshi's question is delayed to a point that is detrimental to the long-term sustainability of the organization.
42:43
SPEAKER_04: Now, um Sahan Sahan is six years old, going into seven, so we are a startup, baby, right?
42:50
SPEAKER_04: But we still have interest from funders in the work that we do.
42:54
SPEAKER_04: Um because even though Minnesota is a healthy use ecosystem, we serve a demo uh a section of a demographic of population that is un has been underserved and most likely will continue to be underserved because of the uh you know how people consider that from a revenue perspective.
43:12
SPEAKER_04: I would say though the turn to turn the time it takes to generate 10 paying members, a hundred meaning a thousand, ten thousand, that requires time.
43:26
SPEAKER_04: That requires Yoshi, may I ask how many people are paying for your um?
43:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we yeah, yeah.
43:32
SPEAKER_01: So we yeah, we have 13,000 people paying at the moment.
43:36
SPEAKER_04: And and um would would you say what's the size of your market, so to speak?
43:42
SPEAKER_04: The city of Manchester?
43:43
SPEAKER_01: Or or well I mean we're we're we're spread across six different cities now.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: And but the the way I think you know, Manchester is is is like a kind of two and a half million metro area, right?
43:53
SPEAKER_01: And so you're talking and and the number of people on our free email list in Manchester is like fifty five thousand, right?
43:58
SPEAKER_01: And the number of people who are paying in Manchester is It's like just over 4,000.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: So what you're not trying to say is, can we get the median person in Manchester to pay?
44:05
SPEAKER_01: You're trying to say, can we get a very, very tiny proportion of people to pay that's going to produce journalism that is how much more impactful than what's already been sort of published.
44:14
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
44:15
SPEAKER_04: So I I do see the non-profit model helping with catalyzing and growing a newsroom in a particular spot that's needed.
44:24
SPEAKER_04: Um but I agree with Yoshi in the sense of like sometimes that model just causes some folks to not think about okay, this is only gonna last for five years.
44:34
SPEAKER_04: We do need people to start paying for it one way or another, whether from reading or events or whatever along the you know, wherever we want to think about it, but we do need to start finding that.
44:45
SPEAKER_04: And um the non-profit model can be can be a hindrance.
44:49
SPEAKER_03: Can we can we can can we sort of pause it at that point and just pivot it a bit to the future?
44:54
SPEAKER_03: Because we do love a solution on this podcast, and we've got 20.
44:58
SPEAKER_03: Okay, but I have two, I have two more questions for.
45:01
SPEAKER_03: Heather wants to stay on the parts.
45:02
SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, mate.
45:03
SPEAKER_03: Okay, Hella wants to stay on the park.
45:05
SPEAKER_03: She she wants to say she wants to stay on the mat.
45:07
SPEAKER_03: She's got her gloves on.
45:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, fair enough.
45:09
SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
45:09
SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
45:10
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, actually, it's not.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: Um you said something about when you first heard people talking about how it was a market failure for local news, but you thought you didn't believe that if you did it the right way, that was true.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: So, what is doing it the right way?
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I think the f the fundamental thing is first of all, that you have to operate it as if it is a business, as if you have to fight every day to get people to pay, etc.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: That's the first thing.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: But then you also have to produce journalism that people don't just like.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: They don't just think is marginally better than the big newspaper you're competing with in your city.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: That it is something they love, that it's something they have an emotional connection with.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: So most of my career as a writer, I did, you know, longer form features.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: And so I wanted to write the kind of journalism on the mill when I started it that I've done for The Guardian or for The Evening Standard or for The Times, etc.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: More in-depth, more of an understanding of who a person really is, capturing the nuances of people, etc.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: And I thought if you do that kind of journalism for a city, people will respond well, and they have.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: So it has to be highly differentiated from what's already out there.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: It has to have much more of a community connection.
46:17
SPEAKER_01: When I see some of these newsrooms that have been funded, and then like you don't see any comments under an amazing story they've written, you just think, okay, audience connection is the is the most important thing.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: You are trying to serve people with things that, A, make them more informed.
46:30
SPEAKER_01: And I know in the J school world, the information is the big thing.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: How do we give people information that they need?
46:37
SPEAKER_01: A huge thing that people want isn't just information, it's a sense of connection.
46:41
SPEAKER_01: A sense of connection to a place and a sense of connection to each other.
46:44
SPEAKER_01: That is a democratic thing, but it's also a personal, emotional thing.
46:47
SPEAKER_01: I want to feel like I know the woman who lives at the top of the tower block three streets down, even though I would never meet her.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: I want to know the guy who came from another city to run the school who lives three blocks down.
46:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm never gonna meet him.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: He might not be in my world, but by reading great journalism, particularly narrative storytelling journalism of the type that we're trying to do, I think you get a sense of connection.
47:07
SPEAKER_01: And I therefore I think if you put those things together, you get a bit lucky, you have the right team.
47:12
SPEAKER_01: I think it's very possible in these kind of metro areas to do great, high-quality, impactful, varied journalism that can be sustainable.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: But I'm not claiming that that's the true for every single community.
47:24
SPEAKER_03: There's a horrible amount of uh agreement on this podcast, and I'm going to try and move it into maybe even an area of more agreement, which is this point about the future.
47:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
47:33
SPEAKER_03: And so if we look at the current pressures on journalism, and particularly local journalism, it's been crisis of business model for the last certainly the last 25 years.
47:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
47:46
SPEAKER_03: Um, that continues, news deserts grow, but we are seeing an ecosystem, particularly of these collaborative networks, the type of work that you're both doing, the type of work that Heather does, that's actually bringing a new product and I think sort of vitality into some places, and we're we're learning and growing from that.
48:05
SPEAKER_03: But we have, I think, two really big uh pressures, one of which is political.
48:11
SPEAKER_03: So this idea that actually independent journalism is the enemy and has to be stopped is not something that we're really used to in the United States or even in the UK.
48:22
SPEAKER_03: And once public media funding becomes part of that discussion, we've lost public media funding here.
48:29
SPEAKER_03: The BBC is very much on the table at the moment in the discourse in in the UK.
48:34
SPEAKER_03: And the other one is technological, and those two things are not separate, actually, they're kind of quite similar because we have now sort of technological change.
48:41
SPEAKER_03: So I was just wondering if uh both of you could talk a little bit about how you see your role, businesses, communities, journalism in that context, and whether you're seeing those pressures in the same way that maybe we, the media commentary, see it from outside.
48:57
SPEAKER_03: And and and what what are you gonna do in the next five years, ten years that responds to those pressures?
49:06
SPEAKER_03: Because it feels like we're having to really carry on building the bicycle while we're riding over very rough terrain.
49:12
SPEAKER_03: Definitely.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: I think my answer is gonna be shorter than violence because we are not facing the same political pressures yet in the UK that's happening in the US.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: What I would say about that though is I think what you need in a scenario where um the federal government or even a state government wants to interrupt the flow of information in the way that clearly is going on at the moment, suing media companies, putting pressure on owners, basically taking bribes in different ways from media companies.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: What you need in a situation like that is for the revenue of the media company to come from tens of thousands of people, not from two people.
49:46
SPEAKER_01: You can, you can, you can, you can you can get two people in a city, the wealthiest people who are the foundation heads, etc., you can get them to turn off the tap.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: It's very difficult to get tens of thousands of people who are loving something and who are incredibly connected to it and who give it 10 bucks a month to stop doing so.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: So I know that's a sort of boring answer coming back to my boilerplate stuff, but I think that is what you'll need in a society in which pressure is being put on.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: I think one of the vulnerabilities at the moment of the US media on to these political attacks is a lot of the large corporate media companies, it's quite easy to squash them because it's one relationship with the president.
50:19
SPEAKER_01: My concern at the lower level would be there are quite a few media companies that are almost entirely reliant on one or two families or one or two foundations.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a very vulnerable situation to be in.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: On the tech side, clearly the tech disruption has only just started when it comes to AI.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: My answer would be: I think we need to have journalism where when people read it, they know it comes from a human being.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: It has the sort of authenticity and the voice of that.
50:44
SPEAKER_01: And I think sometimes, and I know this is sacrilege to a US audience, sometimes that means removing this AP style, this kind of sense of like everything being denuded of any feeling or denuded of any personality.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: I think people need to know I am reading something written by a human being, I know their name, I know a bit about them because they recently wrote about their life, etc.
51:05
SPEAKER_01: I know about their preferences, and I am going to trust this a hell of a lot more than 90% of what I see online, which is increasingly AI generated.
51:12
SPEAKER_01: So that's the way we are thinking about it.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: I know that's not a particularly like tech sophisticated answer.
51:17
SPEAKER_03: Uh Varnand, tell us what you think as well.
51:21
SPEAKER_03: Engineering, your engineering background, I think, puts you in a better position than most to understand.
51:26
SPEAKER_04: No, no, no, no, no, no.
51:27
SPEAKER_04: Please don't do that.
51:28
SPEAKER_04: Um I I'm I'm just gonna just because of recency, I'm gonna I agree with everything that uh that your she said up from the tech side with AI.
51:37
SPEAKER_04: I uh and so I'm just gonna just double double click it or whatever.
51:42
SPEAKER_04: And he said I don't want to waste time there.
51:45
SPEAKER_04: This this conversation here that we are having, and I I I realized when when Emily, when you say well, there's a lot of agreement here, there's not a lot of uh disagreement, and maybe I'm not the best representative of what a nonprofit newsroom should be.
51:59
SPEAKER_04: I also I apologize if that's the case.
52:02
SPEAKER_04: The thing is, whether it's a non-profit or for-profit, you still have to answer the same question, right?
52:08
SPEAKER_04: How do you pay the bills to continue to do the work?
52:11
SPEAKER_04: Now, we are also blessed to um to have this conversation with Yoshi, a for-profit uh person, but it's obvious he cares about his community.
52:24
SPEAKER_04: He places that as high or maybe higher than exceedable.
52:30
SPEAKER_04: I think it's fair to say that not everyone is like Yoshi.
52:35
SPEAKER_04: Um when I when I entered this industry, a friend of mine, uh someone from Sahan showed me uh someone that was just taking use, scrape it, change something for whatever doesn't do a single journalistic thing but makes money out of it, which includes our articles.
52:52
SPEAKER_04: So um I will also argue that Yoshi might not say not the best example of a for-profit, but maybe not the most typical.
53:02
SPEAKER_04: So is that a fair assessment to say?
53:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad you brought that up because the the thing that I've been thinking about in the back of my mind, this whole conversation was something Yoshi, you said about, well, you're for-profit, but you're not like flying around in your private jet.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: I feel like we do live in a moment where when you think of like capitalism has become so extractive and so extreme that when you hear capitalist for-profit, you think of Elon Musk or something, you forget the sort of small scale, like a guy who both cares about his community and wants to pay his bills.
53:38
SPEAKER_00: So he runs a newspaper and he can send his kids to school.
53:42
SPEAKER_00: And it it is like a oh, oh, right, right, that still exists.
53:46
SPEAKER_00: And it is fascinating to think about if we talk about for-profit and a capitalist model in that way.
53:54
SPEAKER_00: What is the potential for the future of local news?
53:56
SPEAKER_00: And and it's I find it interesting just that it makes my brain go, oh, because I've gotten so used to just, you know, anyone who's for profit, it's gonna be that extractive, exploitative horror show.
54:08
SPEAKER_00: But that's not even the roots of capitalism.
54:11
SPEAKER_00: So it's really interesting to hear.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean Heather, I think it's super interesting that that's your reaction.
54:16
SPEAKER_01: But I think that might also speak to the extent to which the consensus has built among people who work in journalism schools, among people who work in newsrooms, that the market failure is so great that all we could really do is think about like a non-profit solution.
54:30
SPEAKER_01: And I think it doesn't help that in this country you've got companies like Alden Capital who are genuinely going around gutting local newsrooms.
54:37
SPEAKER_01: Right.
54:37
SPEAKER_03: They are giving and and making profit.
54:40
SPEAKER_01: And making profit.
54:40
SPEAKER_01: Because all you need to do is cut a hundred people every year and you can maintain a profit margin in a declining business.
54:45
SPEAKER_01: I think that's terrible.
54:46
SPEAKER_01: And I think that gives everything market-driven a bad name.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: I think market-driven is probably a better word than than for-profit, because for-profit, as you say, connotes kind of enormous profit margins when clearly.
54:55
SPEAKER_01: That's not the case.
54:56
SPEAKER_01: But I think the point about being market-driven is you are very responsive to what people want.
55:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that is a really good model for local news.
55:04
SPEAKER_01: And I've noticed in the UK, I don't want to take entire credit for this at all, but I've noticed that the climate in the UK, when you go to media conferences and when you read blogs, etc., is very different now than it was in the 2018, 2019, 2020 period when I before I started.
55:19
SPEAKER_01: Now, I think because we've had a little bit of traction, I think because some of our stories have done well, we're clearly having an investigative impact, but we're also serving people well, we're covering our costs, etc.
55:28
SPEAKER_01: I think now the conversation has totally moved on.
55:31
SPEAKER_01: Now what you have is loads of people imitating or copying, or sorry, a better word would be being inspired by what we've done.
55:37
SPEAKER_01: There are like, you know, a dozen or so local newsletters in the UK and in Europe that have basically taken what we've done and they've come up with their brilliant creative, like new way of doing it, talking about very big ones like Jim Waterson's one in London to ones that have got like you know, a thousand paying members in and I get emails like that all the time.
55:55
SPEAKER_01: So I think when people see that that can be done, and you don't have to wait for enormous, you know, billionaire-founded foundations in order to do what you want to do.
56:04
SPEAKER_01: I think it's quite inspiring.
56:06
SPEAKER_01: And I I I hope that in the US over the next few years, what we are going to see is some people saying, actually, I think the market will fund some really high-quality journalism that I'm passionate about doing.
56:17
SPEAKER_01: And I think that would be good because Emily mentioned at the beginning the sort of 430-ish members of the nonprofit media organization.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: My concern is that a lot of those organizations are going to reach a moment where the people who put the money in lose interest or lose patience or have other priorities.
56:35
SPEAKER_01: As you in a country where you've got people being shot in the street totally arbitrarily, it could well happen that the foundations decide there are other pressing societal concerns that we are going to fund.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: And at that moment, you could see a massive collapse.
56:49
SPEAKER_01: And I think there are the warning signs of there already, and I think that but diversifying the way in which journalism is done in the US at a local level um would be a very, very good thing.
57:00
SPEAKER_04: I I I do have to I so agreeing again, agreeing a lot with what Yoshi is saying.
57:07
SPEAKER_04: I I but I think we and and I I will take ownership to this, like the there are moments in life where market-driven solutions are not sufficient.
57:17
SPEAKER_04: Like it is very clear.
57:18
SPEAKER_04: And and Yoshi, you you brought up a small example, uh, you brought up an example about a small town in Alabama or something along those lines.
57:25
SPEAKER_04: I'm bringing up Sahanjino as an example, which is on the other spectrum.
57:29
SPEAKER_04: A healthy news ecosystem, some of the best news in but uh an underserved market that will never not never say never, but a market-driven solution would not come, right?
57:43
SPEAKER_04: And Yoshi, I would also um with with all due respect, which usually is a precursor saying something rude, but with all due respect, sometimes um you it is possible that you are covering you are blessed with reporters, but you're also covering issues that there's a market that would want to cover it, right?
58:04
SPEAKER_04: Um but if the news about I don't know some things are really important, but you only have 10, 20, 50 readers that would pay for it, so the impact we we we are losing the the the other side of the equation where even though it's important but the market forces will never pay for it, when can philanthropy step in?
58:25
SPEAKER_04: And I would argue philanthropy could step in in the short term because I I I'm the same as you.
58:30
SPEAKER_04: Philanthropy can be fickle and their job is to solve everything else.
58:35
SPEAKER_04: So that's when the public institutions, the government can step in, right?
58:40
SPEAKER_04: Like fixing the roads.
58:42
SPEAKER_04: Well, Alabama needs a it's a needs a newspaper uh for for for instance.
58:47
SPEAKER_00: That that'll be our next our next step.
58:50
SPEAKER_03: I wonder if there's something here as well which has changed fundamentally just about other journalism organizations of all types, which is we're talking about market-driven, and uh it feels to me like we should be talking about public interest and market versus market-driven.
59:06
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and that doesn't really denote whether you're a full-profit or whether you're a non-profit, it just takes maybe kind of philanthropy out, it and it clarifies purpose.
59:16
SPEAKER_03: And it feels to me as though one of the things that's happening with larger media organizations, and sometimes I think this is just a kind of vanity project, um, but I know from my associations with The Guardian, which has done very well from actually non-profit or profit seeking, I think we call it.
59:31
SPEAKER_01: But it is a for-profits company.
59:33
SPEAKER_03: Um it's yes, I mean, as you say, should we should we make a profit?
59:36
SPEAKER_03: Um but but but but also if we if we were to make a profit, it would go back into the endowment, it would go back into the journalism.
59:43
SPEAKER_03: And I think that this really vexing moment that we're in in you know, the home of the free press means that organizations that are really committed to public interest, whatever their profit model, will have to fill in for and see ways of being a network with other organizations that are like them.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_03: So that's and I think we've seen a little bit of that sort of networked response.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_03: And I know there are really problematic issues about big brands, or you know, you're is Axios really going to come into the local market and pro public, or are they really there for the long term?
1:00:21
SPEAKER_03: Is this just to reap more?
1:00:23
SPEAKER_03: Is it getting in the way of local journalism?
1:00:25
SPEAKER_03: But how do you how do you two feel about that fundamentally different model of collaboration, both with your communities um but also with some of your peers?
1:00:37
SPEAKER_03: Because journalism's always been this vehicle competitive market, and that is something about market-driven which makes it very competitive.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_03: And are we gonna see a is that something that's gonna change?
1:00:49
SPEAKER_01: I think competitive is good, Emily.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_01: Like I I I I know that again, this is another absolute sacred cow at the moment at every media conference.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_01: The the answer to everything is to say that organizations that are on the whole not sustainable, that are struggling to make an impact with the public should work together.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_01: That's totally fine, but that won't be the solution.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, I think the point about competition is it's so hard in media to do well.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's such a tough business.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: Trying to get people to pay for news when they're paying for their Netflix and they're paying for everything else, and costs are going up.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: And if you're gonna do it, you have to be like so focused on the thing that you're creating, right?
1:01:27
SPEAKER_01: So people have asked me recently, would we partner with these people who are partnering with you?
1:01:30
SPEAKER_01: Well, what if that means like we're 5% less sort of focused on the thing we do?
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: I think if you're 5% less focused, you don't actually get there.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_01: So I don't think I'd put so much um emphasis on like working together.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_01: I would say you want highly competitive news markets.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: Well, what what Joseph Roth, uh, when he was writing in the 1930s and and early uh late 1930s in Berlin, he wrote about there being 22 newspapers in Berlin.
1:01:52
SPEAKER_01: A golden age of newspapers in Central Europe, where you had in Prague and Berlin and Vienna, you had like more than a dozen papers.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_01: I think we want to go back to that.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: I think it's great that in New York you've got like non-profit and for-profit things all all sort of mixing up with each other.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_01: You've got Hellgate and you've got the city, and you've got all these different things.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_01: I want incredible competition in every market.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_01: I think we're moving beyond the point where a large metro area has one large newspaper.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_01: I think we're moving to a point where there are a dozen different things who've who do different times of journalism for different people, different markets, and in different ways.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_01: The final thing I'll say is on the public interest thing.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_01: I try to encourage my team not to use terms like accountability journalism and public interest journalism because I don't want them to sound, with respect to both of you, like journalism school lecturers.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: The public interest should the public interest should be defined more by the public than by people who are sitting in journalism schools.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_01: And I think that when it's defined by the public, you find that the public are incredibly interested in finding out if the local officials are corrupt.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_01: They're incredibly interested in finding out if the local university is doing side deals with a company in Marrakesh like the thing that we were um exposing.
1:02:59
SPEAKER_01: But the way you do that journalism is you make it enjoyable to read.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_01: Like we don't start our investigations with like the most important details like a sort of old school thing.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: We take you inside the meeting in the hotel where the corrupt deal was done.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_03: You start with the narrative lead, which is what we teach in these journalism schools that you are throwing your populist shape on.
1:03:19
SPEAKER_01: Because the big thing we're saying to readers is not you should read this, right?
1:03:23
SPEAKER_01: Spinach.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_01: I've spoken to a foundation.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_01: When you speak to foundations privately, they are extremely open about the problems.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_01: She she described it as spinach.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to say here's the spinach that you should read and you should pay for.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: We want to say, look at this fascinating story.
1:03:37
SPEAKER_01: And we are going to explain the business deal in a minute and all the different uh numbers involved.
1:03:41
SPEAKER_01: But first of all, you've got to meet the people.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: How was the deal done?
1:03:43
SPEAKER_01: What were they drinking?
1:03:44
SPEAKER_01: You know, and then you get people in, and suddenly you've got tens of thousands of people reading something that previously would have won awards but would have been read by like, you know, 500.
1:03:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a instead of thinking public interest, we should think how do we grab the the public with journalism that is really high quality, that we love doing, that they will love reading.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: And that I think can create sustainability in a way that this sort of uh public interest sort of terminology um maybe slightly gets in the way of.
1:04:13
SPEAKER_04: I I appreciate a lot of the things that that yeah that Yoshi is saying that the the fact of the matter is I'm I'm in agreement with a lot of the things that he said.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_04: Like I don't come from journalism background, and I completely not empathize, resonate with how we how we tell the story is actually more important than this AP standard or whatever that is that's befuddling me right now.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_04: I hope I never learn what the AP standard is.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_04: Um But I do I do I'm in agreement with him that uh how we tell the story and then draw people in is the key to long-term sustainability, whether it's for profit or non-profit, because if you're a non-profit and someone's drawn into your article, it's more than likely that you know we develop this connection with them and then they will be donors for us.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_04: So there are similarities in that in that in in that I I just want to just again call out the fact that um there are some conditions out there in some areas where the best of the best, you can write the most amazing article the way Yoshi has described, where the market does not will not does not allow it for it to be successful, and that's when non-profit can step in, and non-profit can perhaps step in in perpetuity, but non-profit can at the very least provide the initial investment to show what the impact looks like, right?
1:05:38
SPEAKER_04: And so um yeah, I I I I do think there is a very, very uh important role for nonprofit newsrooms, and I'm I I'll probably go back to my original statement, which is context matters.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_04: Like where you're operating, what's the goal, and what's the best way to get to that.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_03: And I th and I think just back to your Back to your original point as well, Varn, and I think you made this point, which is the binary.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_03: You know, we've let we we're too binary about all of this.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_00: Correct.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: It's not either or.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: That's so.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: I feel like the lesson once again is maybe we shouldn't just be like um mindless lemmings running in one direction in a pack.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, seriously, it's like there's gonna be it.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there should be market-driven newsrooms, there should be nonprofit, and because in a lot of the communities that we work in in J and D, it's it's not what you say, Yoshi.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_00: What people are asking for is really basic information that is is not that sexy and is not that intriguing, but they do need it, and that's not gonna be market-driven either.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_03: It it takes all of the and it is also increasingly obscured, sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_00: It's it's a fight even over what's true and what's not and what basic, you know, where you vote, where you don't.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_00: So so it's it's all of it.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_00: I say yes.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say, I'm gonna be really annoying and designing, and I'm gonna say yes and yes and not no, yes.
1:07:05
SPEAKER_03: Not not but, but yes and so not no but so I could I could I could conduct this conversation forever because I think it is so important and so interesting, and you two are just such great interlocutors.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_03: Even though you haven't actually had a physical fight, which uh Yoshi uh Yoshi and I were thinking that maybe that's what would get us booked at Perugia, but you know.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_03: Um but just to sort of wrap up, what we again, what we ask people on journalism 2050 is um 24 years' time, uh what's a what's a best case scenario and what do we have to do to get there?
1:07:42
SPEAKER_01: In local news specifically.
1:07:44
SPEAKER_03: Uh in ideally in your own field.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, look, I I think that what we've undergone in the past 20 years is a period of incredible decline and destruction in local news in the UK and the US.
1:07:56
SPEAKER_01: And that is mainly because, you know, 80% or so of the revenue has been stripped out because, you know, the advertising monopolies that you had in print newspapers have gone.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_01: And so naturally we have had a very, very tough time.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_01: That has been exacerbated by some really poor strategic decisions by the large media companies who instead of investing in the kind of New York Times, kind of like we are gonna keep our value and get people to pay for it, they made it free for a while, then they tried to pay well, etc.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: Disaster, disaster.
1:08:21
SPEAKER_01: I think in 24 years, is it 24 years?
1:08:24
SPEAKER_01: It is 24 years now.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_03: I know it's that we started this in 2025.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_03: It seemed like such a good idea.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_03: And that's challenging our math here.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_01: What I what I think or what I hope are maybe the same thing, is I want to get back to the Joseph Roth Berlin, right?
1:08:38
SPEAKER_01: I want to have 22 different outlets in a metro area fighting for people's attention and their time.
1:08:43
SPEAKER_01: And it's the genius of the creativity and the way they write and the way they deliver news, and some of them are doing it video, some are doing audio, some are doing it over WhatsApp, some are doing it for low-income communities, some are doing it for high-income communities, but then they're creating video content that can go out much broader.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_01: I want to have an absolute melting pot of different models, approaches, um, uh identities, creating journalism that genuinely A, makes people feel informed enough to live a rich life in the local area that they live in, whether it's a village or a city, and feel genuinely connected because I think in the modern world a lot of people lack that sense of connection, and I think local journalism is the best place to provide it.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_01: How do we get to that point?
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: I think it has to be that the people who work in our industry who feel like they have got sort of an innovative sense, a sense of like, I could try this, I could try that.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_01: I would like to see more of that, and I would like to see more things happening on a smaller scale.
1:09:39
SPEAKER_01: I do not believe that very, I know this is a point I've made many times, I do not believe that very large foundations throwing 20 million pounds at uh or dollars at a solution that then peters out after a few years because they never had that sense, I don't think that's the right way to do it.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_01: I think we need incredible creative innovation in local areas, and I totally agree with Varnan.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_01: In some contexts, you are going to have to have long-term philanthropic funding.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_01: But then let's be honest about that.
1:10:05
SPEAKER_01: Those are the areas where we're going to put the philanthropic funding.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_01: In other areas, why don't we see what people will pay for and what they will read in a genuinely innovative local news environment?
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think we've got there yet, but I think we can, and I think there are signs in the past couple of years that we're starting to go in that direction.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_03: Varnen, what uh what are your hopes for what will get us to the best place in 24 years?
1:10:30
SPEAKER_04: I don't know the answer to this.
1:10:32
SPEAKER_04: I've used this example before in other times where Amazon was not making a profit for the longest time until they went into AWS, right?
1:10:41
SPEAKER_04: Amazon Web Services.
1:10:42
SPEAKER_04: And then not only did they turn a profit, they they really, really, really expanded and grew.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_04: And I'm curious what is the local news analog to that?
1:10:54
SPEAKER_04: And obviously, we don't have to all turn into b I I don't think news to journalism is going back to the heydays of convertibles.
1:11:00
SPEAKER_04: I someone told me back in the 80s everyone a reporter would be driving a convertible.
1:11:04
SPEAKER_04: I don't think those days will come back.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_04: But are there are there skill sets, are there values, are there things that we provide to society that they will pay for that is not rooted in our content?
1:11:16
SPEAKER_04: Society is too used to free content, the ones that are kind of basic, right?
1:11:20
SPEAKER_04: They'll pay for stuff, but and so I I find it hard to convince people to start paying for something that they have not paid for a long time.
1:11:31
SPEAKER_04: And so what I hope what my hope is that in 24 years we would crack that code, especially local news, on what is it that they would pay for to keep a newspaper sustainable that is not reliant on the content and the eyeballs.
1:11:48
SPEAKER_04: I know that sounds kind of weird, but I I think I I I think that's just the way it is.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_04: Like we um a hundred people write this article, a million people write this article, but it doesn't really matter in the short term.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_04: I thought I You know, we'll have to so that's the that's the code we have to do.
1:12:05
SPEAKER_03: I think that's really fascinating, and I do think that um we're seeing the value of longitudinal data at the moment fought over by these again like giant companies controlled by a very small number of people.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_03: And I do wonder uh whether you've absolutely hit on the right thing there, Vaughan, and which is creating value at local level.
1:12:23
SPEAKER_03: And I hate myself to for saying that I also deeply agree with Yoshi on on this idea of scale, and that actually actually sort of being able to provide things which are not at scale um is suddenly going to be um something that is really valuable and that people doing the amazing work that both of you both you are doing and your organizations, your newsrooms are doing, um, can actually deliver that in a in a different way.
1:12:52
SPEAKER_00: Um Heather, I want to say Van and Yoshi, thank you so much.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_00: This was just an absolutely fascinating conversation.
1:13:00
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, thanks for having me, guys.
1:13:02
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
1:13:04
SPEAKER_03: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Tower Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_03: Our producer is Amanda Darrick, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earle.
1:13:28
SPEAKER_03: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.