Stop trying to make a profit from local news
John Thornton recently spoke to Peter Kafka of Recode about the news industry trends that led him to co-found, with Elizabeth Green, the American Journalism Project; as well as how John’s day job as a VC led him to become involved in nonprofit local news, AJP’s plans for 2020, and much more.
The podcast and Recode’s article can be found here. The transcript below has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Peter Kafka: I want to talk to you about your project and if I can summarize it adequately, you are raising money, which you then want to distribute to small local news startups. You think that all the efforts to save failing local news sites, local news, publications aren’t working, are misguided. You have a new plan. I want to talk to you about that. You’ve raised about 50 million bucks. You’ve distributed eight and a half of it so far but before we get there, I want to understand how you got to this point. You have a day job as a venture capitalist. You’ve got a background, I think mostly in enterprise IT.
John Thornton: No. That’s right, enterprise software.
PK: What got you into the saving local journalism business?
JT: Oh, so go back more than a decade, 2000… Late 2007, early 2008, I was serving as the managing partner of our venture firm and we sort of woke up one morning and realized that we were underweight media relative to sort of our peer venture firms.
PK: Traditionally VCs didn’t touch media at all.
JT: Not a lot. I mean Austin Ventures was stage agnostic and really fairly industry agnostic and so our peer firm was probably 10 or 15% media and we had essentially none and so we thought it’d be a good idea if we were going to be contrarian to make sure that we’re being purposely contrarian.
PK: Maybe if we’re not going to do media, let’s have a reason for it.
JT: Yeah, let’s have a reason for it. It took the young team that was working for me about a hot second to figure out that this was not the easiest way to make money in the world and so they went off to do other things. One of the things we did look at though briefly, this was just when the first distressed newspaper assets were just first coming on the market and so we looked at a couple of those books…
PK: And this is also the time, just for context, where the New York Times all of a sudden is in real trouble, has to take a high interest loan from-
JT: Carlos Slim, that’s right.
PK: Carlos Slim and sensible people are saying, is it possible the New York Times is going to go out of business?
JT: Well, yeah, for a moment there was a sort of spate of editorializing about what should happen in the eventuality that not so much the New York Times, but the local papers just went kaboom. But we’d looked at these newspaper properties, and I was just struck with the fact that it didn’t look like the market was going to support the kind of coverage that we all had been accustomed to. The sort of hard news at the local level and this is a very shorthand version, but the stuff that affects your decision when you pull the lever at the ballot box. So I was struck by this notion of a market failure because I’m a big fan of markets and so when you see a failure, you pay attention and so I’m an obsessive little dude and so got very interested in this notion of market failure in local news.
PK: I just want to poke at this a little more because I think a lot of folks who are in tech, a lot of investors might say, “Well if the market’s failing… If newspapers are failing, it must be they’re not fulfilling their purpose.”
JT: Yup.
PK: If there was a reason for them to exist, they would exist and they would also point to… Pick internet, especially tech news startup, they seem to be doing it okay. So these guys can figure it out or they’re just not very interested in. What was something about news that was of particular interest to you?
JT: Well, there’s the public interest and there’s what interests the public and I’ve developed a pretty firm conviction that they’re adjacent but they’re not the same thing. In economic theory, there’s this thing called a public good and so local news, in our view, lives in the neighborhood of public goods and positive externalities, which is a bunch of economic big words for there’s no real incentive to produce the kind of news we’re talking about. The fact that it’s not widely consumed, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to exist.
PK: What’s another example of public good? This is a good idea just to tease out for a second.
JT: Clean water, national defense, parks, the libraries.
PK: We all need it.
JT: We all need it but none of us individually is incented to produce it.
PK: And then the other thing I wanted to ask about is, I do remember around this time there were people, there were capitalists, VCs and entrepreneurs trying to poke at local news and they would try things like, well, what if we could just aggregate a bunch of blogs?
JT: Right.
PK: And you know on their own, they’re not going to work very well but we can gather them together and that gives enough scale for advertising. Why not try some sort of version of that where you said, well let’s figure out a version the market can support.
JT: The problem is the stuff we’re talking about is expensive relative to the traffic that it generates. So if you think about the stuff that you need to do your job as a citizen, it’s largely accountability journalism and if you think about that on a sort of spectrum of resource intensiveness from a database… The Texas Tribune in one of their first sort of discoveries was the public employee salary database, which was not terribly expensive to aggregate or maintain but generated pretty good traffic… That’s on the less resource intensive end and then you go to the right and you go through beat reporting and at the far right you have the kind of Pulitzer team that big journalistic institutions field every year. The economics of accountability journalism particularly have never been good and-
PK: And if you want to aggregate local blogs, you might be able to get a bunch of restaurant reviews.
JT: That’s right and business openings.
PK: And doesn’t mean that’s not a real thing.
JT: No, no. It’s not and so we talk about, and this is pretty received economic wisdom I think, we talk about three kinds of information needs, what you have as a consumer, what you have as a worker, what you have as an audience member in terms of entertainment. Those three are pretty well covered and so whether it’s Eater, Zillow or some of the ways in which newspapers are still existing, those needs are pretty well covered. The fourth need, the need as a voter, is less and less well covered at least is our assertion.
PK: I agree with your assertion. It’s very scary and I dip in and out of looking at local news solutions and without trying to offend anyone, I have found very few that seem to work over many years.
JT: I’ve just got to the point where I’m just not very concerned about offending anybody. Ten years ago, 11 years ago, we were sort of patted on the head when we were running this experiment at the Texas Tribune and we were kind of told this is a particularly very virulent recession but the news geniuses, the media geniuses will solve this and about every 18 months it’s been another solution that is supposedly going to save newspapers. I’ve just gotten tired of listening to that because it’s just not going to happen.
PK: You make for a good podcast. So in 2000, 2008 you say this is a problem that I want to solve that leads to the Texas Tribune.
JT: Evan Smith, my good friend, was then at Texas Monthly. I told him about this experience I had looking at newspaper placement books and he said, “Well, if you want to try that, Texas at the state level is as good as anywhere else to start,” and I said, “Well, great. Let’s go do that.” And he said, “Yeah, no way. I’ve got a great job as the editor of Texas Monthly.” Ninety, 120 days later, that began to look not so great and so off we went. But it was never, at least for me, about Texas particularly and not even particularly state level, although statehouse coverage is really… the economics are really difficult. It was about this notion that the market just didn’t look like it was working in what we call civic news and I just didn’t see anything on the horizon that was going to make things anything but worse and unfortunately that we were pretty right on that.
PK: And you know, by the way, I’ve seen people say, well, why couldn’t you just put a camera in front of the local whatever board and tape that and then stream that and you can.
JT: Yes and… yeah, that’s part of it.
PK: But if you want to know why just putting a camera in front of something doesn’t work. Look at the Trump administration. What happens on camera is only part of what happens.
JT: Well and whether it’s a camera or algorithms, all of those things. The good news we hope is that all of those things are going to drive the cost of what we call minimum viable journalism down, but it’ll never get to zero and it’ll never be without substantial human intervention. So what we’re really focused on with AJP is providing the humans and particularly the humans on the business side of local news organizations.
PK: And you’re both raising capital, you’re going to contribute capital, you have ideas for how the papers themselves can raise more. You guys want to raise $500 million over how many years?
JT: Well, we’re starting with 50. We have $46 million in commitments first. Our first fund is targeted at 50.
PK: And the idea is overall you get to 500 and then you want to get other people to kick in 500. You get to… You think $1 billion can kind of solve the local news problem in America.
JT: Ish. It’s a nice round number.
PK: That’s sort of your stretch goal right now.
JT: The way the math works it costs, we think, close to a billion in terms of one-time investment. The way we get to $1 billion is we think $2 billion has come out of local newsgathering spend over the last 15 years, and we got very scientific and said, let’s try to get half of that back and so that’s the billion.
PK: Let’s get half of that back. Roughly put 25,000 journalists to work, on average $80,000 a year all-in, and so what you’re doing now is you’re distributing some of the money you’ve raised to small papers, some startups, and these are… You have an acronym that I think you guys must have coined or maybe you didn’t coin… CNO, which means what?
JT: Civic News Organization. I’m thinking about the first grantees. I don’t think any of them have any print products so it’s exclusively digital, exclusively mission-focused on coverage below the national level and exclusively nonprofit.
PK: Why do they have to be nonprofits? Why couldn’t this be a for profit business?
JT: The long version of this is really long. The short version is back to the idea of market failure. When I mentioned the four information needs at the top, what has happened in the history of newspapers is that once the first three — as a consumer, as an audience member, as a worker — once those are sort of met then what’s left over is divided between profit and meeting the fourth information need and so what we think we’ve got plenty of data on at this point is that given the laws of physics or gravity or whatever metaphor you want to use in media economics, what profit there is or what loss mitigation you can do is just at this point always going to win over serving the fourth information need.
PK: So a for profit business is just structurally unable to make it… You just think it just cannot work and we’re seeing a decade plus of evidence that it’s not going to work. So you’re saying we’ve tried that. Let’s move on.
JT: Yeah, very much so and I’m not a New Testament scholar, but serving God and Mammon… You know, if you Google that there are about a million quotes why that’s not good. Yeah, there’s been some work in that area.
PK: I was looking through one of your papers where you explained other solutions people have tried, why they don’t work. Just every other person that comes through this room and tells me what they’re doing is preaching the gospel of subscriptions. That makes a lot of sense for some things and you say it’s not going to work for local papers.
JT: So if you look at the earnings reports of the public newspaper companies that are reasonably transparent on this, and none of them is terribly transparent because the story’s just not very good. They talk about how their digital subscriptions are growing in the 30 and 40 percent range, but it’s all in just a tiny base and so if you force your way through the math, which is more doable with some of them than others, you come to a very consistent conclusion, which is that for every buck they’re losing on a year-over-year basis in advertising revenue, they’re recovering less than a dime. McClatchy I think reported last quarter that the company has shrunk for 26 consecutive quarters. There’s just no hope that civic news is going to win in an environment where the idea is you pay as you go and you pay for what you read rather than solving for what society needs as a whole.
PK: And there aren’t enough people in any given community who are going to pay enough money to make a viable newspaper?
JT: If you add up all the digital subscriptions in local news — so not Wall Street Journal, not Washington Post, not New York Times — the nonprofit news industry is actually almost as big as that, so that just gives you a sense for how minuscule a contribution that actually makes.
PK: And then the last thing you say won’t work is basically hope a billionaire buys us, hope Laurene Powell Jobs invests in us as a philanthropy or maybe Warren Buffet buys us as a for-profit business. Hope a rich guy or girl buys us is not a good plan.
JT: We’re incredibly pro-billionaire. Very, very, very pro billionaire. We think for the most part though, with the exception of the Washington Post, which Marty Baron was nice enough to give me an hour recently and he told me how the first thing that Jeff Bezos did was say, this is going to be a national paper, that that’s the way the economics work and so there’s really nobody who recently at least has tried this on a for-profit basis who hasn’t either thrown up their hands or, in the case of Paul Huntsman in Salt Lake City, converted it to a nonprofit.
And so it’s not out of the question, but I know that when my local paper came on the market 18 months ago or so and I had wealthy, really civically big hearted friends who said, “Well, what do you think?” And my response was, “Well, what are they going to pay you to take it?” Because do you really want to buy something that my 13- and 15-year-old step-kids have never really heard of and won’t have any reason to? What happened instead was it traded for four-and-a-half or five times cash flow to Gatehouse who immediately offered buyouts to not just the whole newsroom but the entire company, while putting on the back page at the same time, this sort of heartstring plucking plea to support journalism by subscribing to the Austin American-Statesman, which I just find to be complete and utter bullshit.
PK: And this is this part of the problem, right? You estimate 55 percent of the local papers are now owned by private equity firms, which by design are supposed to sort of strip them of parts.
JT: I don’t blame anybody because again, I’ve spent my entire career trying to beat the market essentially.
PK: It’s capitalism right?
JT: Yeah.
PK: And that’s fine, but their job is to wring out efficiencies, try to salvage some value and then find another buyer in four and five to seven years but to ask people to subscribe to those papers as they’re compressing them seems both like bullshit and also-
JT: It’s pretty cynical.
PK: … and also a hard sell.
JT: It’s an increasingly hard sell and what’s happening in most, I would venture to say, newspaper properties is they’ve now been at this long enough that they can see what churn really is and so net subscriber growth is flattening out and it’s becoming apparent to everybody that this is tough.
PK: By the way, the LA Times, right?
JT: Mm-hmm.
PK: Used to be a national paper or was on the edge of being a national paper, but certainly one of America’s best papers.
JT: For sure.
PK: Has had all kinds of problems. Now has one of these benevolent billionaire owners. We hope he has given them a lot of resources, said, go sell digital subscriptions and they have sold very, very few.
JT: Yeah, it’s hard. It’s just hard and at the same time digital advertising is shrinking for a lot of papers almost as quickly as print. Nobody really saw that coming. Facebook and Google have two-thirds to three-quarters share of all net new digital ads at the local level and so it’s just a really tough proposition.
PK: I want to come back to Facebook and Google in a little bit. So let’s talk about what your plan is. So you have sort of a three prong plan for these community newspaper organizations that you sort of want… You basically are sort of requiring them to sort of embrace this economic model, right?
JT: What are the prongs? [laughter]
PK: The requirement as you’re giving out money, you’ve got a bunch of requirements. One is that all the news has to be free. You’ve got to serve the community. Maybe you can have a paid product, but…
JT: Which is a big deal and a controversial one.
PK: So you can’t have a paywall, but what is the economic model that you say is going to work?
JT: It’s easiest to answer that question if you think of starting from scratch in a market, although so far our investments have been exclusively in existing organizations and this will vary from case to case. The heuristic that we’re trying to get people to get their head around is you figure out what the quantum of information is that every citizen should have access to free of charge, regardless of their willingness or ability to pay. Figure out what that costs, which is not an insignificant exercise and subject to lots of controversy, but just sort of bracket that for a second. Multiply that times two. So two years of kind of runway operating expenses… that’s what the community needs to put up up front, that’s philanthropic capital. Then count on philanthropy covering at least 50% of the bills forever and that’s your planning assumption.
PK: I’m not quite with you here. So when you say the community needs to put up, you go out to?
JT: Philanthropy.
PK: Right, but there’s two versions of philanthropy, right?
JT: Mm-hmm.
PK: You’re saying, you need to get this 2X number, you need to go get that on your own?
JT: Oh, saying to the organizations?
PK: Yeah.
JT: In the case of AJP, we’re saying we’ll go help you and we’ll put up part.
PK: We’re going to help you get some of that starter cash. You’re going to have to get some of it on your own.
JT: We’ll match you at some level and we’ll go shoulder-to-shoulder with you in convincing your community why this is a good idea. But part of what they’ve got to understand is that like performing arts or like parks or libraries, the community’s going to have to foot half the bill and then we’re going to try to help these things build the commercial, the membership, the corporate sponsorship capabilities to cover the other half but it’s just going to be half.
PK: And so I’ll try answering the prong question that I asked. So I think the model is we think that straight up philanthropy is going to cover a third of the costs. We think corporate sponsorship, another version of saying advertising in some form or another will kick in a third and then the rest of the third comes from?
JT: Readers.
PK: Readers.
JT: Audience.
PK: You will kick in on your own. We won’t require you to, but the same way that…
JT: Memberships essentially.
PK: … your local NPR affiliate asks you for money, we’re going to do the same thing.
JT: That’s right. With the slight amendment to that is that as a planning assumption, we’re saying it’s not a third, a third, a third, it’s more like half, a quarter, a quarter.
PK: Got it. Someone’s got a great idea for a local community news organization. They say we got smart tech people, et cetera, working on it. They come to you and say, look, our community doesn’t realize how important we’re going to be to them. We can’t get that initial round of capital we need. Is there a bridge there or you go no, that’s literally the other requirement? You have to prove it to them.
JT: For now it’s sort of table stakes and one of the places where we’re vulnerable in terms of our value proposition, if you will, is we are not seeking out the neediest cases. We’re not necessarily seeking out news deserts. We’re not necessarily seeking out places where there really is no commercial base of support and there really is not much philanthropy.
PK: Like in a lot of cases you are saying we’re going to places that are first of all up and running like VTDigger. That’s in Vermont and it’s always held up as sort of one of the successful local news startups, saying we’re going to help you grow faster.
JT: That’s right and we’re going to help you hopefully. We’ve got two proximate objectives. One is to kind of put into the win column a number of organizations that we can say, okay, those we think are “sustainable” and you’ve got to put air quotes on them because we haven’t been through a recession in 10 years. Two is we want to make investments that as efficiently as possible grow the news organization’s ability to spend money in the newsroom. In our model that somewhat counter-intuitively, especially given the name, does not mean hiring journalists. It means hiring commercial sponsorship and membership and fundraising people.
PK: People willing to shake the tree.
JT: You got it.
PK: You got an interesting line one of your planning docs that you guys are distributing that says growing too slowly is expensive. So I get that for traditional VC investment and that’s sort of the standard point of view and there’s some counters to that. If you’re running a local news organization, should you be thinking that way?
JT: Almost any of us has experienced this either in our professional lives or in the nonprofit world where if you literally have to make a nickel to invest a nickel, what happens is people get discouraged. Your best people go to places where that’s not the case and so an A person gets replaced by a B, B-minus person who doesn’t have the institutional memory and it’s just sort of a slog. What we’ve observed is that it sounds pretty simple, but the news organizations that have done best have had some level of upfront investment so they can grow at a reasonable clip. They can invest resources in tech, in revenue generating stuff that they don’t have to live from day to day.
PK: And so velocity is important not in the sense that like you say, you’re not telling people to crank out X number of blog posts per day or whatever the metric is. It’s that you want the business to grow rapidly because that then sort of generates its own virtuous cycle.
JT: The thing that the Tribune is probably best known for is its revenue diversity and the reason that we were able to do that was we raised enough capital upfront that we… Before we had a media property to monetize, we had the people to go monetize it and that’s that’s very standard in the venture capital world. I’m a software venture capitalist and I’ve never seen a software company sell software if it doesn’t have any sales people. So what we’re suggesting is just like in that sector, we’ve got to give these organizations the sort of slack capital, the equity capital to invest in revenue generating infrastructure up front.
PK: I did want to ask you about this. You made a nice segue for me. Primarily your career is mostly enterprise software. I was looking at your list of stuff there. Now there’s maybe one company I recognize. What’s your either best-known success or biggest success?
JT: Oh, this is always such an embarrassing question because what I’ve spent my career on is systems and network management software, which is stuff that nobody’s ever heard of but my first investment, 20-odd years ago, was a company called Tivoli Systems, which went public and was sold to IBM and became the foundation of IBM’s systems and network management infrastructure. More contemporarily we were investors in SolarWinds, which is another systems network management company, $6 or $7 billion market cap.
PK: And so besides the idea that if you’re going to be successful, you need people on the business side and people who can sell stuff, or in the terms of like the newspaper case, shake the trees. What else have you learned in your investing and enterprise software career that’s applicable to what you’re doing now?
JT: It sounds corny and cliche, but leadership, leadership, leadership, quality of people, culture, a culture of delivering and doing what you say you’re going to do. One of the things that we learned over the years as a venture firm was that, and it’s sounds like a tautology, but it’s really not. One of my mentors in the business used to say that companies that hit their numbers tend to hit their numbers. In other words, they know how to set expectations. They know how to plan and they deliver against plan and in the nonprofit world there’s a tendency to sort of relax that a little bit.
PK: Give you a pass.
JT: Yeah, and it tends to be a little self-fulfilling, right? You get a pass because you don’t have the resources to plan and predict and to have excess capacity and then you don’t have the resources and then you don’t hit the plan and you don’t hit the plan and you don’t have the resources.
PK: Google and Facebook are hovering right off stage in this conversation.
JT: Is that what they’re doing?
PK: Well, let’s see. You’ve mentioned them once and you can either be cynical and say they are announcing that they want to help local journalism because it’s going make people like me stop complaining about them. You can say this is altruism. They really do want to do this. They both have made announcements where they’re both pledging $300 million. It’s vague how they’re doing it. You say this is a problem. It’s maybe a billion dollars a year between the two of them. It’s not quite pocket change, but it’s pretty darn close to pocket change for Facebook and Google to kick in $1 billion a year. Why not just make them hand that over? I mean you can’t literally force them to do it, but why not just make it, look, this is a problem that you have helped create and you can easily solve it. Why not make that case to them?
JT: Well, we make that case to them all the time in various ways. I’m always careful about using the word should in very close proximity to anybody else’s money because they’re running a business and they’ve got shareholders and just like the newspaper companies, they’ve got to do what’s best for their shareholders-
PK: But they burn that money many, many, many times a year on things that are… They could easily part with that money and it wouldn’t affect their business in any way. Facebook paid a $5 billion fine this summer. It’s a blip.
JT: Yeah. At the margin, I’m sure you could say that… I’m sure they hear that from a lot of different directions.
PK: Right. They could solve all the world’s problems…. But this is directly related to what they do. They are both in the advertising business. It directly has impact on the business you’re trying to save. It’s not clean air or immigrants rights, all of which are very important. Let me stop making up theoretical things they could solve. But this is a problem they have helped to create.
JT: Right. And so their approach for the most part, which is understandable if you’re a tech company, is to try to apply their tech to making the business better, which works to a degree but is not ultimately going to work in the way we need it to, which is again that fourth information need and both of them have been generous to some degree in nonprofit news. Facebook particularly just made a big investment in the Texas Tribune where they’re going to do something they’re calling Rev Lab, which is going to try to take best practices across both nonprofit and for-profit enterprises but for the most part it’s nonprofit. For both of them as sort of rounding error on the rounding error because they’re a lot more comfortable saying we’re going to make these businesses better than they are saying there’s no effing business here and so it’s primarily a philanthropic pursuit and we’re just going to lean in into that. That’s not something that they have done to date and maybe they will but we haven’t seen any signs of it.
PK: I mean, whenever I propose to someone at one of those organizations that they should just write bigger checks, they look at me like I have multiple horns and they also say something along the lines of, we want to make sure that we are creating sustainable business models.
JT: And that’s what I just called total bullshit because-
PK: But that’s also what you’re saying. We want a sustainable business model.
JT: Here’s the thing that tends to get trivialized, but it’s kind of the whole ball game, which is sustainable and commercially viable are not the same thing. Otherwise, there are all kinds of institutions in our society that wouldn’t exist. Parks, libraries, hospitals. You get the joke and so when it’s Facebook or Google or newspapers or just commercial media, commercial news, junkies or apologists, when they say, well, it’s got to be sustainable… This is the line we hear… It’s got to be profitable to invest more in the newsroom. What we’re saying is that will never happen and you can tech whip this to death and the trajectory of the last dozen years is not going to change.
PK: I like that you say bullshit a lot, it’s good.
JT: Mainly just in this line of work because it’s really got a little, I don’t know if toxic is the right word, but apologists for commercial media and local news are not doing us any favors because the line that I’ve taken to repeating is that the only thing worse than no hope is false hope and so every erg of energy that goes into… And I’m all for membership, I’m all for digital subscriptions, I’m all for increasing the amount of our news coverage that readers pay for, but to say that that’s the whole answer to the exclusion of what we know the air ball is, which has got to be covered by philanthropy, and to make really nonsensical arguments to the contrary is just it’s frustrating when you believe in this stuff like we do.
PK: So let’s say we’ve converted some of the audience here to believers as well. They can kick in money and just to be clear, it’s a straight nonprofit. The AJP is a straight nonprofit, right?
JT: Yeah.
PK: You call it a venture philanthropy-
JT: That’s right.
PK: … but it’s me giving you money. I’m not getting a return.
JT: It is. And we confuse people when we talk about investment because it really is just a straight up tax deductible charitable contribution. That’s right.
PK: What else can I do to help if I believe in the mission?
JT: Well if you believe in the mission at the sort of everyday citizen level, go support your local nonprofit news organization, go seek those out and the Institute for Nonprofit News website is a really good place to start there. But the other thing you can do is really just sort of in conversation began to raise this as an issue with your various circles, because this is going to require a level of movement building that we’re up for but is not going to be easy. We think we need to increase the sustaining journalism philanthropy. So the annual philanthropic spin on journalism by something like a factor of eight to 10.
PK: I will say I’m a lifelong journalist. I don’t know how to do anything else for better and for worse. When I hear other journalists, and sometimes they run the biggest and most important newspapers in the country, talk about the value of journalism there is a little bit of self-serving pompousness and I feel uneasy saying that because I literally believe the country needs these papers to exist or news organizations, or else we’re doomed but it does veer into this self-serving… And often you end up with newspaper reporters describing themselves as if they’re firefighters or EMTs. Any tip you have for suggesting that this is very important, but without coming off like a gas bag?
JT: Well, journalism for journalism’s sake is a pretty tough sell. Whether it’s to philanthropy or to somebody writing a check in a commercial transaction. When we were just getting started at the Tribune, I got really good advice from then-governor Perry’s chief fundraiser and she’s like half my age and she sort of pats me on the head and she says, “John, I really respect what you guys are doing here, but let me give you a tip. You got to stop using that word,” and I said, “What word is that?” And she said, “Journalism.”
She said, “In a conservative’s mind it just lights up liberal.” I said, “Okay, well what do we say instead?” Accountability, centrist down the middle, good government, transparency… all of those are journalistic values and all of those are the resource that’s being delivered to society that we think makes journalism and democracy interdependent. But yeah, selling journalism for the sake of journalism and all of us in this community coming off like we’re some sort of saviors is a bit of a danger. I think there’s actually less of that than there was a dozen years ago, I think. I think both journalists and the public are a lot more woke to kind of what’s going on here and what the function of journalism both is and isn’t.
PK: Last question. One of the reasons you’re in town here shivering is you’re trying to replace yourself as CEO. How’s that job hunt going?
JT: It’s going well. We’ve got a ton of interest. Yeah. We’ve got a ton of interest. It’s a bit of a needle to thread in the sense that we’re looking for somebody who’s really executionally oriented and can really enable this little team that we have to in turn enable these news organizations to be more successful and then this person also needs to be a leader, one of many leaders we hope of a movement that really drives nonprofit journalism as a philanthropic priority. So it’s not going to be an easy job. It’s going to be a damn fun one. It’s going to be a really important one and we’ll have that wrapped up I think in the first quarter.
PK: Where do I have to live if I want this job?
JT: You probably can’t do this job very well in the next 18 months if you’re not on an Acela stop.
PK: Okay. If you want to be on an Acela stop, that means the Northeast corridor for those of you don’t have an Amtrak around you and you want to do this job hit up John. I’m not going to give out his address because you can figure it out that’s the first test.
JT: Can I put in one word on that front?
PK: Go for it.
JT: One of the things that we’re trying to do here is make these jobs in the business side of nonprofit journalism a thing. Much like sort of Teach For America brought people into education a generation ago, even if they weren’t going to do this for a career, for a life-tour of duty.
PK: Peace Corps model.
JT: Right and so that’s the other thing I guess that people can do, with their kids or yourselves and you are a disaffected tech worker and you want some meaning and purpose in your life. This first round of grants is going to fund about 30 positions. Over time, we’ll fund about a hundred and it’s really important that we get great people.
PK: So if you don’t want to make journalism your life, but you think it’s important and you think you can help. Maybe you’re a Googler or a Facebooker you got money and you don’t love where you work. Come work with John. Thanks for coming in, John.
JT: Thanks Peter.
