Independence, ability to focus, and impact: How nonprofit media orgs can thrive in a difficult media economy
We talked to David Cabo, founder of Spain’s Civio, Juan Gómez, sub-editor of the Colombian Rutas del Conflicto, and Rachel Olroyd, editor of the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Drops in print ad revenue and slow digital advertising have meant that leading news organisations are having to come up with new money-making strategies to avoid further staff cuts.
Philanthropy seems to be the antidote for some. Univision launched its foundation to fund independent journalism and digital projects this week. The Guardian and The New York Times have set up nonprofit arms to secure funding for their journalism: the charitable status presumably serving as an incentive for organisations and private individuals to donate.
This shakeup in the business model has also resulted in a growing number of independent nonprofit news outlets. We talked to three of them, represented by David Cabo, founder of Spain’s Civio (winner of a Data Journalism Award), Juan Gómez, sub-editor of the Colombian Rutas del Conflicto (winner of a Data Journalism Award), and Rachel Olroyd, editor of the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism to find out whether nonprofits represent a viable news alternative, how their work differs from that of a commercial newsroom, and their relationship with donors and collaborators.
The not for profit sector is not a silver bullet but it is a force for good
Freedom from power
Gómez draws our attention to the fact that Colombia is an extremely divided and rural country, and that wealth is in the hands of the very few. He says only 32% of the population have access to the Internet. (A study published by the Colombian government cites the same number.)
‘Almost all media here in Colombia are really attached with economic groups’ says Gómez, as they are owned by politicians and corporations, making in-depth investigations difficult.
‘We’re in a transcendental moment in our history’, says Gómez, referring to the peace process in Colombia, underlining the need for good, independent journalism, which Rutas del Conflicto is aiming to provide.
In collaboration with Armando info, Rutas del Conflicto spent eights months in the Llanos Basin in Colombia to produce two important multimedia reports: One about farmers who had owned land in the region for nearly half a century before being unsettled by violence from Paramilitary and Guerrilla groups and seeing their land used for oil extraction by Pacific Rubiales (now called Pacific Exploration & Production), and the other about the fall of the petrol giant in 2016.
Gómez says that the petroleum company was depicted as ‘heroic’ in the media, because it was providing jobs and therefore growing the economy. However, during the course of Rutas del Conflicto’s investigation, it became clear that the history of the company often coincided with the history of the conflict. Gómez believes that no journalist ever dug deeper because of the company’s financial stakes in commercial media; they were indirectly paying money for silence.
In 2013, journalist Daniel Pardo lost his job at digital news portal KienyKe after publishing a critical piece about Pacific Rubiales.
‘If we weren’t a nonprofit newsroom this [investigation] would have never been possible’.
Shedding light on opaque public affairs
Until 2014, according to Cabo, ‘Spain was the only big European country that didn’t recognise the right to access public records’, suggesting striking opacity in the country’s public affairs. The country’s lack of trust in journalists, combined with the public’s ‘thirst for political news’, underlines the country’s need for a new model.
Civio was founded in 2012 and has undertaken a number of investigations to shed some light on murky public dealings. Civio’s Pardonometer, for example, is a portal that reveals the amount of pardons conceded by the Spanish government through data and investigation.
The nonprofit was able to show that over the last 20 years, 10,000 pardons had been granted in Spain, many of which were for corruption charges. Since their investigation, pardons have been consistently fewer and come at a political price. Another project by Civio called Who’s paid for the work? monitors public contracts to uncover who benefited most during the crisis. After having investigated more than 8,000 public work contracts, Civio now uses the data and knowledge gathered to push for better transparency in public procurement.
Civio also uncovered the names and salaries of the government’s advisors and created a map of power relations with over 6,800 verified links between businesspeople and politicians.
‘We have achieved a significant milestone: the new Law on Public Contracts incorporated some of our suggestions to make the entire procurement process more transparent and created a body to monitor irregularities. In 2013 we campaigned and managed to include the royal household, political parties and trade unions into the Freedom of Information Act.’, says Cabo.
Time: the most valuable asset
According to Olroyd, media companies in the UK are ‘increasingly squeezed’.
‘An organisation like the Bureau [of Investigative Journalism] allows journalists the privileges of time and focus. These are rarely found in newsrooms today where the demands of 24 hour news and shrinking resources make it hard to put teams of reporters on one area for months’, says Olroyd.
Investigating US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen is a project that the Bureau has been able to focus on for years. The amount of civilians and children killed in the strikes is recorded and put into narrative timelines, in order to hold the White House to account.
Olroyd says that this project has brought transparency, data, case studies, and stories to the public’s attention, changing the conversation around the use of drones.
‘Through the course of our project we have seen civilian casualties drop quite dramatically and last year President Obama passed an Executive Order which made the protection of civilian life a cross agency focus’, claims Olroyd, underlining the perks of being able to focus on one topic for an extensive period of time in order to have impact and even bring about a change in legislation.
Collaboration: No more dog-eat-dog world
Staff cuts in commercial newsrooms and a shortage of time have pushed more traditional news media to collaborate with nonprofit newsrooms to benefit from the latter’s ‘expertise and do great journalism that would be difficult, if not impossible, otherwise’, according to the American Press Institute.
‘We are not a publishing platform as such. We co-publish most of our work with partners’, says Olroyd, stressing that the work of nonprofits often centers around collaborations with other media companies in order to achieve maximum reach and impact. Some of their partners include The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and The Independent.
Cabo also says that Civio does not compete with other media, ‘on the contrary: many outlets re-publish all our articles. They get quality content and we are able to reach a much broader general audience’.
‘Medicamentalia — our research on global access to health is our most ambitious collaboration with journalists and media organizations from other countries,’ says Cabo.
In 2015, the research was focused on global access to essential medicine, in 2017, it was centred around vaccines, and it is now moving on to contraceptives and reproductive health, seeing as 73% of the 142 million women needing modern methods of contraception live in the world’s poorest countries.
Some of the top level collaborators on the project include Euronews, El Mundo, La Sexta TV, Correct!v, EuroScientist, Il Sole 24 Ore, 20 Minutes, Cadena Ser, La Nación, and Knack Magazine. In a project like this, Civio’s role is coordination and setting a common investigative methodology for data gathering and analysis.
Gómez also speaks favourably of collaborations with commercial newsrooms, suggesting that their different skill sets are complementary. ‘If you want to do in-depth research, you really need collaboration’, he says.
Rutas del Conflicto have also worked with Dan Archer from Empathetic Media, who came to Colombia armed with VR and AR equipment to tell the stories of people in regions that have been particularly harmed by the conflict.
Gómez refers to this collaboration as an experiment, because the stories of the ‘victims or survivors’ had never been told by the media before, especially in this format. The most important principle in a project like this, according to Gómez, is that the relationship between the survivor and journalist is based on respect.
According to Gómez, the line between what you should say and shouldn’t say about the stories of the victims is really thin, particularly when using immersive technologies that have the capacity to ‘really traumatise and harm people’ due to their artificial proximity. Rutas del Conflicto therefore also collaborated with psychologists and social workers to learn how to talk to people that have faced trauma through active listening.
Rather than focusing on victimisation, says Gómez, journalists were advised to ask questions that project to the future: ‘How did you survive the 50 years after the event?’
Who is reading it anyway?
‘What a lot of foundation-supported media are doing is providing quality news to audiences that are already getting a lot of quality news. That’s not a bad thing, but I don’t think they’re addressing the problem of the broader lack of public knowledge in the larger citizenry’, says Rodney Benson on NiemanLab, suggesting that there is one wide gap nonprofits are not filling.
This problem is particularly noticeable in the Colombian media landscape. Gómez says the majority of the population ‘is not aware of the things that are going on’. The influential media outlets are two TV channels, one of which is against the peace process, and eight out of ten Colombians get their information from radio. Seeing as just over a quarter of people have access to the Internet, it is clear that only very few people in Colombia have the ability to actually come into contact with the work of Rutas del Conflicto.
In order to reach beyond those that have Internet access, ‘community radio stations in municipalities are the best option to get allies’, says Gómez, showing that efforts are being made to reach analog audiences.
Conversely, relationships with commercial media also tie ‘[nonprofits] into the larger commercial media system because they have to produce content that the commercial media are going to be comfortable with’, writes Benson.
Cabo also admits that Civio’s regular audience are ‘highly qualified readers with a deeper interest in how decisions are made’, rather than just being interested in having news based on quotes and declarations.
In order to reach and engage a broader audience, Civio is moving away from access journalism to focus on more explanatory reporting, as seen particularly in Civio’s Official Daily Gazette, where they delve into ‘policies not politics’. One of the most recent publications on the website, for example, details Spain signing an agreement with Saudi Arabia to hide information about defense.
Donors
‘Most of our funders are committed to multi-year grants that support the organisation as a whole. We seek project funding when we have identified an area of investigation that we want to stay on for some time. Like all not for profits, our work is independent of our funders’, says Olroyd.
Gómez says that Rutas del Conflicto is ‘trying to reach more hands, more organisations, and more foundations to make it bigger’. He acknowledges that there can be a danger of losing independence, but the key is to make it clear to donors from the start that editorial freedom ‘is not negotiable’.
Civio’s donors help the organisation work in a stable and independent manner, according to Cabo. They allow the nonprofit to investigate issues and promote transparency within institutions and holding public authorities accountable by applying pressure on them.
‘They expect from us to be as much a reliable source of information as an effective agent for change’, says Cabo.
‘We are particularly transparent in this area. With regards to the support of our large donors, we are very strict in their selection: we do not accept funding from any entity whose mission or values clash with ours, and Civio does not accept anonymous donations under any circumstance, neither big or small. We disclose not only our big donors, but also every small contribution we receive. Our base of supporters is remarkably loyal. Ideally, long-term support would be instrumental to help us grow more steadily, but most of our funds come from short-term or project-based support.’
While philanthropy clearly affords these newsrooms time and editorial freedom to carry out investigations and affect change, in an article on journalism.eu American journalist Jack Shafer tells Emma Heald that this is not always the panacea.
‘The Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal earned their reputations by competing in the marketplace, not by stroking philanthropic billionaires or foundations.’
‘Their dynamism and adaptability allowed them to gain their dominant positions in the market; to remove the financial impetus for such growth could have a detrimental effect on their innovation and efficacy in news distribution. It would also, crucially, change the way that they measure their success: an increased focus on story impact could be a positive outcome but this is not relevant for many types of news.’ writes Heald.
Tips on starting your nonprofit
- Olroyd: Get some solid funding that will support you through the first few years. Don’t over promise. Setting something up takes time. Hire good people who buy into the mission. Focus — you can’t do everything.
- Cabo: Focus on specific topics or priorities, and then try to leverage the information generated to make a significant impact. Change doesn’t happen on its own. And always be crystal clear with your mission and your agenda, and let those guide your journalism.
- Gómez: Don’t let anyone jeopardise your independence — it is the heart of your work.
Editor’s note: The article previously stated that Civio was able to show that over the last 20 years, 100,000 pardons had been granted in Spain, many of which were for corruption charges. The actual number of pardons is 10,000.
David Cabo is the founder of Civio. He previously worked at HM Revenue & Customs, Accenture, and BBVA Global Markets.
Rachel Oldroyd is the managing editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. She previously worked at the Mail on Sunday, where she launched the Reportage section.
Juan Gómez is the sub-editor of Rutas del Conflicto.
