Midyear Update on Our Support for Nonprofit Journalism

Paid subscribers have already contributed about $7400

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Rather than a regular column, this week I want to provide an update on the plan, announced in early April, to create a paid subscription option for this newsletter and to donate almost all of the net proceeds to nonprofit journalism before year-end. Key to this: the recipients —no more than four of them—will be limited to orgs nominated by readers.

The bottom line is that we’ve already raised about $7400 for this fund, and I hope it may approach $10,000 by year’s end. There are more than 170 active paid subscribers right now, and you are more than welcome to join them if you like. I’m also happy to report that free subscriptions, which receive the same content and which will always be possible, have increased by more than 450, more than 6%, to nearly 8300 since the paid option was added. In the interest of transparency, I should also say that open rates have declined into the mid-forties and that average readership each week seems to be down about 15%. Unfortunately, that seems not unusual these days.

Whether or not you can contribute or want to, I hope you’ll participate in the conversation about where the money should go. You can nominate recipients, or discuss those others have nominated, in the comments on the April column, or in the comments this week below. I’ll also solicit contributions and nominations twice more this fall.

You’re also welcome to comment more generally on how the money should be directed. Some have already suggested that such donations, necessarily not huge, should be sent to smaller orgs where they might make a larger difference. I hear that, but also know from experience how much of a difference smaller contributions, in the aggregate, can make to larger entities. I’d be very interested in hearing more perspectives on this debate.

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to know about the potential recipient orgs. There have been 37 nominations so far, and they can be broken down into the following groups:

Local newsrooms (19): The 51^st, Abridged.org (KVIE), Alabama Reflector (States Newsroom), Arizona Luminaria, Baltimore Beat, the Beacon, Buffalo’s Fire, Fresnoland, Kansas City Defender, LA Taco, Lookout (Arizona), Louisiana Weekly, Mat-Su Sentinel, Minnesota Reformer (States Newsroom), MLK50, Open Vallejo, Shasta Scout, Streetsblog, WORT-FM.

National newsrooms (10): Borderless, City Bureau, The Conversation US, Guardian US, Haitian Times, Marshall Project, NewsHour, NPR, Prison Journalism Project, Rewire News Group.

Intermediaries (6): Institute for Rural Journalism, Lenfest Institute, NewsMatch, PBS, Student Press Law Center, Trans Journalist Association.

Education (1): CUNY Newmark School.

International (1): Kyiv Independent (via the King Baudouin Foundation).

That’s a great start, but more nominations are welcome.

A thought on the Fourth

Before I go for this week, just a word about the holiday we are about to celebrate. What I will be thinking about on Saturday will be not so much what happened 250 years ago, remarkable as that was, but what occurred 50 years later. This year, the Fourth will mark exactly two centuries since the two leading members of the small group charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence died, just hours but more than 500 miles apart at a time when the fastest mode of transport was by horse.

The fact that the lives of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson— colleagues, friends, adversaries—ended almost simultaneously and precisely a half century after their greatest achievement has always seemed to me a powerful suggestion that a higher power exists, and that it may occasionally guide our nation.

Whether or not you agree, let us together hope that is so. We could surely use the help. Happy Independence Day to you and your loved ones.