Who will write the check for this story?

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By Melissa Coulter | Friday, October 17, 2008 6:54 PM CDT | () comments

What if newspapers funded reporting through charitable contributions instead of ad sales?

That was the question retired Washington Post columnist Bob Levey posed to young journalists in Rock Island this week. Levey spent five days in residence at Augustana College.

“This is the greatest business in the world,” he told the staff of the Augie student newspaper, The Observer, Thursday night at Huckleberry’s Pizza Parlor. “It’s just going to take a different form.”

That different form could be newsrooms funded by philanthropic donations rather than ad sales. Levey suggested that if Steven Spielberg put up $100 million for newspapers to do what Levey says they do best — foreign and investigative reporting and editorial writing — newsrooms wouldn’t have to shrink when ad revenues take a dip. To keep the coverage unbiased, the funder doesn’t get a say in what is covered.

Levey also said newspapers need to get serious about finding a workable model for providing content on the Internet. But that doesn’t mean throwing half-baked, unedited stories online just to beat bloggers to the punch.

“The Web has absolutely wonderful potential, but it needs government,” Levey said. He cringes at the lack of credentials of some high-profile bloggers even as he wonders at the possibilities of YouTube. The new form of journalism will cross the prolific, cost-effective format of blogs with the polished writing, balance and investigative techniques of trained journalists.

Those ideas reminded me of Dave Cohn’s “Spot Us” project, which already is experimenting with those theories in the San Francisco Bay area thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant. Individuals and journalists pitch untold community stories. Community members pledge money to fund the stories they’d like to see investigated. When the money is raised, a journalist is hired to report and write the story, which is fact-checked by editors. The piece is published at www.spot.us and also offered to other local media outlets for publication.

Levey admits he is “fascinated by fundraising.” He did plenty of it during his 36 years at the Post. For 23 years, he wrote a daily column, “Bob Levey’s Washington,” and through it raised $17 million for children’s charities.

But it’s a different mix of philanthropy and reporting that he sees driving journalism in the future.

As Levey pointed out, National Public Radio has always funded itself through donations from listeners and non-profit foundations. But it took its programming to a new level when Joan B. Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, gave an unprecedented $200 million gift in 2003.

This non-profit model isn’t an easy fit in the for-profit world of traditional newspapering. But it might work in the new media milieu.

Community networking sites, like Quadsville.com, could become ideal environments in which to develop crowd-funded journalism, or at least crowd-directed topics. Quadsville also has potential to be a training ground for civic-minded bloggers who want to learn how to bring a reporter’s eye to the posts they write about their community.

A natural symbiosis exists between journalists trained to turn up the truth and citizens deeply invested in their community. It only makes sense that that relationship helps define where journalism is headed in the 21st century.

Melissa Coulter writes on the online community at quadsville.com. Contact her at (563) 383-2243 or at mcoulter@qctimes.com.