March 1, 2015 | Read Time: 12 minutes
More than three decades ago, a pioneer in the field of nonprofit journalism, David Cay Johnston, and Jennifer Leonard, then a program officer at a California foundation, composed a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review on the subject of the “American press’s traditional reluctance to cover nonprofit organizations and issues.” They noted that, although many newspapers had beats dedicated to fields as esoteric as wine, at the time not a single paper could claim a designated nonprofit bailiwick. (“Real reporters don’t cover nonprofits,” an editor once told Mr. Johnston.)
In the years since, what might be termed the “Annie Hall” theory of the press’s failures in regard to the nonprofit sector has proved an enduring theme: The coverage is terrible—and such small portions!
In the ’90s, Burnis Morris, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, surveyed 87 schools of journalism and found that not a single one used a textbook that instructed students on covering nonprofits.
Not surprisingly, he concluded, reporters were not well trained to engage the major issues shaping the sector. In a 2003 study, Seton Hall University professor Matthew Hale surveyed more than 1,000 articles from nine major newspapers over a six-month period and determined that coverage of nonprofits was plentiful but largely “superficial.”
In the last few years, protests became even more insistent, as many newspapers shed the beats hard-won in the wake of Mr. Johnston and Ms. Leonard’s intervention.
They reached their crescendo in 2013 when The New York Times reassigned Stephanie Strom, who had been expertly covering nonprofits for more than a decade, to business reporting. The move became an opportunity for the sector to air its wounded self-regard. “The New York Times Was Wrong to Abandon Philanthropy,” Pablo Eisenberg rebuked the Gray Lady in The Chronicle.
Recently, though, there have been encouraging signs on the media horizon—”glimmers of hope,” as one writer recently termed it. The explosion of online publications has led to a greater scrutiny being applied to the sector, especially with regard to large-scale philanthropy. The sector has also benefited from a contemporary revival of long-form investigative and narrative journalism. (See, for instance, ProPublica’s take-down of the American Red Cross or The New Yorker’s article last year on Mark Zuckerberg’s education philanthropy in Newark). And in another important move, The Boston Globe has assigned a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Sacha Pfeiffer, to cover nonprofits and philanthropy. The beat, it seems, goes on.
These developments should be welcomed. But they probably won’t stop the grumbling about the media’s rough or inexpert treatment of the sector.
There are a number of reasons, I think, why those grievances are not going anywhere.
First, if Descartes once joked that good sense is one of the most equitably distributed resources in the world, since nearly everyone claims to have enough of it, then surely good press must be one of the rarest, since nearly everyone craves more. Politicians, movie producers, restaurateurs—there is likely no threshold at which any of them would suddenly announce they were satisfied with the ink—or pixels—spilled on their behalf. And there is no reason to think that nonprofit leaders should be any different.
And yet, in a sense, they are different, since the press shoulders an especially heavy burden in regard to the third sector. As Mr. Eisenberg pointed out in a 2012 Chronicle piece, “The sad truth is that the news media remain the only serious accountability mechanism America has to ensure the health and integrity of nonprofits.” That’s a grave responsibility, one that almost necessarily sets readers up for disappointment.
There are still other reasons why the sector will likely continue to feel underappreciated and underscrutinized. It is important, however, to move beyond the airing of those grievances to reflect on the issues that undergird them.
What are the challenges facing the production of in-depth, engaging journalism on nonprofits, of writing that elevates the public’s understanding of the sector? Only by grappling with that question will the sector approach—if perhaps only asymptotically—the sort of coverage it deserves.
Those challenges come from two directions—a pincer attack from the demand and supply sides. First, there is the question of audience. The public still does not fully understand the contours of the sector (and the blurring of for-profit and nonprofit boundaries hasn’t lent any more clarity to those delineations).
In a sense, the sector’s sprawling size and variety—precisely those qualities that underline its civic significance—also make it exceedingly difficult to cover journalistically as a coherent entity.
Potential readers can approach business or political news as consumers or as voters (or sports stories as fans), but they don’t have as simple or intelligible a framework with which to conceive of their connection to the nonprofit sector. And they aren’t particularly well informed about nonprofit issues to start with; recent surveys have shown that fewer than half of all Americans can name a single foundation, for instance. All of which leads to a media Catch-22: a better-informed public might demand more coverage of the sector, but it is difficult for the public to gain that awareness without the press’s guidance.
Then there is the related question of financing, part of the challenge facing “public interest” journalism more generally. Such writing represents a public good, one often subject to market failure: Most citizens benefit from it, but few want to pay for it. The situation facing nonprofit reporting is perhaps the most vexed of this type.
As James Hamilton, the Hearst professor of communication at Stanford, points out, it is difficult for publications to “monetize” the value of writing about nonprofits, since the benefits such stories provide—creating more efficient charitable organizations or promoting social justice, for example—are so widely distributed across society.
Other means of attracting readers used to support writing on public affairs, he notes, might not work for nonprofits. There’s “duty”: the sense of civic obligation or partisan allegiance that leads many readers to follow political news. Then there is “diversion”: Think C-Span junkies who can’t get enough of the inner workings of the political realm. But neither of these inducements is likely to attract readers to nonprofit journalism. What’s left is “drama”—the focus on human-interest stories or scandals.
One response to the demand-side challenge is to pitch nonprofit journalism to “insiders”—the trade-journal route.
The Chronicle and its peers—Nonprofit Times, Nonprofit Quarterly, and others—have taken this approach. Nearly two decades ago, so did The American Benefactor, a short-lived publication that featured an A-list of topnotch writers. The publication was targeted, as the title attests, to donors (and so had little trouble courting high-end advertisers). You couldn’t buy the magazine on the newsstand or subscribe; it was distributed through nonprofits as a gift to benefactors. More recently, Inside Philanthropy has also followed this path, styling itself as philanthropy’s online Politico or Variety. As its editor, David Callahan, explains, the publication’s animating idea is that “people who work in a given sector have a hunger for stories that would be too deep in the weeds for the mainstream media.”
There is much to commend in this strategy, and Inside Philanthropy has become essential reading for many in the field. But there is a risk assumed by any insider publication: that it collapses under the weight of its own insularity and clubbiness, that it becomes overrun by jargon or succumbs to “how-to” bullet-point instrumentalism and loses the larger perspective on why its subject matters to society at large. Writers who seek to inform a broader audience on the nonprofit sector reap the insights of these trade sources but must also be especially vigilant in guarding against their shortcomings.
Which leads to the other challenge facing those who support thoughtful, sustained coverage of the nonprofit sector: It’s not easy to produce. This is a fact rarely acknowledged in the complaints about inadequate media coverage, which is often framed conspiratorially. But it’s a difficulty that can be traced to a basic tension in American thought between two deep-seated strains defining our attitude toward charity and philanthropy: Call them the booster and muckraker tendencies.
On the one hand, long exposure to public figures invoking Alexis de Tocqueville and hailing America’s “deep-rooted spirit of caring, of neighbor-helping-neighbor” has primed us for celebrations of organized benevolence. And it is generally easy to shoehorn stories about nonprofits into a feel-good “human-interest” format, which is a reliable way to draw readers in. The latest installment of a genre at least as old as medieval chronicles of saints’ lives, contemporary writing on do-gooders seeks to instruct and inspire and taps into a powerful undercurrent of millennial hope. In the early 19th century, as charitable organizations began to sprout up throughout the nation, Americans thrilled to accounts of their achievements and took their proliferation as signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. In a more secular age, we still do—as the popularity of Nicholas Kristof’s recent book and New York Times columns attests.
At its worst, this boosterish tendency can encourage an unthinking complaisance about the sector’s achievements. But even when it is applied with care, it can find itself caught on the imperative of the “news peg.”
One obvious way nonprofits demand coverage is through their claims to novelty and innovation—by challenging previous norms or achieving success where others have failed. But plenty of nonprofit work—steady, unspectacular, and necessary—doesn’t fit this bill, and so it can find itself in the shadows. Ms. Strom says she grappled with this challenge herself while covering nonprofits at the Times.
“It’s like Apple making computers,” she remarks. “A nonprofit just doing good isn’t news because everyone knows nonprofits are supposed to do good.”
Then there is the muckraker orientation. This inclination aligns well with what surveys reveal to be the role that the public—and many members of the press—believes to be journalism’s primary responsibility: the exposure of wrongdoing. Nonprofit muckrakers seek to deflate pretensions, suss out corruption, and spotlight inefficiencies, constructing narratives in the space between the exalted mission statements of nonprofits and the often compromised, and even sordid, reality of their endeavors.
This view has deep roots in American culture, too. It grows, in part, from a sense that in a democracy, everyone should be good but not too good, or at least not profess to such exalted status. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted more than a century and a half ago, “We do not quite forgive a giver.” And we still don’t quite.
Yet this muckraking approach has its own particular challenges as well.
First, even if one approaches reporting on nonprofits with the hard-nosed tenacity of Watergate-era Woodward and Bernstein, it can be awfully hard to get the goods. There aren’t enough Deep Throats on offer—the grantee-grant-maker relationship casts a pall of deferential silence over much of the activity in the sector.
“That’s the fundamental problem,” notes Ms. Strom. “Nobody really wants to dish on the record.”
In fact, with their fortress of inscrutable 990s and professed good intentions, nonprofits might be one of the more difficult institutions for reporters to crack. As Stanford’s Mr. Hamilton notes, at least with for-profit public companies, reporters can get the benefit of shareholder leverage. And although no institution likes to be the target of negative press scrutiny, nonprofits can be especially adept at self-righteous posturing and pushback. (See, for instance, the Red Cross’s response to ProPublica’s reporting.) The other problem with the muckraker approach is that it can curdle into cynicism, leaving writers, editors, and readers blind to all but the sector’s failings. (Research suggests that when reporters focus on the nonprofit sector as a whole, as opposed to on individual organizations, they tend to spotlight the sector’s flaws and failings.)
Crooked executives, botched initiatives, and hubristic philanthropists soak up all the print; more quotidian, commendable, and modest achievements are ignored. As one media critic notably phrased it, even when the charges have merit, this can end up seeming less like reporting than “bullying.”
The trick, of course, is to marry these two approaches, the commendatory and the critical.
One way to understand the sector’s recent preoccupation with “impact” and strategic philanthropy is as an effort to achieve precisely that sort of reconciliation. They each imply a certain critique of less rigorous, less quantifiably verifiable, practice, yet also exhibit their own streak of millennialism—the kind found in Silicon Valley start-up prospectuses—staked on the imminence of transformative social change. The problem is that the journalism allied with the strategic philanthropy turn has often been so soaked in management consultant buzzwords that it’s lost much of its narrative flavor. It’s as much fun to read as … well, a Silicon Valley start-up prospectus.
So what’s required is a deliberate balancing act. Writers that gravitate to the celebratory role (and their nonprofit sources) should temper their reporting with a dose of healthy skepticism; those who tend to approach stories about nonprofits with a watchdog’s grumpy vigilance need to save some room for the possibility of good works that actually do good. (Solutions Journalism Network is one organization that seems to have struck this balance; it focuses attention on what works in the sector, fighting off the fatalism that can be toxic to readership, but without sacrificing a commitment to investigative integrity.)
It’s a tall order for writers on nonprofits—and for the publications, like this one, that harbor them. The chip on the sector’s collective shoulder about its press treatment should remind us all about the difficulty, and the value, of the endeavor. In that case, our grumbling will itself do some good.
