 Ladies and gentlemen, we here, welcome. Welcome to this panel on philanthropic funding for local news. Excited to be here. My name is Nico Mealy. I am a long time obsessive about sustainable models for local news. I'm currently managing director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation. And I previously worked on the business side at the LA Times and ran a research center on Harvard called the Shorenstein Center, where we did a lot of research on local news. I am here with a really exceptional panel, really looking forward to today's discussion. I daresay it is the most geographically diverse panel I can see on the conference today. All the way to my left is Sharon Chan, the vice president of philanthropy at the New York Times, but she has come to the New York Times and the Seattle Times. Frazier Nelson is next to her. She's vice president of the Salt Lake Tribune, coming to us from Utah. And Lauren Gustis to my left is the West Region editor for McClatchy and is based in Sacramento. Just to frame this up a bit, as I'm sure I don't have to remind too many of you, the business model for, or let me start this way. The vast majority of journalists in the United States are employed by local newspapers. And almost all the journalists in the U.S. are employed by local newspapers. And over the last 15 years, the business model for local news has truly collapsed. To give this a sense of scale, in 1980, there were about the same number of journalists in the United States as steel workers. And today, there are more steel workers than journalists. The collapse of the steel industry is dwarfed by the collapse of the newspaper industry. And we have a great whole story we tell. It's part of our cultural lexicon, the rust belt, and how this has affected those old steel mill towns. But we really don't talk about how the collapse of journalism has affected our communities and our local news. As part of the search to figure out what some solutions for local news would be, recognizing its critical role in our civics and our communities, there is more and more experimentation. I think I dare say most of this conference is about different kinds of experimentation in local news. And one of the things we're here to really talk about is the role of philanthropy in funding local news, especially when most of the local news in the United States are for-profit corporations. They're market-driven entities. And how that shapes the philanthropic options, or I should say, even sometimes constrains them. There are a lot of great resources out there, but I think for starters, I'm just gonna ask each of our panelists to briefly talk about their experience, what they've done, and how they have worked inside a for-profit newsroom to bring philanthropic dollars to support the funding, to support the journalism. Then I'm gonna ask them a few questions, because I have a ton of questions for these three incredible women. And then we'll open it up to some questions from the audience. And we'll try and do it all in an hour so you can get to lunch. I know that we are the only thing that's standing between you and your chicken lunch. Do you know it's chicken? I don't know, but I assume it is. So let's start all the way to my left. And Sharon, do you want to talk to us a little bit about your experience in Seattle and now at the New York Times? Hi, thank you to the Knight Foundation for having me here. I joined the New York Times six months ago in a newly created position as Vice President of Philanthropy. Three things to know about me. I'm a journalist, I was a reporter and editor for 15 years, all of that at the Seattle Times. Two, I like to build new things. So I worked on building these initiatives at the Seattle Times for six years and I'm at the New York Times now because it's about building something new within a 168-year-old company. Lastly, my mission is to amplify underrepresented voices in the media through their stories. My father was a refugee, a child refugee from China during World War II and I'm a former AJA national president. My experience is at the Seattle, so what I'm doing at the New York Times is our vision is to build a stronger, more just society using the power of great journalism in partnership with nonprofits funded by philanthropy. And we have two areas that we're working in, one that we really wanna do that, we wanna do that by a, supporting the survival of local journalism and its essential role in democracy. We feel a responsibility to do that and the second is how do we help people understand the hard problems of the world using the power and reach of New York Times journalism. At the Seattle Times, the thesis was slightly different. It was how do we deepen coverage and conversation about the most urgent critical issues facing the future of our region and what we did there was we created three, well we created four different labs actually and the first one was actually started under I.C. David Boardman, our former executive editor under his leadership. It was Education Lab, it was a partnership with Solutions Journalism Network funded by the Gates Foundation, then we did Traffic Lab, Project Homeless. Some of these were corporate sponsored, some of them were philanthropic foundations sponsored and the last thing we launched was an investigative fund that was supported by donors ranging from $100, $10 a month donors to like $100,000 donors. At the New York Times, I don't have a whole litany of things. We're very much in an inchoate startup mode but an example of things that we're doing, I can give you examples later, thank you and I'm just really excited to be on this panel with this Lauren and Frazier and Nico who have all been innovators and pioneers in their own right. So Sharon, before we go to Frazier, I did wanna ask you a couple of questions. One of the big challenges in this space is the way community foundations and local philanthropists sometimes don't want to fund a for-profit organization with their philanthropic dollars and so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the approach you took at the Seattle Times. Well, I think the first thing is just really, well, first of all, it's all about relationships, right? And we were really lucky in that the publisher and CEO of the Seattle Times, Frank Levin, really thought that there was something here. It was his vision. He brought me on board to help him with it. And what he started doing was he started using the power of his office to open doors to have meetings, right? Meetings with the Gates Foundation, meeting with the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. He'd be at the state business round table listening to the CEO of Starbucks talk about the issue, how they're really like struggling with homelessness, right? So I think having someone at that level listening is super important. And then I think the initial meetings, I will say for at least the first 12 to 18 months, it was like people scratching their heads, like, what, why? Why can't you pay for it for yourself? So I think the third piece is really helping people understand what's happened to the journalism landscape, which you've done a lot of writing on, Nico. Most people do not know. In fact, I will say three years into working with the Gates Foundation, like our program officer was at a meeting where we talked about what's happening in the print advertising market, that that is what has funded the news gathering operation for almost the entire history of the newspaper industry, that your digital subscription only basically pays for the printing and delivery of your paper. So with print advertising going away, most of digital advertising is not replacing it. It's going to Facebook and Google. And that's why you've seen a decline in journalism. Most people do not know that. And you have to explain it to them. And then it makes sense to them. And then we start talking about, okay, what are the hard problems in the community that we could work together to bring awareness to, to shed light on? And that's where the conversation can begin. And you set up a relationship with the Seattle Community Foundation, right? Tell us a little bit about how that worked. The philanthropic dollars went to the Seattle Community Foundation. So we had two different partners. One was initially the Solutions Journalism Network. They were the nonprofit that received funding from the Gates Foundation. And the Seattle Times was a contractor. We were the contractor that hired the editor to reporters. The second one we worked with was the Seattle Foundation was a community foundation. They never actually gave us money, but they supported us with in-kind pro bono services as a fiscal sponsor. They insured to the funders, the philanthropic funders, that the money was being spent for a charitable educational purpose, right? That it wasn't going to pay for a bonus for our publisher or holiday vacation. Or sports coverage. Yes. Oh, sports coverage is terrible. My husband's a sports reporter. I will also say that relationship took even longer to build the relationship with the funders. So that is something, if you're thinking about, like start early. So just to be clear, in both cases, Solutions Journalism Network and in the Seattle Foundation, donors like the Gates Foundation gave grants to those two nonprofit entities who then contracted with the Seattle Times to hire reporters and editors. Yes. And I want to get into that more because I think everyone on this panel has had some experience of some of the challenges that can happen in that complicated nature relationships. But Frazier, you have a very different model and experience really groundbreaking in Salt Lake. Do you want to tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, is this on? Okay. As you've probably heard, the Salt Lake Tribune decided not to go the complicated route. We just became a nonprofit. We found out we were awarded that status by the IRS in November. Actually, Frazier, it's a whole lot closer. Oh, sorry. And I really want to appreciate Sharon's groundbreaking work around the labs because that has allowed us to think about these relationships and having funding going directly to us. But Sharon, you were really helpful to me when we first met, saying it took 18 months of conversation to before you saw any results. And I don't know about you, but 18 months feels like a lifetime for me at the moment. So we spent time between when we... I've been at the Tribune nearly a year. It'll be a year next month. Right away, starting to have those cultivation conversations, reaching out to really the higher net worth people and the larger foundations that are in our community to say if we were to make this move to become a nonprofit, would you be supportive of the paper? And Sharon, you're absolutely right. Telling the story of the truth about journalism, people don't understand what's occurred. They also don't understand, I think we got lazy, and I was one of those people, in understanding what journalism really is. In all the narrative of fake news, and Utah's a very red state. We're not exactly in line completely with our president, but it's a very kind of fox... When media is the enemy, reporters are the enemy of the people. That language resonates where I live. And so really telling the story of what journalism does, and editors are not just the people that remove the Oxford comma. They do a whole lot of other things. We've actually created graphics that explain how a news story is vetted, and I take those with me, because you may think that the head of the Blabla Foundation understands this, but they may have forgotten it. So we walk through why journalism costs a lot of money. It's not just kids right out of college with little pork by hats running around, getting scoops from the cops. It's really a business and an enterprise. So those educational steps, in line with the relationship building steps, I think are where we need to be. So we heard from some of these folks that of course they understood the benefit of the Tribune. The last thing I'll say, Niko, is there's two ways that we helped to create basically our sales pitch. One is the role of journalism in democracy, and the important role it plays in our state. And hopefully a lot of people get that. If they don't quite get that, they do get the role of journalism in our economic story. And Utah sees itself as a dynamic, emerging economy. We're the youngest population in the country. We are a place on the move. We want the Olympics again. We have this place we call Silicon Slopes, which is sort of like, you know, well it's not really like the real Silicon Slopes. It's our version of that. You know, are we that place, or Todd, are we Youngstown, Ohio? You know, and when I say that to the bankers and the powers that be, they wanna choose economic dynamism. And they see reporting as part of that. And that has helped us get into some of the corporate rooms. So let's talk for a minute about exactly what happened in Salt Lake, right? The Huntsman Corporation bought the paper, and then what, and was running it as a for-profit business, and then what happened? Yeah, I mean, we've been through the same, you know, sort of sordid tale of many of you, you know, with different ownership, ultimately, in a hedge fund environment. And Paul's family, his father, John Huntsman Sr., had been interested in the paper. His brother had served as governor, so they understood, you know, the value of the paper in terms of democracy. And Paul really couldn't see Utah growing in the way we wanted to, much less culturally who we are as a people, without an independent press. We're a somewhat unusual environment, that we have a very dominant faith organization, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is also dominant in the political environment. So this 158-year-old independent newspaper is critical to really knowing what's going on. So Paul bought the paper. He's a businessman, you know, he thought he'd have a few years to sort of figure it out. And when he really dug in, he realized there was no figuring it out, with the current model. And as someone who had spent time in philanthropy, he understood that this was really a community asset, and a community institution. And he felt it made all the sense in the world to both, from his point of view, give his asset to the community, but in return, ask the community to support it. And so we are in the process of doing that now. Paul is, he's really wrapping up, we have a complicated joint operating agreement, et cetera. All of that is getting tied up, and the assets, none of the liabilities, but the assets are being placed in this new nonprofit called the Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. And it's basically the masthead, the people, things along those lines. And that will operate going forward as the full business, especially once we get out of this joint operating agreement. And in really highly unusual move, the IRS approved this transition, right, from a for-profit entity to a non-profit entity. Yeah, and I thought it made, I mean, I'm not a journalist, I'm like, Sharon, and thank you, I don't come from this, I come from the non-profit world, and to me, they were like, well, we're gonna sell subscriptions, and it'll be like this and that. To me, it made perfect sense. I mean, I say to our community, you don't storm the symphony and take a seat, and just expect to hear the music. You pay a ticket, and when you're sitting in the concert hall, you look around and go, ah, I wonder who built this, you know? It's not your $45. So, yes, there's an endowment, and the ticket is not deductible. Neither is a subscription to the Salt Lake Tribune. Somebody stepped in and is making ongoing contributions, and then inevitably there's an endowment to support it long-term. So we're doing exactly what nonprofits have been allowed to do since time in memoriam, and why this was such a shocking turn of events I don't understand, because this is, nonprofits have been making money, charging fees, and they should. I mean, the NFL, for example. I mean, there's really nothing unusual about this, except for the sense of wanting to be independent and not endorsing candidates. And we did say we would stop that, and that's clear. The IRS has ruled about political endorsements for years. And just one final question about this before we move on, but you also have a separate foundation to fund journalism in the whole region. Is that right? Yes, and that's included. So we are setting up an endowment called the Utah Journalism Foundation. Our goal is to raise $20 million by the end of this year, which I'm confident we'll do, and $60 million in the next several years. And the earnings from that, like any endowment for a nonprofit purpose, will go to support the Tribune, but also to support emerging voices in the community, scholarships for young journalists, et cetera. We're gonna open up our grant making, and these will not be large grants, but we'll open that up when we hit the 20 million. I think it's also worth pointing out that she was a bit generic when she described her background, but Frazier led the Utah Community Foundation. So you have that experience in community philanthropy, too. Yeah, Utah was the only state in the nation that didn't have a community foundation, so I got mad about that and started it. Unfortunately, it was about a week before Lehman Brothers shut their doors, so it took us a while to really take off, but that organization now has about 100 million under management, and so it's been about 10 years. And I think that there's wealth in our communities, there's wealth in our communities, and it's not just the wealth that we wanna tap into, though, too. We've received, like I'm sure Sharon just said, we've received donations of a dollar and donations of many more times of that. Everybody has a place in saving these institutions, everyone, everyone benefits from them, everyone can participate in them, and I think we need to value those gifts regardless of their size for what they mean to our institutions and our democracy. So, Lauren, you're in a little bit of a different position than the other two panelists here. You work for a large publicly-traded newspaper chain, McClatchy, that... For a few more days. For, yeah, that recently declared bankruptcy. And I think in the cases of the Seattle Times, the publisher and the family still have a significant ownership stake and have a lot of control over it, very different from McClatchy, but tell us a little bit about what you're doing. Yeah, hi. Thank you. I just wanna amplify or build on a perspective that you both shared as we talk about sharing our own story and whether you are in journalism or if you are going to bring the findings from this week back to your local communities. Like, it is imperative that we know that when news organizations go away, there is an impact in that community. It costs more to live in a city that doesn't have a news organization. Cities bond more, which costs taxpayers more money. And this is, I will share the link with you and you can share it out. Fewer people run for elected office and the people who do run for elected office are less diverse. There are direct impacts to losing local news and information. And we haven't shared those so much so that 70% of people across the country think that local news is doing just fine and only 14% of those people pay for local news. So like, wow, there's the gap, right? So yes, our structure is different in McClatchy and yet same challenges, right? How do we go forward? What does that look like? How do we provide value in our communities? And for me, that means five news organizations in California, my home newspaper is the Sacramento Bee, foreign Washington state and the Idaho statesman in Idaho. So like Sharon, we started with the premise that we need to do more to serve our local communities and how can we have that conversation? Who do we need to have that conversation with? What does it look like? I would say fortunately, McClatchy has just kind of let us run with that. They've been very supportive with respect to resources that are available, but there has been no person who's come to me and said, you know, why are you doing this? Or, you know, what, you know, what would you stop? Which has been really wonderful. We did build on the model that the Seattle Times established and I think you did a lot of the legwork, right? That helped people to understand that, oh my gosh, you know, we could work with a community foundation. We've had our community foundations call yours to talk through like what worked and what didn't and where the robots were. There is a community that is being created here of supporters and I would encourage you to seek those people out too if you're interested. We also work with a guy named Joaquin Alvarado who founded, or excuse me, who was the CEO for Center for Investigative Reporting. He had a lot of experience in fundraising for local journalism or for journalism more broadly, I should say, not local journalism and he's been helping us kind of build capacity in that sense because I'm a reporter like you didn't necessarily know how to walk into that funder conversation, right? And so had to do some learning there. And the other critical component has been the community foundation's willingness to engage. So we started in Fresno, which if you're not familiar with the Central Valley of California, Fresno is its anchor. Fresno is an extremely poor city. Three in five people in Fresno live in poverty. Fresno supplies over 90% or the Central Valley does of the country's fruit and over 50% of its fruit and vegetables. So it's very productive, a lot of migrant workers and not a lot of educational attainment in the community. So we went out and we said, what is the most important thing to you in Fresno? We asked that question of city leaders. We asked that question of regular people. We did surveys on our site. We hosted lunches, we had events where we engaged people outside of our building to talk about the things that were most important to them. And one of the things we heard consistently was we need to get our kids in better shape to contribute to an economy that looks different than what we have right now. And so we decided to launch the education lab. We have four people on the education lab team. Three of them speak Spanish. We're sharing all of our reporting with Univision and Telemundo. We're making it available to others who might want to have access to it as well. It is essentially open source. One of the reporters is an engagement reporter and we think that's really important as we look at finding the bandwidth to reestablish trust in communities where we haven't spent a lot of time for a lot of years because we just haven't had the bandwidth. So we launched Education Lab late last fall. We launched Fresno Land this month. Fresno Land is another lab. It's a water and land policy lab. And this one was really interesting because it came about through a partnership with a previously existing nonprofit that was doing policy reporting on land and water. And it was a one person show and she didn't have the bandwidth to do it all by herself. And she said, I would love some help. Could I partner with you? And so she had all these relationships with funders, Jan Zuckerberg, the California Endowment, which is a big deal in California. And she brought that relationship to the beam. We were able to amplify her platform. We are coaching her up on how to be a responsible journalist. We are hiring additional people to welcome into the lab. But it was a different model than what we saw with Ed Lab. And so just to be clear, so as both Ed Lab and Fresno Land are focused on covering Fresno? They are focused on the Central Valley. Central Valley. And so did you decide, how did you go about this? Did you decide, boy, we really need to cover Fresno better or boy, we really need to cover Education better or we have a funder who really wants, like, how did that all happen? Yeah. We started in Fresno because we saw potential there and because it was a mid-sized market for McClatchy, not too big, not too small, there's a lot of pride in Fresno and a lot of people who want to see Fresno win. And so we thought that there were some optimal conditions. But what I would say is in all likelihood, almost every McClatchy community is having a conversation about how to support journalism in ways that are more creative perhaps than what we have considered in the past. Mindy is here, Mindy's the editor of the Miami Herald, and her team did the tremendous work on perversion of justice. And after her team did that work on the perversion of justice package and ensuing stories, the reporters would get, and I love this story Mindy, I hope you don't mind me telling it, the reporters would get these asks from people like as far away as like Stockholm, Sweden, like how could we support more of this? And your reporter had to say, well, you could buy a subscription to the Miami Herald and the people were like, we don't want a subscription to the Herald, we just want to support the work that you're doing and we want you to do more of that. And so there wasn't capacity for us to accept that type of commitment. And so Mindy has created the investigative fund which you heard about earlier this week that will enable her team to do more of that kind of work. And so each site in McClatchy is kind of finding a way forward with respect to what's appropriate in the local communities that it serves. And what is the actual institutional vehicle? If does the foundation, how does the foundation just give money to McClatchy or describe to us exactly how this works? And so as all of you likely know, McClatchy entered chapter 11 proceedings a couple of weeks ago and we've spent a lot of time on the phone with supporters and funders and in personal meetings, you know, when we're in the same spot to reassure them that their contribution is safe and our commitment is to the journalism. We've worked principally with community foundations, although there are other opportunities and avenues for fiscal sponsorship. If you're in a community that for whatever reason just doesn't make that possible or tenable. But principally, you know, our relationships are built with community foundations. And so is it similar then to the Seattle Times that a community foundation acts as Tate accepts the charitable funds and then contracts with McClatchy? With the local news organization, yes. With the local newsroom that's owned by McClatchy, yeah. Okay. Excellent, that's a short summary from all three of these incredible pioneers. I'm gonna ask them a couple more questions and then we'll open it up to the room. So I guess I would love to actually hear from each of you what the biggest challenge you encountered was over the course of trying to figure out how to use philanthropic funds to support investigative and local news. Okay, first thing, like I said at the beginning, the concept was too out there at the beginning. I think things have changed. So that is going to be less of an issue. I think the second thing that was challenging is like sometimes at the beginning, you're so focused on trying to land funding that you don't spend enough time thinking about like what do I want it for? And so there's a, I think this is actually attention with any nonprofit, like how far do I want to twist myself to get this piece of funding? So like I had an experience like that with a large foundation where I was pitching them. And I think in the end like I look back, I did the Seattle Times actually really want that. And we never got the funding for it, which was fine. But I mean, it was like good nine months of my life of like sporadic email conversation and proposals. So I think like really it only worked. And I always say this, like you have to find the overlap between what your newsroom wants to do and what our funder impact goals. And it has to be overlapping. Cause like, I mean, you know, the worst thing, you know, however, like for people who are journalists will know this, but like the story no one ever wants to do is a story that comes out of the morning meeting from the editors, right? Where the editor comes to your desk is like, we heard this story on NPR and we would like you to do a story on it. And you're going to get a super crappy story at the end of that day. So that's another piece of learning. The third is really what Frazier talked about was just the length of time and the relationship building. You can't treat relationship building and fundraising like you would talk to a source as a reporter. It's a relationship of trust that's built over time. I would like to just for a second thank Sharon for her groundbreaking work on the lab, particularly anchoring the right price. Funders have a, people who raise money for a living and funders sometimes have a hard time coming together about what it actually takes to do something. And when they're used to putting on a play, they're used to funding a school. They're not used to funding journalism. They don't know how much it costs. I had no idea how much it costs. And so we're educating funders about what it actually takes to produce what it is they would like to see. And the way you design the labs with reporters and editors, I think really anchors what it takes. And, but that's an educational process all of us will go through in our communities. This isn't a $25,000 grant and it's not a part time if you really wanna move the needle on an issue. It takes heavy lifting. The biggest problem that we've had, I mean there's so many, what would I pick? But one that I think it might be relevant to you all is the technology in place for subscriptions is not the technology that you need for donations. And so the vendor that we use does not have the flexibility and the design of the product to do what we need it to do. So if you subscribe to the Tribune and you try to make it a donation on top or you wanna change the amount of donation or you wanna do all these other things, we don't have the public radio, sign into your own account and choose your own adventure. We are locked into these legacy, gnarly, non-responsive. And I just can't stand it. It's so frustrating and Nico and I met yesterday, he's like, AB test this, AB test that. And I'm like, I want to, will fill in the blank, allow me? Probably not, because it takes us eight hours to get the font right on a pop-up. And so our systems are not where they need to be to do what we need to have happen. So that's my gripe of the day. That's a good one, or a bad one. You know what I mean. And I'm not a technologist, you know? So I'm just like, fix it, fix it. They're like, you know. We have legacy news systems, right? We're trying to work in sales force to cultivate donors and so on and so forth. And is that the optimal platform for that type of relationship? Not a lot of options. I would say, and as we in McCarthy try to share best practices and work on this together, you know, I'll join a funder meeting and did this in the Carolinas recently and we walked out of the meeting and the journalists' eyes were huge and they're just like, holy shit. That's gonna take, oh, there's a camera. Detroit Public Television. Okay, that's good, it's fine. Detroit's okay with that, right? You know, it's a lot of work. And when Sharon first came and shared her findings to a group of journalists that were gathered in Omaha, Nebraska, I had like a big long list of things I wanted to do coming out at Omaha and that was not one of them, right? Because it was so much work and I was like, I just don't have the bandwidth for that, right? And it takes time to build relationships and build trust and so on and so forth. And so what I would say is, you know, what is the small thing that you can do when you go home if you're interested? Can you call someone up and have a conversation? Can you say, I'd like to go to coffee and talk about this? How can you bite little pieces off, you know, as you go on down the road and make it manageable for yourself? Do not set a goal of raising a million dollars by the end of this year. You know, think about what those conversations are that might be constructive for you to begin to have in your community. Start to listen, right? And then you can build out a plan. But if you go home with the whole, like, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do it before the end of the year, you'll drive yourself crazy. What, one question I wanna ask all through you is, you know, in a traditional for-profit newsroom, there's this understanding that the business side is over here, advertisers. Advertisers cannot dictate coverage, even in broad areas. And the newsroom and the editorial decision making is completely separate. There's a firewall. If there's ever a dispute, it basically goes to the publisher. But it's a really well-established citizen, a really well-established precedent in culture and norm in American journalism that advertisers have absolutely no impact or discretion around editorial coverage. And that that's actually good for advertisers because it fosters trust all around. And so foundations work differently, right? They expect to be able to direct their funds in specific ways. In some cases they have to because of their individual mandates as foundations, their purpose and their mission. A foundation devoted to climate change is not gonna just generally fund journalism on homelessness necessarily. So I wondered if one or all of you could talk about how you navigated that, that that's a new-ish problem for newsrooms. Yeah, I mean we just, I mean we did the pre-work, right? We sat down with our editors and decided like these were the four things, right? Funders will not know what stories are being worked on. They will not see stories before they appear in print or online. They don't have special access to reporters. And the public always knows where the funding is coming from. And I mean, funders want the credit as well, but we wanna be transparent with our readers. So I think just saying that really clear at the beginning, we would say in our meetings initially, when we're talking to them, I would bring one of the later executive editors, Don Shelton, with me to the meetings for him to explain it because funders will actually try to probe. So like, and not in a way that means they want to control the coverage, but like they'll just start to like, they'll start to wanna test you. And so what if we did this or what if this was a thing? Then you have the editor there to say that. The other thing is I will say that people, journalists are very afraid that funders wanna influence the coverage. That hasn't been the case with the funders that I've worked with. They have actually felt, they have as much fear of being seen as buying the hometown paper as the journalists do. And oftentimes that's why later on after Education Lab, we worked with like a diversified funding collaborative for each of our labs. So it protects them, it protects us. And then the third thing I will say is that like, I remember hearing Keith Woods, who's around somewhere here at a conference a couple of years ago, they said like leadership is about not just having someone's back, but standing in front. And I really feel that as a person who's asking for money, like when I am having stakeholder meetings with funders, I wanna stand in front of the journalists. If someone asks a question, and it's as simple as, what do you have coming this quarter? I simply jump in and say we're not, I'm sorry, we can't talk about that. I just add, we share our statement of editorial independence on anything that we share with potential funders or funders. And it's included on all of the landings for all of the labs. So it's pretty straightforward with respect to where we stand, which is ultimately what you just ran through at the outset. The other thing that we do is we agree ahead of time on what that communication of cadence, cadence of communication is going to be. So every quarter we'll deliver an impact report. And we've already told them what will be on the impact report. Here are the metrics and here are the measures that we're gonna share updates on. And so we have predetermined, how we can communicate in a way that's responsible, but also that hopefully kind of diminishes the potential for a communication that would be less than constructive. I should add that we wanna be held accountable on things. We wanna be held accountable on building an audience. We wanna be held accountable that the stories are actually creating a conversation among decision makers, government leaders. And we wanna be held accountable on that. Are we delivering Solutions Journalism? We like open critiques on that. What we are not open to is what are you writing your stories about? I just say a good resource for this kind of discussion is the Pointer Institute. We gave a copy of our ethical, of our guidelines for gift acceptance for review. And we were really, they were very helpful in looking at what we were gonna put forward. Another great resource is Media Impact Funders. Vince is here, the executive director, and they put out guidelines like printed pamphlets that you can share that provide a great template both for editorial independence, but also impact measurement. We actually had a funny conversation. One of the people that has been a very generous owner owns one of the local sports teams. And she said, well, does this mean that my team will win every game? And I said, what other teams are there? She knew, I mean, she was anticipating that that wall was coming down. And I think you're absolutely right. I mean, these are sophisticated people. They understand our role. Well, for asking them for money, for independent journalism, we just have to walk them through it and make sure that the guidelines are there. And then when they sign the gift agreement, that those guidelines are real, if you do that kind of thing, that they're very clear in the gift agreement. Excellent, we've got about 20 minutes left. I thought I'd open it up to questions. We'll start back here. Hi, Lisa Adkins with Bluegrass Community Foundation in Lexington, Kentucky. I know I'm not the only community foundation with McClatchy newspapers in the room that aren't in California. And so the question is, we've already co-funded a report for America Reporter. We've just opened up a fiscal sponsorship fund with the Herald Leader. But I can't imagine in our stripped-down newsroom that our general manager of our newspaper is now going to be doing fundraising full-time. And so what's the infrastructure in McClatchy to help the papers that are in Lexington, Kentucky or in the Chattahoochee Valley in Georgia? And I would just very strongly echo that it's one thing for community foundations to understand this. And I think especially those of us that have been coming to this conference year after year really do, but I will echo that donors do not. And Lexington is a university city. It's mid-size. It has highly educated, sophisticated people. And they do not understand this issue at all. As I have made pitches to fund holders and philanthropists, they just don't get why they should be supporting a for-profit newspaper. And then I'll just say, in the McClatchy case, the bankruptcy makes it more complicated. So to my guess, primary question is, are there people like you and McClatchy that are working with these smaller markets? And who do we connect with? Thank you. First, thank you. For your support of local journalism in Lexington, I know Peter is just wearing one hat as the GM. And yet, in McClatchy, we tend to wear a lot of hats. And as such, yes, I've been asked to take a look at how we might support this effort more broadly. We have only been talking about this type of relationship with community foundations from a more strategic standpoint. I would say for the last maybe eight months. And it's very new for us. And one of my concerns is that, and this is a personal concern, so forgive me, is that are we going to be able to do this? Are we good enough at this? Do we have the bandwidth? Nicko asked if we had the resources that we needed or what keeps us up at night or where our biggest challenges are. And like Frazier, I wake up in the morning, I'm like, oh my gosh, all those things, right? And so I'm not directly answering your question because our resources are not as they should be for this effort at this point in time. I think as a company, we're going to have to determine as we emerge from bankruptcy what our commitment, not to the local journalism or even to this effort is because I think, as you know, there are people in the community who want to help. There are plenty of people that we still have to reach and educate and bring along if we can. But what our structure looks like with respect to this effort. And I think that's every day we see more promising signs with respect to the conversations that have occurred here and elsewhere. We haven't yet made firm plans with respect to how we can best structure ourselves to meet the opportunity. However, I would love to continue the conversation. I'm in touch with Peter on a regular basis. We talk every week, so let me know. I want to ask just as a follow-up to Sharon, you know, your role at the New York Times, Vice President Philanthropy, is that important attempt to try and institutionalize this inside the company? And are you aware of other companies that are considering or have created a similar institutional role focused on philanthropy? Yeah, so mine is a newly created position and it is to institutionalize, have someone full-time focused on it. I do think that makes a big difference. Every time that we have added, I think you can probably launch one initiative with existing resources, which is what we did. But once you get into more, or if you want to replicate, you're going to need a full-time person, which is what the Seattle Times did. And then I've seen, like, once we added another director on my team, then we're able to launch a whole other thing, right? So there is, but I don't think that one thing is going to be constrained, like that one editor is going to be constrained launching the thing that's been started. If it's just one, was that the question? Okay. I'm Annie with the Lundfest Institute and we're the fundraising arm for the Philadelphia Enquirer among many other things. And so we have a team of people fundraising for the Enquirer. A newspaper wouldn't think twice about adding somebody into the advertising sales team if they were clear that it would generate revenue, needed revenue for the news outlet. Why the business side of newspapers think any differently about philanthropy and fundraising is beyond me. It's, you need people, you need to spend money to make money and you need to make that commitment. And I think if community foundations are really committed to their local news outlets and want to support them, a great way to start that is to give these newspapers capacity-building grants so they have a three-year runway and enough money to hire the staff and the resources they need to start a fundraising program. Just about two cents. Yeah, yeah. Any comment from the panel? I'll just say Annie's a great resource and to like she has a long background with United Way and Lundfest Institute is a learning resource for journalism and philanthropy. I'm Taylor Batten. I'm the managing editor at the Charlotte Observer and we're starting these conversations in Charlotte and I'm interested in what the most common and specific objection you all hear from funders and how do you address it? Well, now that I work at the New York Times, like I will say the big, the thing that is I think the unspoken question is why is the New York Times that is like five million digital subscribers in this space? And for us, our explanation is simply that 10 years ago, the New York Times was actually not that confident in its ability to remain an independent publication and it's spent 10 years building up a digital business that's based on selling subscriptions and selling advertising to the audiences among those subscribers. Now that actually is a very specific type of journalism that will drive digital subscriptions and create audiences that digital advertisers want to reach. There is journalism that drives social impact that improves the world that is needed for the future of the globe and America that doesn't fit that. So one example initiative I'm developing is around rural America and how could we elevate the issues of rural America to the national decision makers and influencers who read the New York Times? There are not subscribers in rural America who, enough of them, who want to subscribe to the New York Times to make it worth it for us to use our money to do that. There are not advertisers who want to reach people in rural America through the New York Times to make that worthwhile. So I think the ability to explain that, why we're in the space, is actually a really common, spoken and unspoken question. I'd say there are the people who hate the comments section and they will not give money until we change the platform and that is very common and there's nothing to be done about that. They are not a happy group. There are people who don't like our coverage and who feel as though our coverage is two X or two Y. I mean it's usually about the LDS church. We're either two pro-church, we cover it too much or we're two anti-church and we do too much. So there are people who come down on the side of our coverage. Now there are also subscribers so I'm like, well clearly you read it, do you want it to continue? That's probably, from a local point of view, that's what we hear the most objection around. We also I think some of these relationships with donors are really more transactional in nature than donation nature. There are people who see the Tribune as a, there are people who use their philanthropy to advertise their business. So they use it out of their marketing or they come at it from a much more, their donations are much more tied to the success of their business, corporate-wise. And so we don't necessarily fit well into that kind of giving and we have been turned down by somebody I thought would support us because I don't think we offered a good underwriting opportunity so we're gonna come back to them with more of a, of something that appeals more to the more transactional nature of their philanthropy. I would say though that getting rejected or being turned down is a way of life if you're raising money and it is just a step in developing the relationship. I mean some people really will never give to the Tribune and I understand that and if they say it clearly I won't bug them again. But a no is really just a, it's not really a no. Not yet. It's a not yet, it's a what else can I do? And it's not as though we're go dogs go and we come back with a different hat the next week and then do you like this hat, do you like this hat? But you know because I do think that there's a tendency, you don't want your need to, I mean you need to come first. What you want to do is most important and a donor should be able to meet you where that need is. Otherwise they're probably not a good, the right kind of donor. But for general operating, et cetera, I mean you're really just asking them to support democracy and that's an answer because people have a hard time saying no to. They may say no to at a big level but they could give you a little bit. I also think it's really important to research heavily the people that you ask money for. So I've taken a number of meetings here and I'm not asking for things that I don't think are in the likelihood or the interest area of anybody I'm talking to. I know what they've given to, I know how much they've given, I'm asking for the right amount for the right purpose. And you're helping them do their job that way. You're making it easier for them. So I would just really encourage you, research, research, research. And if there's a person in town. And accept rejection. I would just say there might be someone who can be your influencer in Charlotte who is that person or who are those few people who know everyone and know which potholes you should avoid when you walk into that conversation that's been really helpful for us. That you take with you, et cetera. And Frasier you raised something which I'm curious about all of you. Is there any concern about philanthropy cannibalizing existing advertising? I know in the Seattle Times case some of those labs had big corporate sponsors. And I just wondered about that dynamic. Over time what we found was that working with corporate sponsors allowed us and our whole company including advertising to build a first party relationship with a large company whether it's Alaska Airlines or Starbucks. Because typically the advertising department at a paper the size of the Seattle Times can only access their advertising budgets through buyers. So they don't ever have a chance. Through parties, through agencies or other, yeah. Yeah, so they actually don't have a chance to pitch a bigger project. But sometimes we would go together to a meeting and I would talk about here's a way that you can improve support your community through Project Homeless. And then by the way, like then advertising would talk about this is another way that you could get your message out there. Tom. Yes, it's on. I'm Tom Rosenstiel. I spent 16 years at the Pew Research Center. And at Pew there was a political side Pew Charitable Trust which did a lot of lobbying and saving fish and sharks and islands and things like that. And then we had the Pew Research Center which did pure research. We were all told to go out and fundraise. And our message at the Pew Research Center is better information makes a better society. Over the nine years we were charged with that we raised maybe $10 million. And on the political side they raised $450 million. Our experience was that people, high-end donors want to solve problems that they've identified that they care about. And whether it's Gates or Buffett or whatever. If journalism is a means to that end but these are people that, they are not journalists. And only a small percentage of people really resonated to the idea of journalism saves democracy. So we ended up having to put a zone around, okay this is your area, you're interested in this. The ground rules for us to do the research there is gonna be X, Y, and Z. You can't put your hand on the scale, et cetera, et cetera. But it took us a long time to realize that our religion about a better society with more facts was a relatively small cult among the people that we were dealing with. Tom also has a great white paper on fundraising and journalism at the American Press Institute. I highly recommend taking a look at it. Great piece. It's the American Press Institute and they have a white paper and it's about philanthropy, the intersection of philanthropy and journalism. It's very good, been very helpful. Hi, I'm Susan Edelman. I'm from a community foundation in Northeast Florida and I'm interested in if you set up a fund or attract donors to help a newspaper that is not a McClatchy newspaper but is a very large behemoth. What keeps them from supplanting? Fine, we'll have an education lab and then the reporter that was barely covering education, they just cut that person. What kind of guidelines, what kind of running room do you have in that kind of aspect? You know, when we first set up education lab, part of the agreement said that we would not cut our existing education resources. Yeah, you can demand that. Yeah. I just want to say one other thing about who drives the, who makes the decision? I'm, I don't go off and ask for funding for things that the editor of our paper doesn't tell us she needs, right? I just can't come in and say, let's cover the X, you know, because I have a donor who wants it. This, I mean, that's a conversation we have with the leadership but I'm not going rogue and then she can come to me and say, we really need to increase our coverage for education. You know, can you maybe talk about a way to do that with funders? So I think that, that as much as, as important it is to be clear with the grant makers, it's also important to be led by the mission of the organization and make sure that you are doing what is important for your community, not what a donor potentially drives. Richard Hamburg with Detroit. I agree with Tom, we're finding, differentiating ourselves around environment and Great Lakes education, arts and culture generically for a public television station to suggest journalism is a little, it's hard, it's hard for the funder to understand that. The other thing is, and this is the good news but also the challenge, every single place we're going, we're being asked about diversity. I love your plan, who's, bring your staff. You know, showing up pale male and stale, maybe not your best move at this point, but the very people you're asking for funding for are looking to solve a larger problem and they've got dozens of people saying, I am the emerging voice in Detroit, incorporating those partnerships. You have to be incredibly comfortable with this issue and committed to it from the very top of the organization. I'm with Community Foundation Tampa Bay and pointers in our area and we're so proud of that. Can you tell me just what size endowment is necessary to feel comfortable that there's going to be a flow of capital and I'm sure that's a range depending on the costs. And then the other question is, how involved does the Community Foundation staff get in the fundraising? I'll jump in on that one just quickly. There are, your endowment probably looks a heck of a lot different than say, an endowment for a single reporter, right? And if you work for a Community Foundation, you know what your returns are on a sum of money, right? And if it costs 60 to 70,000, depending on the community to support a reporter, you can do the math on what a fellow shipper, an endowment, excuse me, would look like for that, right? If it's two reporters, we could figure out what that would be. 2.5 million would get you two reporters on an annual basis in any community. The lab models are funded over years, right? And so that's not an endowment. That's a for one year, it costs $300,000 to operate a four-person lab, all costs included. To answer your question about Community Foundations, many Community Foundations are probably about as well-resourced as a newsroom, right? In that you do a lot and you handle a lot of volume and you have a lot of relationships to maintain. And so we have made no ass of any Community Foundation yet to help us with that fundraising. Have they connected us with people we should be talking to? Yes, but we haven't engaged them in doing that work with us. We've said so far we're gonna do this and we're gonna see if we can do this because we think it's important that we help people understand that we need a deeper and more authentic relationship with our community moving forward and that's on us. Yep, so I have Vince Daley, Executive Director of Media Impact Funders. I have a question about the practical sort of guidance on the roles of Community Foundations, but I also just wanna mention that we're gonna be gathering our Journalism Funders meeting, which is an annual thing that we do in the fall. It's the first week of October in Philadelphia where I think we can certainly draw on our friends at the Lenfest Institute to carry forward where they have a major sort of hybrid, commercial, non-commercial arrangement there, but we'd love to carry this conversation forward there. So my question is relating to the different aspects of Community Foundations, both the discretionary grant making of the sort of professional program staff versus the contributions through the donor-advised funds. Is there a much greater opportunity to draw on those donor-advised funds? We've seen that there's a lot of resources flowing already. We did about a 10-year look at journalism grant making. We're looking at $1 billion in grants. Over $100 million of that is from Community Foundations. We think that's probably not programs staff-driven discretionary dollars. It's probably more daffs, and so what can you offer in terms of guidance of how to work with those donors as well? Before we answer that, we're about out of time, so I just want to take two more questions in a rapid round that will answer all of them. Is there a microphone back here? Yeah, just give the question quick. We're gonna do- Don't want to be the keep us from lunch guy. When it comes to funders and you look at them on an advocacy or ideological spectrum, is there a point where they get too far out to be considered and how do you kind of know where that place is? Does that make any sense? Great. I'm with the AP, a not-for-profit, but not a non-profit. I'm wondering about internal messaging with staff about what you all are doing, concerns that arise about certain areas being more funded than others, anything that has to do with those kinds of internal communications. So the three questions are one, donor-advised funds and the challenges and opportunities in working with them. Two, are there any, are there political leanings too far one way or the other that would affect? Is there anyone you will not take money from philanthropically, maybe is one way to say it? And third, what about inside the newsroom and concerns about some people getting more money than others? Well, we won't take money from funders like if you're running for president and you have a philanthropy, like the New York Times will probably not be talking to you at this point. So that would be one example. Also the other is like a funder is like so dominant in that sphere, like we probably wouldn't talk to them. Like there are just certain funders that are like, basically their money is driving the entire agenda for entire sector. So kind of taking funding from them to cover that would be an issue for us. I'll just talk briefly about the talking to employees. I think when we became a nonprofit, there was a sense of, oh, happy days are here again, money will flow, we'll all get raises in a big newsroom. This is a slog, it's difficult work. It is, and I think we have tempered, we certainly are optimistic, we will remain optimistic, but we've had to temper some kind of initial euphoria. No anonymous donors. Okay, thank you very much. All of you for your time and let's give our panel a big round of applause for their leadership.