I hate long magazine lead times…I file a story that’s up-to-date, and by the time you get to read it, 5% of it is either wrong, or we missed new developments. But that’s the trade-off when you’re putting together a big, glossy magazine that boasts the luxuries of fact-checking, thorough editing, and a complex layout. So I put up with it.
In the case of the debut issue of Miller-McCune, the situation was exaggerated by the fact that it was the first of a new publication, so all copy had to be in two months early. Consequently, some things happened after we put the nonprofit news story to bed. So here are a few addenda:
- I mentioned in passing Kennesaw State University professor Leonard Witt’s notion of “representative journalism,” which would have a nonprofit hub help groups of readers pool their money to fund a reporter who covers a specific topic. During the past few weeks, Witt has actually moved forward with a project in Northfield, Minn. It’s definitely an experiment, but looks promising.
- I wrote that even Paul Bass’ New Haven Independent, one of the pioneers of the nonprofit new media model, and one of its most successful practitioners, was still not on financially sustainable ground. Bass emailed this week to let me know that its financial picture has “brightened considerably,” and that its fourth year (which runs through mid-2009) looks solid.
- And one more piece of information I wanted to get out there, for the record… Joel Kramer of MinnPost was disappointed in our characterization of the scale of his staff as “several” and with a “relative handful” of editorial employees compared to the major Twin Cities papers, when MinnPost boasts more than 50 reporters. As I told Kramer, the big difference is that most of MinnPost’s reporters are freelancers, not full-time staffers, and that the Strib and Pioneer-Press still dwarf MinnPost in size. That said, MinnPost is clearly one of the strongest nonprofit media operations (at least from a management and financial perspective). In an ideal world with infinite reporting time and writing space, we would have fully examined the staffing model and talked about why it saves money relying on freelancers (as most magazines do) instead of full-time beat reporters. As a freelancer myself, I can tell you that many publications save thousands of dollars by not offering benefits and by paying $1/word — the same rate one of my mentors commanded when he quit the Washington Post to go freelance during the mid-1980s.
1 Comment
March 25, 2008 at 5:42 pm
You wrote:
Today we posted the reporting position, which will be a fantastic opportunity for a great writer/reporter interested in helping a community better understand itself. Go here for details.