Nonprofits can’t revive journalism, media analyst insists

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Can nonprofit news orgs step up and rescue American journalism? CPB just announced five local journalism centers in one of many efforts nationwide. It’s a grant of some $10.5 million, “with an expectation that each Center will become self-sustaining by the end of the two-year funding period,” according to CPB. But at least one media analyst says, nonprofits just can’t achieve what needs to be done. In fact, Alan D. Mutter, a longtime newspaper editor and adjunct faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, titled his blog post today, “Non-profits can’t possibly save the news.” He says he can prove it using “simple math.” He’s calculated that “it would take $88 billion – or nearly a third of all the $307.7 billion donated to charity in 2008 – to fund the reporting still being done at America’s seriously straitened newspapers.”

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