“Where there is disruption, there is opportunity”: What does the future hold for nonprofit newsrooms?
On March 18, 2020, the staff at
Isthmus, a 45 year old alt-weekly newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, were scrambling to assemble that week’s newspaper for a coronavirus edition; they had just scrapped their original cover story. But after the paper ran the next morning,
Isthmus’ owners told staff that the alt-weekly’s best chance for survival was to pause operations indefinitely. Within a week, all 23 full-time employees were laid off. “It was incredibly fast,” said Judith Davidoff, the editor of
Isthmus. “I can’t say that any of us thought they were going to shut down that quickly.”
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When Facebook has announced various initiatives to help news organizations, they have tended to benefit larger newsrooms that are less in need of assistance. For instance, when the News Tab was unveiled a year and a half ago, it was explicitly designed to benefit behemoths like The New York Times, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed.
As I wrote then: “At a time when local news is under unprecedented economic pressure, the News Tab will only widen the gap between relatively well-off, highly visible national news organizations and small local projects. The national sites will get paid; the local sites will be billed monthly.”