Nonprofits can't revive journalism, media analyst insists

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."