As more nonprofit news outlets emerge, it may be time for them to collectively consider a new industry-wide version of the traditional advertising-based editorial protections. Courtesy NetPhotos / Alamy

Within a few days earlier this month, Gerry Lenfest, the eighty-five-year-old owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, announced that he would transfer ownership to a new nonprofit organization, and Chris Hughes, the thirty-two-year-old owner of The New Republic, announced that he would sell the magazine, and mentioned a change to nonprofit status as one of several plausible futures for it. Do two instances qualify as a trend? At the very least, they make public what the people who work at these publications have known for a long time: that parts of the news business might not really be a business.

The New Republic belongs to a category of journalism—small-circulation magazines about politics, culture, and intellectual life—that is not, has never been, and likely can never be profitable. Such publications, oddly, often survive longer than profit-making magazines. (I should say that I am a longtime denizen of this world; I’m involved with several nonprofit journalism ventures, I’ve written occasionally for The New Republic since the late nineteen-seventies, and my wife was a senior editor there who arrived early in the Hughes era and was part of an exodus of editorial staff a couple of years later.) The Spectator has been continuously published since 1828, Harper’s since 1850, The Atlantic since 1857, and The Nation since 1865. The reason they have lasted so long is that they are relatively cheap to produce (far cheaper than a daily newspaper), and, on their good days, they have a visibility and effect disproportionate to their size, which gives them a plausible argument in seeking nonmarket support. The most workable business model for these magazines—if it were fair to use the term, which it isn’t—has been having a wealthy owner/patron who is willing to cover modest losses for a generation or so. That was what Hughes appeared to be when he bought The New Republic, in 2012, but it seems he believed that, by switching the magazine from a primarily print to primarily digital publication, he could make it profitable. His announcement shows that his hypothesis was wrong.

The Inquirer is different: a publication that was nicely profitable fifteen years ago and now is not and, in its owner’s judgment, will never be again. If the great American big-city newspapers, which in their glory days did the majority of whatever original reporting there was in their hometowns, are now struggling, that tears a hole in the fabric of community life. The most socially useful journalism these papers did—investigative reporting, international reporting, thick daily coverage of civic institutions like government and schools—was probably never as much the reason for their commercial success as sports and entertainment coverage, comics, horoscopes, advice columns, and weather reports, but the success subsidized it. Producing that kind of journalism, which costs money, will require some other support system.

Of course, a daily newspaper can also have a patron-owner (like John Henry, who owns the Boston *Globe*) or can sit protected inside a larger entity with other forms of income (like Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal), but in the last decade or so a good many nonprofit news organizations have started to fill the gaps left by the commercial decline of the newspaper business. These include organizations that do investigative reporting, like ProPublica; international reporting, like GroundTruth and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; local and regional coverage, like the Texas Tribune and Voice of San Diego; and single-topic reporting, like the Marshall Project and InsideClimate News. Some of these organizations are mainly publishers, and some are mainly sponsors of reporting that appears in publications including The New Yorker. Their work is always good, and sometimes spectacular.

Problem solved? Well, no. Nonprofits still have to make payroll, so they have to bring in more money than they spend. Unless they have a single patron, this means they have to fund-raise every bit as energetically as commercial news organizations in the pre-Internet era had to sell advertising. The fund-raising is actually trickier. Of the major foundations, only one, the Knight Foundation, of Miami, has journalism as a primary mission. Many other potential supporters of nonprofit journalism see it as a means to an end (usually, bringing public attention to whatever issue is their main focus), not as an independent social good. The traditional major newspaper advertisers, like department stores and auto dealers, didn’t want to have a conversation about what work the City Hall reporter would be doing before they signed a contract, because the reporter usually wasn’t going to be covering their business. But that’s exactly the kind of conversation donors to news nonprofits want to have about the reporter on campaign finance, or education reform, or environmental policy, before they decide whether the gift they’re being asked for fits their mission.

Journalists like to use hoary metaphors to describe the protection of editorial purpose from commercial intervention: church-state, Chinese wall. The implication is that shortly after God decided to separate the land and the water and to divide humans into male and female, He set journalists apart from their sources of financial support. Actually, the rulebook about advertisers and newsrooms, which came into being, gradually, through the second half of the twentieth century, is not very old, and it took a struggle to establish. That struggle has just broken out again, because the Federal Trade Commission has announced that it wants news organizations to be clearer about labelling online “native advertising”—paid-for material that looks a little like editorial matter—as what it really is.

If nonprofit journalism is now becoming a sector, rather than a few cases, then it should organize itself and work up its own version of the traditional advertising-based editorial protections. That will be a struggle, too, but it will build trust with readers and media critics, and protection from editorial meddling. There’s nothing more comforting, for somebody who runs one of these organizations, than being able to tell a prospective funder that there is an inviolable industry-wide rule against, for example, promising how a story will turn out. Journalism is too vast and disorganized ever to fit entirely, or even mostly, under the umbrella of the American nonprofit laws. But it looks ever more likely that a substantial and especially valuable part of it will. It’s time to create a structure to go along with that development, lest the editorial independence that’s the whole point here be diminished.