In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so. Ever since I left the Washington Post, in 2005—after twenty years there that included a stint in management—and particularly since I joined the nonprofit world at the New America Foundation and started learning about the management and fund-raising issues at tax-exempt organizations, I have been mulling over this idea: that only by turning the Post into a nonprofit trust and raising a university-size endowment to support the newsroom could the paper retain the vitality it requires to serve as a successful watchdog over our constitutional system. Now David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst, have come forward with a similar argument.

Their math is the same as that which got me started on this notion. When I left the Post’s newsroom, a few years ago, the total cost of its news-gathering operations—salaries, benefits, and cash—was in the neighborhood of $120 million. That was lean compared with the Times, which Swensen and Schmidt peg as a $200-million operation today. But it was more than enough to maintain a strong investigative-reporting staff of more than a dozen reporters, editors, and researchers, and to support richly detailed beat reporting across a range of local, national, and foreign-policy subjects. We had about thirty staff foreign correspondents in about twenty bureaus and additional contract writers abroad.

It has been very painful to watch papers like the Post offer buyouts to dozens of talented journalists at the height of their powers while shutting overseas bureaus and even entire sections of the paper. Not to pick on any one institution, but, from a constitutional perspective, how did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before September) an endowment well in excess of one billion dollars, while the Washington Post, a fountainhead of Watergate and so much other skeptical and investigative reporting critical to the republic’s health, is in jeopardy? I’m sure that Williams-generated nostalgia in the emotional lives of wealthy people is hard to overestimate, but still …

Yes, the dispersal of publishing through digital technology is itself a source of constitutional renewal, and already small digital publishers are proving through their enterprise and investigative reporting that the values underlying the old models will not disappear. Yes, my thinking is admittedly rooted in an aging generation’s experience. Still, there is just no substitute for the professional, civil-service-style, relentless independent thinking, reporting, and observation that developed in big newsrooms between the Second World War and whenever it was that the end began—about 2005 or so. And those qualities arose from the scale of those newsrooms, and the way the quasi-monopoly business model and high-quality family owners shielded them from political or commercial pressure—not perfectly, but largely. Yes, the big papers failed, as in the run-up to the Iraq war, but they succeeded much more often. They practiced a kind of journalism that, on the whole, was better for a democratic constitutional system than any journalism ever practiced before, anywhere. So sayeth me, at any rate.

The typical spend rate for endowed nonprofits is in the five-percent range. If the Washington Post had a two billion dollar endowment, it would be able to fund a very healthy newsroom. And this is before revenue from continuing operations—advertising, circulation, etc., which could surely cover at least the cost of distribution and overhead, particularly if the form of delivery is increasingly digital. Two billion dollars, by the way, represents something in the neighborhood of five per cent of Warren Buffett’s net worth, the last I knew that figure. (Buffett is a director of the Washington Post Company and one of the great public-minded businessmen of his age, although my impression is that, as someone who is so talented at making money, he is congenitally unhappy about giving it away—so he has asked his friend Bill Gates to do it for him).

I’m glad that Swensen and Schmidt have put this model out there prominently in the discourse. Obviously, this is not the best time in the world to be raising charitable funds for any cause. What worries me on behalf of the Post is that whoever moves first in the direction that Swensen and Schmidt have suggested is going to have a big advantage—whoever is first to market will be first to a billion-dollar-plus endowment. The families that own these papers are understandably reluctant—they are successful business families with great pride and confidence in their ability to turn things around. At this point, my hypothesis is that the philanthropists have to move first. Warren? Bill? You can secure the First Amendment for a generation at a time of historical transformation in national life, and in the country’s place in the world. If you’ll just put up the first billion, the rest of us promise to get busy helping to raise the rest.