Journalists and their funders: Whose job is it to measure impact, and how should it be done?
Nonprofit journalism legend Chuck Lewis on setting benchmarks for the impact of nonprofit news: “The idea of fixing a single standard that everyone’s going to adhere to — talk about herding cats. That’s not even fair to cats.”
Chuck Lewis didn’t mean to become the Yoda of nonprofit journalism — it just sort of happened that way. He was a reporter for decades before founding his first nonprofit, the Center for Public Integrity, in 1996, and later the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Now he’s trying to answer a couple fundamental questions that will influence the future of nonprofit news: How can you judge whether a nonprofit outlet is having a positive impact? And who should do the judging?
The past decade has seen an explosion in nonprofit news organizations. The Investigative News Network, which Lewis helped found in 2009, has more than 80 members nationwide. Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism counts 172 nonprofit outlets in the U.S. Revenues in the for-profit world have continued to decrease, newsrooms have continued to shrink, and the coverage gap has