Blog Insider: Why We Aren’t a Non-Profit [$2 Challenge]

by Latoya Peterson

On a cold windy night at WBAI, I finally had a chance to catch up with Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of Feministing. Late one night, while waiting for Jay Smooth to arrive at the radio station, we were both excited about our plans to take our sites to the next level.

“We’re becoming a non-profit,” said Samhita. (Edited: Feministing is considering becoming a non-profit. They are still exploring. – LDP)

“We’re going for-profit,” I replied.

We both looked at each other for a long second, wondering, “Well, how do you plan to make that work?”

The first time we considered becoming a nonprofit was 2008, with Carmen quickly dismissing the idea. She had some misgivings about the nonprofit model, and said she preferred to work in a different way for social change.

I was inclined to agree. I had worked as a consultant for an environmental nonprofit for about nine months, and the entire experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I had never worked for a non-profit before, so I didn’t know that the board having a dispute with the executive director was a bad sign going in. Within a month, the person who had hired me left for good, leaving a leadership vacuum – all the top level folks had left over the last six months, so most of the remaining staff was junior level. The board had good intentions, but was completely out of touch with reality, and proposed everything from a change in mission and alignment to moving office space to save money. The board also didn’t agree on some very key things, which meant every person who interviewed for the top position came away with different ideas about the organization. Eventually, all the employees were let go, the place was completely reorganized, and as far as I know, they are still limping along.

I decided to reconsider the non-profit model though, when it came time to figure out what to do with this blog. There didn’t appear to be many alternatives for a social justice focused organization. In 2009, I was asked to head to the Poynter Institute, to become a Sense-Making fellow. There, I met some amazing people – Chris Rabb, Shawn Williams, Matt Thompson, Drew Curtis, Keith Woods, and Anna John, to name a just a few. (Every single fellow is awesome.)

All of us were called together to discuss the future of journalism and what Poynter termed “The Fifth Estate,” meaning the online space which allowed certain journalistic activity to occur. The first Sensemaking meeting was fairly free-form, which meant we all sat in a room for five days and just talked to each other. During that time, two people made a really compelling case for a non-profit model. One, Geoff Dougherty, was a newspaper man who was convinced that non-profit journalism would save ailing industry. The other, Kristina Rizga, was running an amazing site called WireTap Magazine, and we spent some time discussing the philosophy behind independent media and content creation.

That year, I talked to Kristina at length about how the non-profit model worked, and she gave me some great advice. She warned that the funding process was no joke, and mentioned to expect anywhere from 18-24 months to pass before you ever see a check for a funder. She talked about being mission focused, and how WireTap wanted to do more outreach in undeserved communities to get people paid and give them writing credits. She talked about how labor intensive the process was, particularly working with people who had never written anything for publication before, and how there was a long process to turn someone’s idea to a finished, print-worthy contribution. However, her eyes always sparkled when she discussed her work, which let me know that despite all the pitfalls, Kristina was going to find a way to work it out.

Page 1 of 4 | Next page