News is a Bu$iness -- Or is It?

Part Three: Mississippi Today and Beyond

Anna Wolfe graduated from Mississippi State University in 2014. She is now the “inequity and corruption” reporter for Mississippi Today, a nonprofit that in less than a decade has earned recognition as the state’s leading news organization.  

 Wolfe’s coverage of Mississippi’s welfare program won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. The citation said that she “revealed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of state welfare dollars to benefit his family and friends, including NFL quarterback Brett Favre.” Wolfe has accumulated so many other top-tier accolades for her work that linking to them here shows the measure of her accomplishments.

Yes, local journalism around the country has been ravaged by business upheavals. But Wolfe and her colleagues in Mississippi and their counterparts at scores of other startup nonprofit news enterprises around the country are reinventing the essential practice of keeping tabs on who, what, when where and how all that matters to so many people happens and what it means to them.

Mississippi Today has reporters covering the legislature, politics, health, and education, and a popular sports columnist. With only about twenty people on staff so far, its output is impressive. Not surprisingly, Mississippi Today has raised hackles in the state’s political establishment.

Ritual complaints about outsiders intruding in Mississippi don’t land effectively on an enterprise so completely homegrown. A group of prominent people in the state founded the news organization in 2016 with money and national connections. It describes itself as “the only fully staffed, member supported, digital first, nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom serving Mississippi and meeting the information needs of communities across the state.” It is now part of a network called Deep South Today, which has a second news organization (Verite in New Orleans) and ambitions to add and expand.

What is especially notable in this local news movement -- and its greatest continuing challenge – is that its sole purpose is the pursuit of the news. It is not intended to earn riches for its founders and investors.

While BuzzFeed and Vice (you know the litany of losers) have come a cropper, the nonprofits are still mainly in the early stages of development, in which they are hoping to get enough traction to persuade their communities to support them at scale. It is still too early to declare that the efforts will succeed.

But hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars are being committed and every one of the news non-profits is conjuring ways to raise money from memberships, events, and sponsorship.

The concept of nonprofit newsgathering is not altogether new. There are precedents in major broadcast and internet-based fields.

NPR and PBS are well established in the national news stratosphere, but it has taken decades for that to happen, and the capricious nature of corporate underwriting and government funding suggest that hard-hitting accountability journalism may make it problematic to keep the powers-that-be dispensing largesse.

And, of course, relentless fundraising is necessary.

A different model was the creation forty-five years ago of C-SPAN which was founded by the country’s cable systems as a public service to provide coverage of government, national events, history, and books. The programming has been scrupulously designed to inform and not offend – which newsrooms would find hard to maintain.

And as the cable systems confront cord-cutting and streaming, C-SPAN is now going through its own process of reinvention, on the internet and by attracting limited advertising and donations.

Mississippi Today makes all its stories available at no charge to the other state newspapers and outlets, building the footprint for its indispensability. It also encompasses Jerry Mitchell’s Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, which is a finalist in this year’s Goldsmith Prize at the Harvard Kennedy School for a project called “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs,” which the New York Times supported with two reporting fellows and featured the results.

The vibe among the upstarts is collaborative. They meet regularly in groups to share experiences, best practices, and frustrations. I asked Mary Margaret White, the executive director of Mississippi Today to recommend a couple of regional news organizations she admires. She mentioned El Paso Matters and The Current, “for Savannah and coastal Georgia,” and based on their sites I understand why.

Mississippi journalism has long dealt with overt racism in white-owned newspapers. That problem has receded. The board of directors is led by Andy Lack, a Mississippi native who had an illustrious career in television news. Others on the board are prominent in their fields and suitably diverse in race and gender.

In the bad old days of Mississippi’s history with segregation, Jim Crow, and the KKK, getting state news meant navigating bigotry. On the day after the 1963 March on Washington, the headline in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the main state newspaper, was “Washington Is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed.” Rea Hederman of the family who owned the paper transformed it and won a Pulitzer.

It is now one of those desiccated dailies in the Gannett chain. Mississippi Today is young, idealistic, and energized. If it gets the means to do so, it can demonstrate what the news business should be.

Reimagining local journalism countrywide demands vision, leadership, entrepreneurial skills, and money that provides the time it can take to establish a meaningful place in people’s lives.

Next week: ProPublica and The Marshall Project, the ne plus ultra.