This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 9, 2009 - In the lower right portion of this Beacon page, you'll notice something new -- ads. In one sense, they have nothing to do with our mission of providing news that matters to the St. Louis region. Advertisers and what goes into the ads will not influence the Beacon's journalism in any way.
In another sense, these ads have a lot to do with sustaining our important mission into the future. Skill and time are required to produce good journalism -- the kind that asks tough questions, acts as a watchdog and helps our community recognize problems and seize opportunities. Doing good journalism takes resources. One way the Beacon will be generating those resources is through tasteful, unobtrusive ads like those you see today.
The ads are presented through a tool called Flyerboard, run by a company based at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. The company, Paper G, works with other online non-profit news sites like the Beacon. Flyerboard looks like a bulletin board, and we expect many of the ads to include information about events, performances and the like. We hope you'll find the information useful.
Previously, financial support for the Beacon has come entirely from donations -- most from individual St. Louisans and some from foundations. (Our donors are listed on the site.) Our supporters understand that good reporting is an essential community resource, and they've stepped forward to help us make it happen. We're proud and grateful to receive their help and expect donations to continue as the bedrock of our financial foundation for now. Flyerboard constitutes a second revenue source, and we'll be developing others as well in coming months.
Over the last couple weeks, I've attended two gatherings of journalists from across the country. Most talk was about the trainwreck that print and broadcast media find themselves in. In Detroit, the Free Press and News have announced plans to cut home delivery to three days a week, and the Rocky Mountain News has gone out of business. Seattle and perhaps San Francisco are reported to be on the verge of becoming the first major city without a daily ink-on-paper news source.
By some estimates, news staffs have shrunk at least a quarter on average in the last couple of years. Several big city newsrooms are only half or even a third the size they were at their peak a few years ago. Clearly, the economic model that used to support good journalism is broken.
But the important issue is not whether certain media companies or even certain forms of media survive. The issue is whether good reporting will survive as a vital piece of community infrastructure. "Citizen journalists" can perform most of the functions of good journalists some of the time -- checking assertions, providing context and raising questions.
But they can't entirely substitute for a reporting corps that can spend all day every day digging out facts and seeking perspectives from all sides. Sustaining that work is the Beacon's goal, and why we're building multiple sources of revenue to make it happen.