Nonprofit journalism — like Texas Watchdog — is on the rise, NYT says

By Jennifer Peebles | Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Nonprofit journalism — which is what we’re doing here at Texas Watchdog — got a big shout-out this morning from The New York Times.

The NYT’s piece, focused largely on the nonprofit news site VoiceofSanDiego.org, lays out a pretty good definition of what we’re trying to do and why we’re doing it. An excerpt:

… Financially, VoiceofSanDiego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.

New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.

To back up for a second:

Texas Watchdog is a nonprofit. We’re not owned by a company or a person or a chain of newspapers or TV stations. While we get off the ground, we’ve been graciously funded by a foundation based in Chicago that wants to support government transparency efforts (read more on our “About us” page). We’re nonpartisan and independent — take a look around our site and you’ll see that we have written stories critical of people on both the Democratic side, including Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez and Democratic fundraiser Fred Baron, and the Republican side, including state Sen. Kim Brimer and Bush White House insider Stephen Payne. And our government transparency work includes our recent posting of personal financial disclosure forms by all 181 state legislators, the first time this had been done by anyone in Texas. We plan to do lot more of that, too.

Now, we’re not as big as VoiceofSanDiego.org — they’ve got 11 people on their staff, the NYT story says, and we’re just a little group of about four. And they’ve been around a couple of years now, while we’re just a few months old.

Take a read of the NYT story and tell us what you think, either in our blog comments area or by shooting me an e-mail. I’m jennifer@texaswatchdog.org. If you like what we do, here are two things you can do to help us: First, tell your friends about us — shoot them a link to a story you liked, or just tell them our URL, TexasWatchdog.org. Second, send us your story ideas. We’re new. We want to know what’s going on and what you would like to see written about. Tell us some ways you think we could make government more transparent. Some of you have already sent us your tips, and we appreciate it. We’re paying attention to every one of them. Keep ‘em coming.

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