Haak-Frost: Treat local journalism as a public good this #GivingTuesday

Tomorrow is #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving established to support local causes and transform communities. Watershed Voice, like many other nonprofits, is asking for your support. We’d also like you to consider treating local journalism as a public good, rather than a commercial product, this GivingTuesday.

Courtney Lewis, the chief of growth programs at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), recently penned an editorial for Medium in which she posed the question, “What if we embraced news as a public good?”

In the column, Lewis references media scholar Victor Pickard, who wrote that in a social sense, “journalism’s value to society transcends the revenue that it generates,” comparing it to a lighthouse:

A classic example of a public good is a lighthouse, which is a kind of essential infrastructure that ships need to navigate coastlines, but no cost-effective way exists to make people pay for it. Instead, people will ‘free ride,’ which takes away market incentives to provide the good. Society requires these goods, but individuals typically undervalue them because they are unable or unwilling to pay for their full costs, which leads to the market under-producing them.

Victor Pickard, Democracy without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society

In the decades before I entered the fray of independent, nonprofit journalism, journalism itself was a profitable business. When the subscriber model began to falter, publishers around the world started leaning more heavily into subsidizing their work with advertising revenue. As the physical paper product began to fall out of favor, and readers began to seek their news almost exclusively online, that advertising revenue began to dry up.

In the last decade, the U.S. has lost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists, which amounts to 43,000, while more than half of U.S. counties now have no access or very limited access to local news. This is why supporting local, independent newsrooms like ours, who are trying to provide that access to small, rural counties like St. Joseph and Cass, is so important.

According to Lewis, research shows that in areas where commercial news has declined, the presence of local nonprofit news organizations producing watchdog journalism keeps public officials accountable.

In addition to our function as a local news source and watchdog, Watershed Voice decided earlier this year to do away with our paywall, and make our work accessible to everyone. As I wrote on my personal Facebook account ahead of Small Business Saturday, I firmly believe having disposable income shouldn’t be a prerequisite for staying informed, and our new business model reflects that.

I’ve spent nearly my entire life at or below the poverty line, and delivering newspapers was the only reason I had regular access to local news growing up. Knowledge truly is power, and being well informed is more often than not a byproduct of privilege, when it should be an inalienable right.

In that spirit we will continue to provide our award-winning reporting free of charge. But make no mistake, producing such work costs money.

As I wrote last December, a staff of three, the bare minimum in terms of capacity that we need to properly do this work, including myself, our office manager Steph Hightree, and a staff writer costs $88,400 annually, or $7,366.66 on average per month. Factoring in the cost of website upkeep, data storage, our freelance budget, and other bills, this nonprofit needs north of $100,000 annually to operate at the level you’ve become accustomed to as readers.

You don’t have to pay to read our work, nor does anyone else, but we ask that if you have the means to set up a monthly or one-time donation this GivingTuesday, that you do so. For Watershed Voice, for the community, and for the public good.

Alek Haak-Frost is executive editor, publisher, and founder of Watershed Voice.