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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Unlike many news orgs, ProPublica's funding has managed to stay solid during the post-President Trump years — $60M according to their 2021 990, vs. $51M in 2019. I worked there in its first years, when nearly its entire $10M budget came from its founding donor.

But PP, along with Axios and Politico, is an exception that proves the rule. The NYT is probably the only legacy news org that has an optimistic long-term future, due to its last-man-standing position and diversification into tech and games.

(TV news is a different situation, obviously Fox News has done very well. CNN had major cuts during the Discovery-Warner merger, but I don't think they're on a downward spiral)

https://www.propublica.org/reports

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142...

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Fox News has done very well because they aren't a journalism organization. They just repeat what their audience wants to hear and laugh all the way to the bank. If what they're talking about is in any way related to the truth it is entirely coincidental. They have in multiple lawsuits now argued that they are not a news organization and can not be held to any journalistic standards.

Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive. Telling people what they want to hear is cheap and easy.

> Fox News has done very well because they aren't a journalism organization. They just repeat what their audience wants to hear and laugh all the way to the bank.

This could be stated for all news organizations, especially those that claim to be impartial on paper. You could argue Fox News is worse, but don't pretend that the New York Times or Washington Post don't have a slant - or a 30 degree angle. Especially after the Nicholas Sandmann debacle in which they paid settlements for defamation. Or another example, MSNBC was banned from the Rittenhouse trial after being caught following the Jury Bus.

It could be said that free markets are bad for journalism. Markets optimize for cost, so if you can create a product that looks like journalism but is less expensive to produce, it is likely to be the winner in a market system.

This is why it is fascinating to watch what happens to experiments like NPR, although even in that case it was only a partial success.

> Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive.

I'm not certain that that's the case, at least in Canada.

Time and time again, much of the lowest-quality reporting/journalism I've seen has been from the largest Canadian news organizations that have significant resources at their disposal.

On the other hand, most of the best journalism I've seen has been from the organizations that are far smaller, and with far fewer resources.

It has even gotten to the point where relatively average individuals who are merely live streaming or sharing videos/photos of events end up providing more detailed, representative, objective, and timelier reporting than the large news organizations.

Difficulty and expense being a requirement for real journalism doesn’t mean that low-quality journalism can’t also be expensive.

Journalism is largely partisan on all sides. Where partisans claim otherwise, they cite sources which adhere to their own biases.

https://assets-c3.propublica.org/pdf/reports/2022-Annual-Rep...

Page 43:

- 5.8 million monthly page views

- 506,544 newsletter subscribers

Page 44:

- 2022 revenue $42 million

- Online donations $4.3 million

- The rest is grants and gifts

- Expenses $40.2

This is... not good at all.. it is basically a tiny blog that runs 90% on donations from a few rich people. I've seen single tweets with more views than what they get in a month, propublica sadly can't be sustainable for much longer I wouldn't think.

This subject has been giving me anxiety since about 2006. Nothing seems to stem the decline and I am scared what kind of world we will end up in soon as a result.

Their business model isn't based on website CPM, but on producing "impact" that gets them recognition and appreciation. Their recent stories on Clarence Thomas [0] dominated the news cycle last week. Even if the website story page got just 1M hits, far more people saw the story via other media outlets and government officials citing it. When PP puts out fundraising pitches, the Thomas story will be a highlight for this year.

It's worth noting that investigative work has always been like this. Even before news orgs had web analytics, they knew that a multi-month investigation into government spending/corruption might be a few thousand or just hundred readers, but as long as those readers included people in positions of power and influence -- e.g. a member of congress who can call for a congressional hearing -- then that boosts the newspaper brand and influence as much as any popular story.

PP focuses on investigative work rather than general news. It doesn't publish frequently enough, or about any specific topic, to drive regular annual readership (i.e. subscribers) -- I doubt there are many people who'd check PP's homepage on a daily or even weekly basis. So, better to attract charitable foundation grants and small donor contributions than to do a subscriber paywall.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...

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