That concept is currently in operation at the foundation-owned St. Petersburg Times in Florida, and it's sparking discussion in an industry where the overwhelming pressure to preserve high profit margins is leading to a gutting of the journalistic mission.
DURING the next year or so, The St. Petersburg Times plans to continue pursuing deeply reported, long-term features about such topics as Florida’s property insurance crisis, complex tax issues, public education at all levels, and wildlife and endangered species. It will balance this slate of stories against all the other bread-and-butter issues it covers everyday for its readers: politics, business, sports, community affairs, culture and more.
“We’re going to invest the time and energy and the resources in these stories because the question we’re always asking ourselves is what matters to our audience,” said Stephen Buckley, the managing editor of the newspaper. “And that’s the question that really drives our organization: Are we doing work that matters?”
Such ambitions were rare enough in the good old days of gumshoe journalism, when newspapers were cash machines. Now, as more readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet, this kind of enterprise reporting has become harder to find at many papers. And in that context, The St. Petersburg Times is itself an endangered species — an independent, privately owned daily that continues to serve up quality journalism. Many owners of other daily city papers sold them off years ago to try to avoid inheritance taxes. But The St. Petersburg Times was not sold; to guarantee local ownership and independence, its owner, Nelson Poynter, gave it away upon his death in 1978 to a nonprofit educational organization now called the Poynter Institute.
For newspaper publishing — an industry awash in uncertainty as it tries to adapt to the Internet — The St. Petersburg Times offers one possible model for salvaging enterprises that must, as all businesses do, respond to financial reality. In contrast to some other businesses, newspapers also have to address technological change and economic shifts while carrying out their traditional mission of trying to provide independent, high-quality information and analysis to readers.
Interest in the St. Petersburg model has grown in the wake of Rupert Murdoch’s recent agreement to acquire Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. That was just the latest in a wave of seismic changes that include plummeting stock prices for publicly owned newspaper companies (including The New York Times Company), the divestiture of the Knight Ridder chain and the cost-cutting that has ravaged newspapers like The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., and The Los Angeles Times.
“I think the St. Petersburg Times model is wonderful, and I think it would be great if there would be more of them,” said John S. Carroll, a former top editor at The Los Angeles Times, who resigned after resisting staff cuts ordered by its owner, the Tribune Company. “The value of newspapers is dropping so the financial sacrifice necessary to do this is becoming easier, and I think there is a lot of charitable money around, and there are some money people who are concerned about the future of journalism.”
FOR their part, editors at The St. Petersburg Times say Mr. Poynter was a visionary whose act of singular munificence allows their reporters to do painstaking reporting because the paper doesn’t answer to outside investors who constantly watch the bottom line. “We don’t put out a newspaper to make money,” says Paul C. Tash, the chief executive of the Times Publishing Company, which oversees the paper. “We make money so we can put out a great newspaper.”
Mr. Poynter didn’t make all his family members happy by giving away a fortune, but as he said, “I haven’t met my great-grandchildren, and I may not like them.” While his legacy allows for patient, long-term investment, The St. Petersburg Times isn’t free from the industry’s challenges.
The paper doesn’t get any money from the Poynter Institute. Just like other private businesses, it pays for its operating expenses, $90 million this year for payroll alone, from its own revenue, and it pays taxes on its profits. It must also pay the Poynter Institute a yearly dividend, currently about $6 million, for which it receives no tax benefit. “The Times Publishing Company has no tax advantages related to our ownership,” said Jana Jones, the company’s chief financial officer.
What makes the company different from most private companies is that the owner, the Poynter Institute, does not take money out of the company beyond the dividend. Every decision that is made at the newspaper with regard to the use of profits, executives say, is based on the reinvestment needs of the company. No owner or chain is removing that money to invest in another newspaper or another business.