By Ellen Clegg
When two legends in digital publishing sit down to talk in unvarnished terms about the past, present and future of nonprofit journalism, it’s worth noting. And reading. That happened last week, in a virtual sense, when Richard Tofel, the founding general manager and former president of ProPublica, interviewed Evan Smith, the founding CEO of The Texas Tribune. (The interview, in Q&A form, is on Tofel’s “Second Rough Draft” newsletter and can be found here.)
Smith and Tofel were both present at the creation, as they say. Smith, the longtime editorial chief at Texas Monthly, a must-read statewide magazine based in Austin, joined venture capitalist John Thornton and political writer Ross Ramsey in launching the nonprofit, digital Texas Tribune in 2009 — a time when the once-robust political and statehouse coverage supplied by legacy newspapers like the Austin American-Statesman and The Dallas Morning News was heading toward a cliff. He is now a senior adviser at the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ philanthropy, and a professor of the practice at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.
Tofel was the first employee and a moral force at ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit newsroom founded in 2007 to hold power to account — and to keep the essential practice of investigative journalism alive in an era marked by a business recession and rounds of staff layoffs and buyouts in newsrooms. He is now the principal of Gallatin Advisory LLC, but his journalistic opinions are very much his own, formed over a long career as an innovator.
Both projects are discussed in our book, “What Works in Community News.” I met with Smith and Tribune editor-in-chief Sewell Chan in their newsroom in Austin, and both men shared insights into the founding and the future of the Tribune as Smith prepared to move on and Chan succeeded Ramsey. And Wendi C. Thomas, founder of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, another project we profile in our book, forged an important partnership with ProPublica to bring national attention to her stellar investigative series, “Profiting from the poor,” which uncovered predatory debt-collection practices at a Memphis hospital.
It would do a disservice to the Tofel-Smith tango to try to summarize it in one paragraph, but here’s a taste, from Smith:
There is absolutely no way to put a one size fits all strategy in front of the [nonprofit] sector. What works in Texas works in Texas. There would be no value and no probability of success in exporting the model to other places — in scraping Texas off the nameplate and replacing it with Montana or Vermont or California or South Carolina — because what works in those places works in those places. … This is not something that — as “nonprofit journalism economics in a box” — can be purchased off the shelf and put in your checked baggage and taken home with you. You’ve got to figure it out on your own locally.
What Works 