(Kevin Stark)

Michael Stoll believes that newspapers should provide a public service. Stoll moved to San Francisco in 2000 to work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and, after being promoted three times, was fired after accusing the publisher of tailoring coverage to favor certain advertisers and politicians. Stoll was then hired to scrutinize the content of local news organizations by Grade the News, a media watchdog group based at Stanford University.

Through his work, Stoll often found that the intentions of many journalists - to tell the truth and uncover social injustice - were being compromised by the business practices of their publications. Specifically, newspapers needed ad revenue to fund their journalism and this was influencing the reporting. In 2005, Stoll began circulating ideas for his own publication, a nonprofit noncommercial news organization that published hard-hitting reporting.

The Public Press was born out of these initial plans and published its first content last fall. It has joined the ranks of organizations like the Voice of San Diego, Consumer Reports and others that have attempted to create a nonprofit, noncommercial business model. "What it comes down to is we have created a platform of journalism that cannot be bought," said Stoll.

Stoll's project could not be more timely. With the digital media transformation and economic recession, the traditional commercial business model for news organizations is hurting. "There is a growing realization that journalism as we conceived it and the whole tradition of journalism over the last 100 or 150 years are based on a fundamental inefficiency of advertising," Stoll said. "Once a much more effective means of conveying advertising to the public was invented, that inefficiency disappeared and journalism was suddenly in peril." Stroll's project has been able to attract a significant buzz just based on the promise of a unique new business model.

While the corporate business model is proving to be ineffective financially, Stoll also believes that it is morally questionable. Newspapers have depended on advertising for most of their revenues. The role of a media executive was to make the paper as appealing as possible to advertising dollars. Often this meant being able to show a potential advertiser that you have a wealthy readership. As a result, marginalized communities were forgotten in the story telling and distributing of newspapers.

To illustrate, Stoll talks about East Palo Alto. "Palo Alto is a very wealthy city. East Palo Alto, on the other side of Highway 101, is a very poor city. The San Jose Mercury News has never had an East Palo Alto office and never will because there are no valuable customers there. There is no reason for them to do a serious distribution push there. If they get thirty or forty percent of the households to subscribe, it will give them a very small circulation revenue but an even smaller boost in their ad rates. So, ads are very palpably influencing the journalism."

"The idea that you can tweak your business model and change the whole purpose of the publication is intriguing to me," Stoll said.

This is timely, because "investigative journalism is in peril," Stoll said. He added that many former investigative reporters are being forced to write general assignment stories to make ends meet. "That is painful for them, but they don't have a choice because those newspapers are so understaffed that they just have to produce news. They don't have the time to give stories the concentration and work that they need to uncover hard-to-get stories, pore over documents, and do lots of interviews on specific topics."

But how is The Public Press different? Reporters are paid through small community donations. The Public Press is collaborating with a fundraising Web site called Spot.Us that was started by David Cohn. Through the Web site, reporters are actually pitching stories directly to the Bay Area community.

It works like this: Reporters write up a story pitch with the details of an article or beat they want to report. If readers are interested in the story idea they can donate to pay the reporter. The Web site will place a maximum donation level so as to discourage single wealthy contributors from fully funding a pitch.

Through Spot.Us and a partnership with Newsdesk.org, The Public Press has already successfully funded one major beat and is in the middle of a successful push on its second project, the City Budget Watchdog. For the first project, Stoll paid six reporters to scrutinize claims made in voter's guides for the local election of 2008. "We were fact checking claims, in order to highlight exaggerations and outright fabrications," Stoll said.

City Budget Watchdog is a bigger pitch and will pay a team of reporters for three months to cover the budget crisis in San Francisco. "We are looking at the details and the process behind cutting back San Francisco government to where it was maybe ten years ago." This budget season the city was facing a half billion dollar deficit. Yet the number of San Francisco City Hall reporters has decreased from a couple of dozen a few years ago to just a handful today. The project is in its first month and has already reached the halfway mark of its fundraising goal.

According to Stoll, the most important part of his organization has been its extensive network of volunteers and collaborators. While some reporters are paid through community fundraising, many of the folks working on The Public Press - from writers to editors to multimedia experts - are volunteering their time.

Also, Stoll has not given up on print journalism. He believes that print media is the most effective vehicle for encouraging a lively community discussion about politics and policy. "There is much to learn both from the technology of delivery and news gathering and collaboration. I still believe there is a role for professional journalism and mass media distribution. On a local level this is easier to accomplish with print." While The Public Press is currently online, Stoll hopes to be publishing a paper is in the future. The unique business model and publication cycle allow for that sort of experimentation.

"We can just focus on the serious, on the investigative and the enterprise. That is what inspires me. If we can keep doing that and inspire others to join us and inspire those with a little bit of extra money in the world to lend us some support, we can very quickly make a name for ourselves and provide a public service. That is really the point, to provide a public service."


Kevin Stark is a former intern for the Media Management Center and a guest blogger for TechScout. Kevin was just recently hired as a reporter for The Public Press. We wish him all the best in his new pursuit.

This TechScout article is part of a series of interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.

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