Mother Jones, The New Business Model For Publishing?
“We’re so out of date, we’re hip,” Mother Jones co-editor Monika Bauerlein told the San Francisco Chronicle. Thirty years ago the national magazine decided to become a nonprofit. Now, burdened with heavy debt and no foreseeable way to turn a profit in the current market, many newspapers are investigating their once unique business model.
Mother Jones wasn’t born out of a recession though, it was born out of necessity. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, a group of investors decided it was necessary to create an investigative news magazine that wasn’t constrained by the pressures of advertising or corporate interests. Thus Mother Jones was conceived.
Now the magazine is fielding calls from its media peers interested in discovering how their model works exactly. Running a nonprofit publication is not an easy business model though. According to two Yale scholars, it would take an estimated $5 billion endowment to maintain the $200 million annual newsroom budget for the New York Times.
Still the industry is interested in any reorganization that might offer a ray during these hard pressed times. The MinnPost.com, the first print publication to go fully digital, is receiving a lot of positive reviews about their new structure from media pundits, but the staff itself still contends their $1.2 million operation is still in its experimental phase.
It’s clear that every everyone is still groping in the dark for answers to this tremendous problem.
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