Michael Stoll says:

The Public Press does two things: Original reporting (under-appreciated beats and team investigative projects) and content sharing with as many as 30 nonprofit local public media and civic organizations. In a way these streams are increasingly merging as we do more projects that require close coordination and story planning from the start. It’s definitely cost-positive.

We are now doing collaborative reporting with at least three or four news organizations simultaneously, and usually do that with project-specific funding from foundations. That allows us to do a big cover story for $1,000 to $2,000. If we were doing it alone we would be spending five to 10 times that much. And we would have much smaller reach.

Michael Stoll says:

We do a wide range of collaboration styles. Last fall we “collaborated” with the Center for Public Integrity on a story on how juvenile justice was going the “restorative” path in San Francisco and other cities. It was part of a larger package of stories by CPI on the increasing numbers of expulsions and suspensions in schools across the country. They paid two freelance writers and a photographer to do it. We ran it in the newspaper. Both organizations did the editing.

Michael Stoll says:

http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2011-12/bucking-a-punitive-trend-san-francisco-lets-students-own-up-to-misdeeds-instead-of-gett

Michael Stoll says:

Oh, and the most important criterion of all: We all have to enjoy working together. The best feeling in the world is when you collaborate on reporting and editing a story, and then co-publish, and your partner comes back to you a month later and says, “That was exhausting but I had fun and learned a lot about how to do a team project. I want to do it again.”

Michael Stoll says:

We had a budget of $75,000 last year, which largely went to rent on our downtown 640-square-foot office where I sit now and printing of the quarterly broadsheet edition, which we sell for $1 in about 50 retail locations. Much of the rest goes to paying freelance writers and photographers, but a fair amount of content comes from partners, volunteers and college interns getting credit. We spread it out and we make stone soup. In a way I think we’re much more efficient and therefore effective than most of the larger nonprofits — one reason the foundations ought to get to know what we do and invest in watering the sprigs instead of throwing millions of dollars at grandiose experiments that promise the world and then collapse.

Michael Stoll says:

RE imagining revenue … that’s an interesting question and it depends on how you frame it — what your business model is. We’re mostly funded by individual members paying as little as $35 a year. It’s based on the public broadcasting model that predicts roughly 10 percent of your audience, however large it is, will pay you something to support good community journalism. So the more we get the word out, the more people see that we’re doing civic-focused impactful reporting they can’t find anywhere else, the more community support we get. We don’t take advertising on principle, so we’re not going to write puff pieces on Dow Chemical or anything. It is hard to work this way but our business model relies on public trust, not fast bucks.

Michael Stoll says:

RE scalability … I think the public broadcasters need to lower the drawbridge and take some of the more serious and professional news-gathering operations into their newsrooms. There are some great experiments at doing that, but others remain somewhat reserved and fear that their economic or journalistic positions will be compromised. But public broadcasters could all stand to expand their local news staffs, since a lot of what they do is “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Antiques Roadshow.” What’s missing, and what public radio in particular could expand, is local news. That’s what these local startups are all about. Win-win.

Michael Stoll says:

We love the idea of a barter economy, since so much of what we do is volunteer anyway. When you have a collaborator with millions of dollars set aside for news, then we ask for a little bit to help keep the lights on. But more important than that so far has been establishing a relationship of trust with collaborators who may be leery of letting someone not on their staff take direction from an editor at another newsroom, or go on assignment with a photographer they don’t know. We do have significant syndication income, in the tens of thousands per year, and some of that qualifies as collaborative work and some is simply giving orgs the ability to reprint. We’re in the early days of this experiment. But we’re not yet economically sustainable, so we are relying on the goodwill of wealthier partners, and trying to convince them over time that we actually provide great value to their organizations and enhance their journalistic or civic missions. We will continue to look for these opportunities under every rock, because it’s better than selling soap and cell phones in pop-up ads on our website or inserts in the paper. We want to remain a noncommercial public trust.

Michael Stoll says:

Beyond that, new models and mashups of models need to be tried. There is no such thing as clean money, but the greater the diversity of revenue models that news startups try, the greater the chance that some of them will emerge as the next sustainable community institutions. Many, but by no means all, public broadcasters and mission-driven magazines don’t take advertising for some of the above reasons, relying instead on grassroots support. Many people thought public broadcasting couldn’t work, but it has more than 70 years of experience to show that it cannot only work but it can thrive and be a meaningful alternative to the typical commercial broadcasting dreck. The Public Press is a hybrid of the newspaper circulation revenue model with the “pledge” model of public broadcasting, casting back a few decades to before the corporations owned Big Bird.

Michael Stoll says:

Yes, there are all sorts of interesting models popping up, ad-based, ad-free, few ads, only ads you like. We’re just one flavor. More flavors, more balanced diet. But specifically we are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a public trust, a nonprofit and a community-run resource. We are not about selling eyeballs to advertisers. I think our audience appreciates that and makes them more likely to donate.