Columbia Journalism Review has an insightful feature up on the United States’ burgeoning non-profit journalism industry. Writer Jill Drew looks at the unusual practices that separate organisations like California Watch from traditional newsrooms, and whether the philanthropic donations and other smaller revenue streams on which they rely can sustain the groundbreaking work being done.

The editors agreed; this was big. But then the conversation veered in a direction unfamiliar to traditional newsrooms. Instead of planning how to get the story published before word of it leaked, the excited editors started throwing out ideas for how they could share Johnson’s reporting with a large array of competitive news outlets across the state and around the country. No one would get a scoop; rather, every outlet would run the story at around the same time, customized to resonate with its audience, be they newspaper subscribers, Web readers, television viewers, or radio listeners.

Full story at this link…