Good journalism is often expensive and difficult to fund. NewsMatch, a collaborative fundraising program for Institute for Nonprofit News members like Street Roots, seeks to bridge the gap by providing $13,000 in dollar-for-dollar matching funds, doubling all individual contributions up to $1,000 every November and December.
Street Roots internally selected Nov. 26 through Dec. 5 as its NewsMatch period. Meaning if you donate up to $1,000 to Street Roots in that window, NewsMatch will double it. Between its incredible supporters and NewsMatch, Street Roots could raise $26,000 in 10 days, further bolstering the strength of the newsroom and the quality of journalism it provides.
It’s Street Roots’ first year taking part in NewsMatch, so it’s a rather exciting opportunity, and a well-timed one, at that.
While swaths of for-profit publications go out of business and downsize, many nonprofit newsrooms are growing. Newspapers like Street Roots are more sustainable because all of the money they can amass goes to paying staff who produce the newspaper (editors, reporters, designers) and to the materials required to produce a newspaper (computers, public records, printing costs, etc.). There’s no suit-and-tie guy in a corner office sitting on a pile of money while the newspaper cuts positions.
Even with that being the case, and say it with me, good journalism is often expensive and difficult to fund.
In the contemporary news market, and really since the idealized halcyon days of American journalism, less-than-stellar journalism regularly wins out. Publications cater to an existing worldview, grasping at the low-hanging fruit of whatever moral panic is en vogue or, conversely, failing to acknowledge any issues exist in our world. So, depending on the consumer’s worldview, they can turn to one channel or “news” publication for footage of a waterskiing squirrel, or they can turn to another channel or “news” publication to learn about how [insert marginalized group here] is the cause of all social ills. They can find an outlet saying Republicans cause all the problems, or they can find an outlet saying Democrats cause all the problems.
In business, this is called finding a “niche.” Street Roots, like many nonprofit investigative or accountability-focused outlets, doesn’t really have a niche in that way. Many nonprofit news outlets exist in a different “market” entirely, in which journalism is treated as a public service rather than a consumable product.
Take Sreet Roots’ Zuhl fellow Jeremiah Hayden’s story on the Hurley family on page 8 of the Nov. 29 Fall Anthology, for example. Months of reporting on a spate of local jail deaths resulted in this story. While county officials pushed the narrative that fentanyl use in jails was a main factor — a statement that made its way into local media — Hayden requested medical examiner records in all of the recent jail deaths. After the county denied the request, Hayden filed an appeal with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office, which ordered the county to release the records.
Ultimately, those records showed people were not, in fact, overdosing in custody. The records instead spoke to the complicated web of health issues — mental and physical — that prisoners face, and the general lack of transparency and accountability in institutional health care. The Hurley family’s story puts a fine point on both of these components.
Finding and reporting the truth of the situation lacked the benefit of preaching to the outrage choir about drugs, but it helps a community better understand a problem, and be better positioned to solve it.
While the lack of a “niche” makes the journalism better, it still presents funding challenges. For instance, Street Roots has to pay for public records required to produce journalism like Hayden’s story on the Hurleys. It also has to pay Hayden to do the more time-consuming work of digging for the truth.
Street Roots Indigenous affairs reporter Melanie Henshaw’s story about racist and offensive place names on page 4 of the Nov. 29 Fall Anthology is an example of another form of indispensable journalism Street Roots produces. Henshaw takes a largely inaccessible and unknown process, like how streets and natural features with racist names are renamed, and spells it out for the public. She gives the previously little-known who, what, when, where, why and how of a situation.
Henshaw’s coverage and her sources not only assert the importance of addressing an all-too-common but all-too-often ignored issue, but provide readers with the ability and knowledge to be involved with the solutions. In order to produce this type of work, Henshaw spends countless hours researching tribal, local, county, state and federal regulations, as well as these jurisdictions’ various decision-making bodies. She spends countless hours interviewing people, making sure to include the perspectives of the most-affected people often completely ignored in the process of narrative formation.
The result of her work is hundreds of pages of laws, historical texts and interview transcripts synthesized neatly in a two-page story we can read on a MAX ride to work. If that sounds like a lot of very hard work, that’s because it is a lot of very hard work.
Even if a publication like Street Roots can mount a compelling argument for its value, the monetary value and societal value don’t always line up. That’s especially true for a newspaper like Street Roots, which doesn’t turn a profit from sales.
Street Roots doesn’t profit from sales for good reason. Street Roots vendors make a profit by purchasing papers at 25 cents and selling them for $1 (and a tip if you’re cool and can afford it).
And while buying a paper from a vendor will always be the most essential way to support Street Roots and its vendors, donating to the newspaper itself isn’t far off. It’s a form of recognizing independent, in-depth journalism as a public service. It’s a way to ensure vendors not only have a paper to sell, but they have a high-quality paper to sell.
Supporting the Street Roots newspaper is also a way to push back on elected officials, powerful special interest groups and inaccurate (yet profitable) narratives oversimplifying the problems we see in our city.
What better time to support those initiatives than when every dollar you donate is doubled?
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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