Over the past decade, nonprofit news has been seen as one of the bright spots in U.S. journalism — an emblem of hope for the future amid a landscape littered with failures and financial struggles.

With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions out there are grim. Largely in response, more than 6,000 nonprofit foundations have made major investments in local news initiatives, totaling some half a billion dollars or more in direct funding for journalism.

As a result, the number of U.S. nonprofit news organizations has been growing by double-digit percentages year-over-year.

It’s fair to question whether this is sustainable. But in the meantime, at least, what’s not to like about this arrangement — this major push to subsidize local journalism at a time when the for-profit model for it is rapidly vanishing?

Behind the scenes, it seems, there are cracks in the foundation, ones that appear to call for greater scrutiny to understand how sustainable and effective this model truly is moving forward.

As described in an ethnographic study published recently in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley of the University of Memphis spent four months in late 2023 and early 2024 embedded in a four-person nonprofit newsroom in a midsized Rust Belt city, and also interviewed news workers at seven other nonprofit outlets. She focused on the question of labor: What is the impact of this type of journalism on the work and the workers involved?

Her main finding is blunt: “The emphasis on funding, on money, and on organizational concerns has become the top priority for individuals working for nonprofit news entities.” And, as journalists “busy themselves” with these administrative chores and organizational imperatives — to keep grant money coming in, to keep funders happy, etc. — it not only comes at the expense of the journalism product but also extracts a heavy toll of unpaid labor from the news workers involved.

Read the full article about the sustainability of the nonprofit news model by Seth C. Lewis and Nick Mathews at Nieman Journalism Lab.