Cachet, Not Cash, Fuels NYT Local Team Ups

In the news business, there’s really no pressure like New York Times pressure. Two years after the Times initiated a small cluster of news-producing partnerships with nonprofit, Web-only publications in the Bay Area, Chicago and Texas, those independents are learning that the Gray Lady’s instant credibility comes with an exacting set of standards and needs, if not necessarily a serious boost in revenue or Web traffic.

Editors at the Bay Citizen, the Texas Tribune and the Chicago News Cooperative uniformly agree that the Times partnership has been a boon to their legitimacy and to their respective missions to raise the level of local journalism in their markets. But some acknowledge that weighing the Times’ need — two pages of original local news for the back pages of the print edition’s A section twice a week — against their own can be a challenge, especially as they try to define their own identities as neophyte news organizations.

“We have our identity online that’s completely different than what we’re doing in the Times,” said Steve Fainaru, editor in chief of the Bay Citizen. “We want to be more innovative. We want to be experimental. We want to have a different voice than we have in the Times.”

But Fainaru is quick to acknowledge that he also wants the Times’ powerful reputation to help the Bay Citizen get its own legs underneath it. And therein lies the unique set of challenges in partnering with such a powerhouse: Where are editorial lines drawn? How does a small independent cultivate two voices at once? And given that the Times is paying for this reporting with an annual licensing fee with no revenue sharing on ad sales, can the nonprofits afford to keep it up?

For the Times, the impetus for these partnerships came with the newspaper industry’s falling sky in 2009, said Jim Schachter, the associate managing editor at the paper who was tasked with forging the relationships. And there was also a concern of practical competition: “We knew The Wall Street Journal was going to be adding local pages in the Bay Area, and we wanted to get there first,” Schachter said.

“The business people at the Times were looking at the question of how do we sustain our print circulation for the longest time possible,” he said. And so they proposed an experiment to see whether adding local news to the print edition in places where circulation was strong could extend print’s life, possibly even increasing circulation. (The Tribune’s pages are distributed throughout Texas, Chicago’s pages extend throughout Illinois and into Wisconsin and the Bay Area’s coverage hits print editions in nine California counties, according to Schachter.)

For the Bay Area, the Times launched local pages in fall 2009 with a temporary staff editor and a pool of freelancers and San Francisco staffers who were stretched beyond their normally tech-centric reporting. Meanwhile, it also launched its first partnership that fall with the Chicago News Cooperative, a fledgling nonprofit effort led by Jim O’Shea, a former editor for the Los Angeles Times and former managing editor at the Chicago Tribune.

“We were the first ones, so we were kind of a guinea pig, in a way,” O’Shea said.

On the Times’ side, Schachter said that there were two main criteria for prospective partners. First was that the paper needed to be convinced that it wasn’t going out on a limb and that the nonprofit would be able to survive for at least three to five years. “Second, we as a newsroom had to believe that the organization would be able to produce New York Times-quality journalism,” he said.

In Chicago, there were some early hiccups. “We had some deadline issues at first when we weren’t filing on deadline and that was causing a little problem,” O’Shea said. “And the Times will probably tell you we still don’t file on deadline.”

When the Bay Area deal came together to replace the temporary Times staff in 2010, the paper played a role that could be seen as equal parts partner and midwife. The Bay Citizen launched with the Times deal in place, the result of months of talks between the New York editors and Warren Hellman, the Bay Citizen’s founder and principal initial funder. Schachter was among the group who screened prospective staffers’ applications, and former Times executive editor Bill Keller went to San Francisco and sat in as part of the final interviewing team.

The Texas Tribune was the last partner to come into the mix in mid-2010, and the relationship was a departure from the previous partnerships. Having already been in operation for a year before the Times’ offer came along, the Tribune had already established something of an institutional identity. “It was very different going in and setting up an arrangement with a newsroom that has been in operation already as opposed to one that can build its week around meeting your needs,” Schachter said.