With an eye on the coming global conference on climate in Copenhagen, Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco has called a “major organizing meeting” of concerned media outlets—among them the Atlantic, Wired, ProPublica, Grist, and Slate. “Our intention is to take advantage of each of our respective strengths and report on what we think is the most important story of our times,” writes Steven Katz, interim CEO of Mother Jones, e-mailing me from the coast. “We’re very excited about this opportunity to breathe new life into journalism through this collaboration and to reach a much broader audience with really terrific reporting about an issue as big as this.”
On the phone Katz says not to worry. He can’t imagine the Atlantic or Slate or any of the other conferees surrendering an ounce of autonomy. But a new age demands new forms, new conversations, new alliances. We hang together or we hang separately. “We’re still making this stuff up at this point,” he reminds me.
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Mother Jones is getting kudos for making this stuff up about as well as anyone around. Here’s the San Francisco Chronicle in March: “Nonprofit Mother Jones Role Model for Industry.” And Advertising Age in October: “Mother Jones, the nonprofit magazine of investigative reporting, has been around since 1976, but lately it’s been getting plenty of fresh attention. Partly because it’s a proven model for nonprofit journalism (the magazine gets support from subscribers, donors, advertisers and foundations) in a moment when old monopoly-driven for-profit business models for journalism, particularly at newspapers, are crumbling. But also because editorially, the magazine has been on a hot streak.”
In the good old days, a major magazine would decide what journalism it wanted to do and then—if it could afford it—do it. At Mother Jones, “can we afford it?” yields to “who can we find to pay for it?” Imagine Time editors telling each other that it would be nice to launch a human-rights reporting project, but first they’d better clear it with advertisers.
Yes, advertisers are easier for publishers to deal with. What a shame for journalism that so many are wandering away.
Mother Jones wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming into the murky world of collaborative media. Four years ago it was a leader in organizing the conference of independent media that established the Media Consortium, a Chicago-based alliance of independent print, electronic, and online outlets whose politics are progressive and whose mission, according to its Web site, is “to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones.” Tracy Van Slyke, former publisher of In These Times, runs the Media Consortium out of her apartment on Logan Boulevard. Its big accomplishment is “The Big Thaw,” a report a year in the making that proposes to guide independent media through “Journalism’s Ice Age.”
“To that end, we’re forging a collaboration with a range of news organizations—magazines, online news sites, nonprofit reporting shops, multimedia operations—because we each have different strengths, but working together we can cover this story better than any of us could on our own.”
