Where Have all the Journalists Gone?
They found something that pays better … and that's bad news for democracy
When I studied print journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa in the early 1980s, the industry was alive and thriving. When I taught my last course to journalism students in 2014 (on social media), I warned them their industry was broke and they would have to become entrepreneurial to pay the rent. Ten years later, the opportunities for journalists have never been better. What’s going on?
The past 25 years has seen an enormous shift in news media consumption: from the morning paper and the evening network news to the 24-hour cable shock-jocks, algorithmic socialization of information, podcasts and thematic news feeds. Other arts and forms of entertainment also struggled with the relentless assaults from the Internet, social media and now artificial intelligence, but news organizations (print media in particular) had its business model decimated, forcing the industry to go through a series of severe transformations. See an earlier Firebreak piece that looked at the history of failed efforts to create a new financial structure for this legacy media.
Free news on demand, leaky paywalls, declining readership (and literacy) as well as the loss of trust led to a mainstream print media that was in freefall. A decade ago, low salaries and unrealistic editorial demands resulted in an embarrassing decline in quality as good journalists sought new career opportunities, replaced by (far fewer) fresh graduates on fixed contracts and editors who, frankly, couldn’t even spell. At the same time, activists paid by other organizations started to call themselves journalists as it allowed them larger audiences for their campaign rhetoric (without putting a strain on media resources). See Firebreak articles on media pretenders like Carey Gillam and Stéphane Horel.
The New Wealth Transition
While news organizations failed to adapt to the new markets created by digital technologies, the tech entrepreneurs were banking their billions as their new media sucked in news content, advertising and audiences. As the four tech revolutions in the last generation (Internet, social media, crypto and AI) altered the means and speed of wealth creation, it also changed economic and social models. Tech billionaires were commonplace and, with the Giving Pledge, were forced into philanthropic ventures and creating foundations they did not have the time or interest in running. Middle-men opportunists wasted no time stepping in to manage these billions.
The media groups’ losses were the tech companies profits and it is interesting to see how this wealth is once again transitioning back into the legacy media organizations. But the rules of the game had changed. Some, like Jeff Bezos, bought traditional newspapers to covet as a trophy. Other news organizations, like the Guardian, set up as a non-profit, seeking millions in donations from these foundations (offering ink for cash). But the foundation world was also changing as the large numbers of billionaires (freshly minted on a daily basis) transformed philanthropy into a complex, more “professionalized” industry.
As requests for donations were becoming an administrative burden, foundations stopped accepting open solicitations. They started to work with fiscal sponsors, consultants who would develop a fund, strategy or organization and then pitch it to a group of foundations for collaborative financing. These philanthropic advisers, results oriented, did not see the marketability of stuffy, traditional mainstream media, so they started tailoring projects to directly fund new media operations or freelance (investigative) journalists. Some of the following are examples of how these new groups were created and led by activists according to certain programs and objectives.
Covering Climate Now (CCN) and Solutions Journalism Network were created by fiscal sponsors to train and fund journalists to promote more climate reporting (as they argued, “all stories are climate stories”.) A Firebreak exposé showed how CCN’s top managers were even paid by their fiscal sponsor, where they remained employed.
The anti-PFAS Forever Lobbying campaign got funding from a series of foundations to write news articles on the risks of PFAS. They worked with 46 journalists and 29 media partners in 16 countries to amplify their activism.
The Lighthouse Reports NGO was awarded €800,000 from the Oak Foundation to pay a group of journalists to try to take out a news monitoring site that, among other things, covered campaign news on GMOs and pesticides for the research community.
If anyone is curious as to why there are so many stories against salmon farming, just look at how some seemingly small, unknown organizations put “Apply for a Grant” on their homepage (see image).
The fiscal sponsor revolution is not only influencing how foundations fund projects, it is affecting how the media interacts with other arms of the funded projects (NGO campaigns, the litigation industry, lobbying). Reporting has become part of the foundation campaign chessboard, controlled by consultants with access to billions of docile foundation funds.
Leaving the Daily Grind for the High Life
With millions pouring in, journalists have been leaving their media jobs to become “news project managers”. While they might be spending more time writing grant applications than articles, the opportunities are lucrative and easy to come by. The levels of foundation funding going into media manipulation is mind numbing. The Firebreak translated an investigation into how the European Climate Foundation, with an annual budget of €275 million per year, mostly from American tech billionaire foundations, has been able to control the climate narrative for more than a decade by paying off almost all of the European climate NGOs (including managing Greta), hiring some of the best Brussels-based lobbyists and former politicians to dominate climate policy debates while running a high-level media campaign. €275 million per year in the Favor Bank can enrich many groups and organizations that would normally struggle to make an impact.
Journalists now have several options. They can continue to work in a dying legacy news organization for a diminishing salary and a declining workforce with little freedom on what to write about. They can join some of the new, foundation-funded news organizations. Or they can apply for unlimited funding for project-based investigative reports from fiscal sponsors with access to multiple foundation funding programs (and a captive network of NGOs and lobbyists to promote the final product). For journalists struggling under budget restraints and obstructive editors, being flown around to report on a thematic story and getting paid well has become an attractive enough option for them to leave their traditional news desks (and who can blame them?).
When I ask where the journalists have gone, the answer is obvious. They have sought the high life of foundation-funded start-ups or freelance projects.
The Best News that Billionaires Can Buy
There are some ethical issues here, no doubt. Democracy depends on a free, independent press to provide the best available information to a critical thinking public. But when activist consultants with access to the passive billions tucked inside foundations start pumping funding into NGOs to run a campaign while also paying journalists to report on their campaign, there is a certain amount of managed deception going on. If you pay a journalist to report on a campaign you are running, is it news or propaganda? If, as is the case, no one is transparent about the source of this funding, then it is called “news”.
The fact that foundations and their fiscal sponsors prefer to operate in the shadows, take donor-advised funds from special interest groups and do not feel obliged to be transparent, does not make the situation any easier to monitor.
How much of our news-feed is controlled by special interests?
It is clear that the hundreds of millions going into foundation-funded climate campaigns has had an influence on the stories journalists focus on and editors promote. The proponents for degrowth in a post-capitalist world were benefiting from the radical cuts in consumption being forced on Western populations.
With the constant news flow on PFAS, it is hard to remind ourselves that the term “forever chemical” is only eight years old. With multiple foundation funding of a group of activist journalists, they have successfully distorted the facts to meet the narrative proposed by the special interest groups working behind the scenes.
When I asked a group recently if they had noticed an unusual amount of reporting against salmon aquaculture, there were nods in the room, but no one could explain why that was the case. The Firebreak showed how foundations were not only funding the anti-salmon campaigns, but also financing the journalists reporting on it, published in the New York Times no less.
People need to be more vigilant on how their news is reported and who is defining the narrative that drives the stories into the public dialogue. Why have there recently been so many stories (and subsequent regulations) against the food industry and vaping, for example? Could there be foundations behind the scenes paying off journalists to keep these stories “newsworthy”? Could some foundations with an interest in controlling certain consumer and lifestyle choices be behind these stories?
Case Study: The Examination
The Examination is a news organization that produces investigative reports on health issues (food, tobacco, vaping, chemicals, pharmaceuticals…). They claim to be a “non-profit newsroom” providing a “fearless journalism for a healthier world”. In reality, they are a foundation-funded activist campaign group working to translate NGO campaigns (funded by the same foundations) into newsworthy stories to help interest groups control the narrative.
They have employed (poached?) a team of journalists coming from organizations like the New York Times, Boston Globe, USA Today, Bloomberg and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). When I ask where the journalists have gone, many of them have left the mainstream media to work for campaign groups like The Examination.
The Examination’s issues though have been defined by the organizations providing the lucrative financing used to attract such high-level investigative journalists and keep them flying first class to get to the campaigns they are expected to cover.
It is not enough that Michael Bloomberg’s foundation is funding low quality research and aggressive NGOs to campaign against consumer products like soft drinks, alcohol, vaping and processed food products. With his media experience, Michael realized the need to create a news organization that would be dedicated to reporting on his campaigns. The Examination calls their work investigative journalism, but the reality is that they were funded to promote Bloomberg activism campaigns.
The Examination is not actually doing journalism and its website carefully wordsmiths around that. They call it “co-reporting” meaning that funding is provided for an Examination activist to work with a mainstream media reporter. In other words, they produce the stories according to the narrative defined by the interest groups funding them, and this paid propaganda gets coverage in large news outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian, Washington Post ... The nice part is that these financially strapped legacy media outlets don’t have to pay any of the costs. Everyone wins (except the truth).
At the bottom of the article, it might state one of the writer’s affliliations, or that the report has been co-reported with a “researcher” from The Examination, but the reader would then have to go to the NGO’s website to work through the maze of information to discover the myriad of special interests and networks behind the funding of the article. Nobody has the time to do that and on the surface, it all looks credible. The story is read and amplified as news, not as the manufactured activist campaign literature it was intended to be.
More Money, More Narrative Control
If The Examination were simply another Bloomberg project, we could roll our eyes and expect the dust to settle after a few years (more wasted philanthropist billions that should have gone to supporting important causes like healthcare and education). But The Examination is aiming higher, recently employing a fiscal sponsor: Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. This organization is not part of the Rockefeller family of foundations but rather a consultancy that works to raise more money from foundations for specific projects. In the case of The Examination, I suppose Bloomberg’s millions were not enough.
A fiscal sponsor is intended to help an organization or project with advice, funding and administrative support. Once the goals are identified, the consultants create a fund, package it up in a way that it can be sold to a number of “investors” (foundations that will contribute to the project). Who actually donates to the project or NGO becomes a bit cloudy as transparency is not required with such fiscal sponsors. It is odd in this case that The Examination only brought in the fiscal sponsor after their first year, even though they already had solid supporters and a clear strategy. Maybe Bloomberg’s millions really were not enough.
It gets even cloudier when their Policies page mentions The Examination is not a newsroom or a media group, but a “sponsored project of a 501(c)(3) non-profit that operates as a public trust”.
I was hoping that The Examination would tell us more about this public trust that is pulling their strings, but perhaps that is between the fiscal sponsor and the intermediary entity they created (a common fiscal sponsor trick).
Nobody really knows how much the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is raising for The Examination, and from whom, but we know that this is one of the higher end fiscal sponsor consultancies (with higher end flat-rate commissions taken off of each contribution). Given the campaign strategy of this investigative news NGO, we can be certain that its fiscal sponsor funding is not coming from the food, alcohol, vaping or chemical industries.
Where have all the Print Journalists Gone?
There are great amounts of foundation money pouring into investigative activism with many ongoing campaigns needing more coverage, something journalists have not seen in living memory. As long as foundations don’t need to be transparent and as long as fiscal sponsors are running the shows from the shadows, this big money will continue to flow and drive the narratives.
Where have all of the journalists gone? They are no longer in legacy media groups chasing useless leads from incompetent editors. They’ve gone freelance and if they are not writing grant applications, they are enjoying the good life.
Those with integrity left the profession long ago.