Foundations stepping into news game

Nonprofits cite media cutbacks, content gaps

By Phil Galewitz
From the Winter 2008 issue of HealthBeat

Depressed about the current state of journalism, in which cutbacks, buyouts and layoffs have become the norm? Some major health foundations say they are too – and they're reacting to it.

In Florida and Kansas, health foundations are funding news services to gather health policy news and disperse it on the Internet. The trend could take off this year as the Kaiser Family Foundation and the California HealthCare Foundation are considering launching their own types of health news services.

Foundation officials say all the efforts have the same goal – to fill the news gap left by newspapers and magazines, which have reduced the number of reporters and space devoted to health news.

"With the declines in the news business, nonprofits are looking to jump in and see what they can do," said Matt James, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

For journalists, the trend could mean new places to gather information and new job opportunities.

But the trend also raises questions of whether the news produced by these nonprofit organizations will be seen as being as credible as that in mainstream newspapers and magazines.

Foundations also are playing a greater role in several general new news services.

This includes ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit that later this year will have about two dozen reporters doing investigative journalism. ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. It is being funded by the Sandler Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other foundations. Health care will be among the areas on which ProPublica focuses.

Several donors, including the Knight Foundation of Miami, are funding MinnPost, a nonprofit journalism enterprise that publishes MinnPost.com and MinnPost in Print – providing news in and about Minnesota. This news service is trying to fill the gap in coverage left from major cutbacks at the two large newspapers in Minnesota.

Florida Health News

Florida Health News started in 2007 as a way to provide daily links to news stories in newspapers across Florida and highlight health policy news in Tallahassee. The site has enabled Florida health reporters to keep better aware of health news and government and industry meetings across the state. Among its most avid subscriber groups are health professionals and policymakers in state health agencies, consultants, health and insurance executives and patient advocates. About 100 subscribers describe themselves as working in the media or public relations.

In 2008, the organization started hiring freelancers to gather news to put on its Web site, www.floridahealthnews.org. The site is sponsored by the Florida Health Policy Center, a collaborative of Florida foundations dedicated to furthering access to neutral and objective health information. The members include the Health Foundation of South Florida and the Winter Park Health Foundation.

"This is too important a subject for someone not to cover it," said Carol Gentry, former Tampa Tribune and Wall Street Journal health writer who founded the Web site and became its full-time editor in December. " So the natural result was for journalists who care about these issues to start online news sites and look for funding from foundations that have a mission related to health education."

About 1,500 people receive daily e-mail alerts with the health headlines of the day from Florida Health News. It has garnered $183,000 in foundation funding for 2008 with the likelihood of similar amounts or the next two years. By end of 2010, it hopes to be at least 50 percent self-supporting through advertising and donations. The news service is trying to develop a lower-cost model that can be replicated in states that don't have deep-pocket foundations, Gentry said.

Kansas Health Institute

A few months before Florida Health News was launched, Kansas Health Institute's News Service got its start. The news service began in January 2007 and has four full-time reporters at its headquarters in Topeka. The KHI Web site lists several of its own stories, and highlights health stories done by other media organizations.

Jim McLean, the institute's vice president for public affairs, is the driving force behind the news service. McLean is a former government and business editor for the Topeka Capital-Journal and news director for Kansas Public Radio.

The institute started the news service after being dismayed by the lack of coverage of important health news in the state. "There was not much coverage of health policy in the mainstream press here in Kansas," McLean said. "Newsrooms are shrinking, news holes are shrinking, circulation is shrinking and they don't have the degree of specialization of reporters they once did, and what suffers is detailed coverage of health."

In addition to displaying health policy news on its Web site, some of the news service's reports appear in newspapers, including the Topeka Capital-Journal. The stories are provided free.

Some Kansas newspapers initially questioned how objective the reporting was, but McLean said the service was able to overcome doubters. "We were able to convince people we are not an advocacy organization and our only motivation was to create better discussions around these issues so policymakers can make more informed decisions," he said.

The KHI Web site has about 700 e-mail subscribers, many of whom are legislators, regulators, lobbyists and others in the health field.

There are four members of the news service's editorial staff, while The Associated Press has three reporters in Topeka, McLean said.

There are no plans to seek advertising for the news service site, which is running on a $300,000 budget paid by the institute. The institute gets about half its funding from the Kansas Health Foundation, a hospital conversion foundation.

McLean is hoping to add some freelancers and re-tool the Web site. "We see this as a pioneering effort," he said. "It's fun to be part of something like this."

While the major papers in Wichita and Kansas City haven't picked up any of the news service stories, some bloggers at those papers have referred to news first reported by KHI, McLean said.

The news service rarely quotes expertsfrom the institute and doesn't give the institute's reports and studies any extraordinary coverage. "We don't want to be seen as a shill for the organization,' he said.

Kaiser Family Foundation

The Kaiser Family Foundation is planning to start its own health news service this year – taking the leap from assisting reporters to practicing journalism.

"The reason to do it is a simple one," said Matt James, senior vice president of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based organization. "We believe health journalism is an important tool to help people understand what's going on in the health system and how change affects them."

The foundation believes it must find new ways to educate the public and policymakers because of the cutbacks in journalism.

"We feel there's been a lack of investment in recent years in terms of news organizations spending what they need to spend to do the kind of health reporting that can be valuable to inform the public," James said.

The foundation has been helping health journalists for two decades with its fellowships, detailed Web site and numerous reports and studies on health policy topics.

Kaiser Family Foundation hasn't decided how much money to put into the news service, which will determine how big an editorial staff it may have.

James envisions the news service providing more "enterprise reporting" as opposed to "investigative journalism." It would look to cover health policy news either not being covered by the major dailies or not being covered with enough depth, he said.

Unlike news services in Florida and Kansas, Kaiser would focus on national and international health news, James said.

Kaiser's staff will have the ultimate authority over the news service, helping to set its direction. But it will not be involved in day-to-day editorial decisions.

James doesn't see conflict-of-interest concerns in this role because Kaiser is not an advocacy organization. "We don't take positions on issues, we don't endorse legislation, we see ourselves as a non-partisan source of health information," he said. "This is another way to help inform the public."

The Kaiser Family Foundation plans to build a new Web site for the new service and will also make its content available through partnerships with existing news organizations. It does not plan to seek advertising.

California HealthCare Foundation

David Olmos, former health editor at the Los Angeles Times, is researching starting a health news service in California to be funded by the California HealthCare Foundation. Olmos was the foundation's communications director before leaving the organization late last year to research the news service idea.

The foundation is worried cutbacks in health coverage in the state are hurting its mission to foster public discussion of health issues. "The idea is to create a health care journalism team to do more in-depth reporting on health care and health policy in California," Olmos said. "Our focus would be on explanatory and enterprise journalism."

For 10 years, the California foundation has run California HealthLine, a free daily digest of health news and opinions. The site mostly provides links to health news coverage across the state, though it also has some original content from freelancers and staff of the Advisory Board, a national research firm responsible for the Web site's editorial content. The site, which has 30,000 subscribers, is intended for people working in the health industry and policymakers.

"The project that we are studying would have professional journalists producing in-depth stories about major issues in health care and health policy," Olmos said. "The idea is that these stories would be distributed by media organization partners." The stories would be aimed at mass audiences rather than health care insiders.

Olmos has had discussions with newspaper editors and TV, radio and online editorial managers in California to see if they would run the stories from the news service and work with it on projects. "Their reaction is encouraging," he said. "We are still exploring if they will see us as an unbiased and objective source," he said. The news service would be free to readers and not have advertising.

Unlike traditional news services such as The Associated Press, Olmos said the California news service would not seek to cover everything in health care. Rather he sees the foundation adopting an idea similar to Pro Publica, which focuses on big-picture stories.

Olmos hopes to present a plan to the Oakland, Calif.-based foundation this spring with a decision to be made by summer. "The public has a need to know what is going on in health policy and if the media is not doing it, someone else may come in and do it in a different way," he said.

Phil Galewitz is editor of HealthBeat, a health writer for The Palm Beach Post and a board member of both the Association of Health Care Journalists and Florida Health News. In 2004-05 he was a fellow of the Kaiser Family Foundation.