Eric Rynston-Lobel at The Northeastern Medill Local News Initiative:
On Sunday, L.A. Reported launched as the latest startup in the country’s second-largest city. The organization was founded by Scott Woolley, formerly Forbes’ West Coast bureau chief, and David Dreier, former chairman of the Tribune Publishing Company who previously spent 32 years in Congress. Along with inaugural editor Karin Klein, who worked at the Los Angeles Times for 35 years, the outlet aims to bring a mix of old-school style to a new-school platform. Primarily distributed through Substack, L.A. Reported’s first package examined where the city stands a year after the devastating wildfires that burned through the region. The launch comes days after The LA Local, a nonprofit newsroom backed by the American Journalism Project, went live as well. Medill’s Local News Initiative caught up with Woolley to get a better understanding of L.A. Reported’s goals, its experimental financial model and more. Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Eric Rynston-Lobel: I saw one of the key things you’ve been touting is that this is a new model for nonprofit news. Can you explain how and what it is you’re doing that’s different?
Scott Woolley:: We like to talk about having sort of both a new economic model and a new editorial model that’s paired with it. We’re a 501(c)(3) — so we’re launching purely with philanthropic money but hoping to prove that we can eventually, within three years, become reader supported. There are a couple reasons for this. The most fundamental one is that I think it’s just a lot healthier to have your readership as the group you really owe your allegiance to. I’m on the board of Voice of San Diego — there’s a lot of good nonprofits, donors are well intentioned, following the direction of donors. It’s not that that causes a huge problem, but I think I would love to work to a place where we’re serving readers and our success is based on our ability to make readers happy. So that’s a piece of it. The other piece is that ultimately, that’s just a more scalable, replicable model. If we want to really help fill the hole in local news that’s been left by the death or coming death of the local newspaper industry, just relying on perpetual philanthropic funding just makes that really hard to do. You have to go start up from scratch, and then you have to raise money every year. At Voice of San Diego, budget’s about $2.1 million; that’s what we’ve got to raise every year. It works because they’re a great organization, but that is hard to just go to a new city and be like, ‘Now we’re going to start raising $2.1 million in this new place.’ If we can prove that we can use philanthropic dollars to launch and then move to a place where we’re reader supported, then all of a sudden, that’s a huge home run, not just because we’ll be doing good work here in LA, but because we’ll have a model that we can spread across the country in a much faster way than I think a pure nonprofit model could ever do.