Among the winners in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ awards for best environmental reporting, announced in October were news stories published in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times and on National Public Radio. Previous SEJ award winners have included the High Country News, National Geographic Magazine, the Public Broadcasting System, Associated Press, Great Lakes Radio Consortium and Mother Jones magazine.

What do all of these news media have in common?

They are all owned by non-profit organizations.

In my view, this is hardly a coincidence. Some of the nation’s very best environmental reporting is now appearing in non-profit news media, and non-profit organizations are increasingly performing the vital democratic roles that commercial media once did.
In an excellent new report, “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change,” Geneva Overholser documents the growing financial pressures that profit-making news media corporations are facing. “There are fewer newspapers, fewer local owners, fewer (but larger) newspaper-owning companies,” she wrote. “Pressure on broadcast operations to produce 40 percent profits has hollowed out news staffs across the country.”

But at the same time that these financial pressures are squeezing profit-making newspapers, Overholser says many non-profit news organizations are flourishing. Consider this:

• Since 2000, the audience of National Public Radio has increased from 14.7 million to 26 million listeners. During the last six years, NPR has opened up new foreign bureaus in Beijing, Istanbul, Baghdad, Hanoi, Cairo, Shanghai and other cities and created new beats on science and technology and the environment. At a time when for-profit radio stations have all but abandoned in-depth and investigative reporting, NPR has thrived by offering serious and thoughtful coverage on the environment and other topics.
  
• The St. Petersburg Times has become the largest-circulation and most highly regarded newspaper in Florida in recent years because of its reputation for providing outstanding reporting on the environment and other complex issues. The St.Petersburg Times is owned by the Poynter Institute, the non-profit educational organization founded by Nelson Poynter to help keep the newspaper independent and protected from business pressures.
  
• Internationally, some of the best environmental reporting is also occurring at non-profit news media. Independent World Television in Toronto and the Guardian in the United Kingdom are both non-profit organizations.
  
• Non-profits, such as the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., and the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, are performing the investigative reporting roles that once-great newspapers used to perform. These two non-profits have bankrolled some first-rate investigative reporting on the impact of privatization of the world’s drinking water, the politics of oil and the effects of polluting factories on third-world countries.
  
• Not-for-profit foundations, such as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Gannett’s Freedom Forum, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and others are supporting some of the most thoughtful and insightful journalism and journalism experiments throughout the country.

To be sure, there are many profit-making news corporations that continue to do great work. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Orleans Times-Picayune, New Yorker and other publications continue to produce outstanding environmental journalism. But financial pressures from stockholders at publicly-held media corporations are affecting news organizations in many communities.

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, has said, “We should have a Marshall Plan by foundations and philanthropic folks” to support non-profit models. “We have a robust civil society, but a fragile one. There’s got to be a serious commitment here.”

The growth of non-profit news media does, of course, raise some concerns, including the influence that non-profit organizations could have on the news agenda. But Knight Professor of Journalism Phil Meyer at the University of North Carolina counters, “Let’s be blunt. Allowing charitable foundations to pay for the news might be risky, but it is probably no worse than a system in which advertisers pay for it.”