Little more than two years after he bought the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, Paul Huntsman, of the billionaire Huntsman family, wants the paper to become a non-profit.
Through a joint operating agreement, the Tribune shares advertising, printing and distribution services with the Deseret News.
The paper still needs approval from the IRS, because it would be tax-free if granted non-profit status.
But there's a lot more to the idea and whether it will actually work, says Jay Rosen, media critic and journalism professor at New York University.
“The short answer is we don’t know yet because this is a novel experiment,” he told KNPR's State of Nevada.
Rosen said no one has attempted this model before and so there is no recipe for success to follow.
Other newspapers, like the Guardian, have been owned by nonprofits but there has never been a commercial newspaper that moved to a nonprofit.
With nonprofit status, the Tribune could potentially qualify for government money, but Rosen doesn't think government funding for a major metropolitan newspaper is a good idea.
“That is what I think the challenge for the Tribune will be is to describe itself as a nonprofit worthy of public support but not government support," he said, "So, we’ll see how they redraw the commercial newspaper as a nonprofit as something that is created for public benefit, not for private gain.”
The overall problem for the Tribune and other newspapers, especially local newspapers, is they have yet to find a way to make money through the model used in the past as the internet has become the main source of information.
“Extracting from the internet the revenues you need to run the newsroom you had when you relied on print advertising that is a trick no one has really pulled off," Rosen said.
He said that newspapers are going to continue to fold because of that but those that survive will need to provide something important to readers.
“I think the ones that are, are going to prove themselves valuable to their communities with good news production and great journalism and utility as a product, but they’re also going to have to prove themselves in their commitment to those places,” he said.
Whether the Salt Lake Tribune will be able to provide that value to its community under its new model remains to be seen.
Jay Rosen, journalism professor, New York University
