Editor Emeritus Rosemary Otzman mentioned at least twice in columns that the paper has transitioned from a for-profit model to a nonprofit foundation, The Belleville Area News Foundation. However, I don’t think we at the Independent have explained in any detail what that means for us and for the community.
In many ways, nothing much will change for most of our readers. If you’ve tried to take out a classified or display ad since the change, you might have run into a few changes with the way we process payments since some of our banking and money-related processes and vendors have changed. Most of the differences, though, are behind the scenes. Here are the basics!
Who: The original board of directors of the for-profit paper has now changed to a nonprofit board. Current members are board President Harry Van Gelder, along with board members Barbara Miller, Janet Millard, Sharon Peters, Kathleen Springer, Elena Manalp, and Sharon Claxton. We’re seeking new board members, so please check out our ad in this issue.
What: The Belleville Area Independent is now a publication of the nonprofit Belleville Area News Foundation (BANF).
When: The BANF was established earlier this year, but it had been in the works for nearly a year before that.
Where: We’re going to continue to operate out of our office downtown indefinitely. I’m always sad when a paper pulls an office out of a community and goes to a remote/online model only, so I’m glad we have offices where we can interact with readers in person.
Why: According to Doug Peters, a retired local attorney who consults with the BANF board, he provided an analysis of the paper while it was a for-profit enterprise. He found that Rosemary was basically getting paid for one salary while doing one and a half jobs, and that was one of a handful of reasons the paper looked like it was breaking even or making a small profit.
“It was clear we couldn’t ad revenue our way out of the problem,” Peters told me in phone conversation.
Peters said he knew another nonprofit newspaper, the Grosse Pointe News, used “angel donations” as a model, but that can be a dangerous model, because “angel investors” can pass on, lose a fortune, or otherwise fail to fund the paper at any time.
As a foundation, BANF will be exploring multiple strategies to keep us solvent and publishing papers well into the future.
How: The nonprofit can continue to solicit traditional ad revenue, but we can also accept “angel” donations and seek grants to support community journalism. We’ve been working on some exciting grant opportunities that will help us with the technology necessary to get the news out, for instance.
I think it’s important that the public get transparency from the newspaper about how we operate just as much as it’s important for governments and school districts to run transparently. After all, now that we’re a nonprofit, we are the community’s paper.
If you were curious, I hope that helped explain how and why we transitioned to the new nonprofit model. If anyone has questions that I haven’t addressed, I’ll answer them in a follow up column.