Walter B. “Walt” Potter Jr. is a retired newspaper executive who in 2010 established the Walter B. Potter Fund for Innovation in Local Journalism at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Among other initiatives, the fund backs the Potter Digital Ambassadors, which sends Missouri journalism students out to local papers as consultants on new technology.
Producing news with nonprofit revenue streams is an approach that’s rapidly gaining steam.
Nonprofit news outlets have been around for decades, but the approach began to spread some 15 or so years ago with the founding of organizations like Voice of San Diego in 2005, which describes itself as the first digital, nonprofit news organization in the country to serve a local community, as well as the MinnPost in 2007 and the Texas Tribune in 2009. At the same time philanthropic organizations like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and others have poured tens of millions of dollars into backing those efforts.
