CalMatters' Neil Chase on the Future of Journalism: Collaboration, Innovation and Technology.

How is nonprofit journalism transforming the media landscape? Explore this intriguing shift with my guest, Neil Chase, CEO of Cal Matters, as we unpack how organizations like his are stepping up amidst the decline of traditional newspapers. Discover how CalMatters' innovative nonprofit model collaborates with local news outlets, NPR stations, and public television to deliver reliable, free access to information on state government and policies to Californians. We take a look at the challenges brought on by social media and the unchecked flow of information, reaffirming the vital role of trusted journalism today.

We uncover a groundbreaking approach to empowering local journalism through technology, as we discuss initiatives like digital democracy. By harnessing comprehensive data on state legislators and utilizing AI, CalMatters is revolutionizing the way story ideas are generated and shared with journalists across the state. The commitment to expanding coverage beyond Sacramento is at the forefront, focusing on the local impact of legislation and the challenges of remote work. Through collaboration and hiring talented journalists, CalMatters is poised to enhance journalistic integrity and keep communities well-informed.

Finally, we look into the future of journalism through collaboration and sustainable funding. The formation of the California Newsroom, a collaboration among various news organizations, showcases the power of shared resources and comprehensive coverage. From Arizona State University's nonprofit journalism labs to community-driven initiatives like Solving Sacramento, we highlight innovative funding models that are paving the way for a diverse, community-centric media landscape. Neil shares his insights on engaging future journalists, underscoring the potential for a new generation to lead journalism into a promising future.

You can connect directly with Neil by email at neil@calmatters.org

You can learn more about CalMatters, subscribe to news updates or make a contribution directly via their website by clicking on the link. CalMatters

(00:00) Funding Nonprofit Journalism Through Collaboration
CalMatters emerged as a nonprofit response to declining traditional newspaper coverage, providing free access to quality journalism and collaborating with local media sources.

(11:20) Empowering Local Journalism Through Technology
Digital democracy increases public awareness of state government by providing comprehensive data, generating story ideas, and expanding coverage across California.

(13:59) Strengthening Journalism Through Collaboration
Collaborative journalism in California, with NPR hub and engagement with student programs, offers hope for local news coverage.

(21:27) Sustainable Funding for Diverse Journalism
Arizona State University's nonprofit journalism labs, community-based reporting, and challenges of securing funding for quality reporting.

(32:23) Supporting Nonprofit Journalism Through Technology
Neil discusses media challenges, engaging audiences of all ages, and the role of technology in journalism with appreci

Thank you so much for listening! We appreciate you. Please visit the website to sign up for our email updates. https://www.nonprofpod.com/ And if you like, leave me a voicemail to comment on the program, leave a question for us to ask in the future or a message for me, Jeff Holden. I may even use your voice mail message in a future episode. https://www.nonprofpod.com/voicemail. Thanks again for your support in listening, commenting and sharing the great work our local nonprofits are accomplishing.

Transcript

Neil Chase: [00:00:00] I am pleasantly surprised, but surprised every time I meet a group of young students, college and high school, we work with high school students as well, who really believe journalism is important. They see the changes in the news media, but they, they follow it and they consume it and they, they are paying more attention, I think, to what's going on in the world than many of us were at that age.

I'm

Jeff Holden: Jeff Holden. Welcome to the Nonprofit Podcast Network. Our purpose and passion is to highlight a nonprofit organization in each weekly episode Giving that organization an opportunity to tell their story. In their words, to better inform and educate the respective communities they serve, as well as provide one more tool for them to share their message to constituents and donors.

Our goal is to help build stronger communities through shared [00:01:00] voices and to both encourage and support the growth of local non profit organizations. through podcasting. Thanks to our founding partners for their foresight in helping us transform the way conversations start. CAP Trust, fiduciary advice for endowments and foundations.

Runyon Saltzman Incorporated, RSE. Marketing, advertising, and public relations creating integrated communications committed to improving lives. And Western Health Advantage, a full service health care plan for individuals, employer groups, and families. News is an important element in our We have an innate need to know.

We crave information, and all too often what we get is biased from for profit news organizations that have a particular bent. What happens when profit is not the motive, and the news is gathered, produced, and delivered, and serves all news outlets regardless of their tax status? My guest this episode is CEO of an organization that does just that.[00:02:00] 

Neil Chase leads the team at CalMatters, the highly respected nonprofit newsroom that explains California policy and politics. Neil knows his news. He's been executive director of the Mercury News and East Bay Times, editor at the San Francisco Examiner, The Arizona Republic, CBS Market Watch, and the New York Times.

He teaches, consults, and trains in a variety of capacities, and it's my privilege to speak with him. Neal Chase, welcome to the Nonprofit Podcast Network. Thank you. Great to be here. Excited to hear the stories. The way we consume our news and information today has really changed dramatically from even just a few years back.

Traditional linear media like radio and television, even cable, have seen significant declines in usage to alternative media. We're seeing, you know, streaming audio, streaming video, X, former Twitter and TikTok, actually providing news and content. And clearly, CalMatters saw something [00:03:00] happening 10 years ago when you launched the program.

Could you tell us what the genesis of the organization was and, and, How we got to where we are 10 years later. 

Neil Chase: Yeah, I don't know if we saw something happening or we saw something not happening that should be happening. And I can't take credit, I was not there at the time of the start. But a couple of folks who really care about journalism and about having an informed public, and who believe that government works better if somebody's watching it, which I think we all, we all would agree with, they were looking at the situation in Sacramento.

where, in the late 1990s, there were 150 journalists covering Sacramento, covering the state capitol. It's a sign to be at the state capitol. Some of them were national reporters or statewide reporters. A lot of them were the bureau chief. The Bakersfield Californian had a reporter in the state capitol.

The San Diego Union Tribune had a reporter in the state capitol. And these people were all watching what was going on there. In a 300 billion dollar government that is one of the 10 largest things in the world, right? And so, with the decline of the newspaper business, you know, in the late 1990s, [00:04:00] internet advertising became the best way to reach people.

Newspaper advertising was no longer a great Right. And so the newspaper industry collapsed, and it continues to collapse. It's shrinking gradually. One of the first things to go was the Sacramento coverage. And so CalMatters was started to fill that gap, to give people in California coverage of the policy issues and the politics in the capital, both things that affect them.

Nobody pays a lot of attention to the fact that So many decisions are made in Sacramento about education, health care, the environment, that trickle down to everybody across the state. But also, you vote every two years for representatives to go to Sacramento and represent you, and you often don't hear anything about them until two years later when it's re election time.

And so, the idea was to engage people in understanding what their government is doing, how it works, and give them a chance to get engaged if they want to. 

Jeff Holden: In terms of people who use the product, you have some interesting collaborations. Walk us through a few of those, if you would. 

Neil Chase: Yeah, one of the early principles at CalMatters was that this is not a [00:05:00] for profit business, it's a non profit.

We're not going to make a lot of money off of advertising or page views, not that the for profit businesses do either these days. 

Jeff Holden: Although you do have a significant number of downloads, a million over the course of a month. Oh, we have a lot of 

Neil Chase: people, we have a lot of people coming to us. Yeah. But if I was to double my audience tomorrow, it wouldn't change our finances.

Right. Because we don't charge people for the work we do. And we'll touch that funding situation in a minute. But not only do we not charge people, we believe that the most important thing we can do is not get someone to come to our website. The most important thing we can do is get the information that we're doing out to people.

And so we give it away for free to all news organizations in California. Newspapers, radio stations, websites. Anybody wants to republish it and put it in front of their audiences. And so, when we do a story, it goes on our website, it goes on Apple News. We get a lot of traffic on both. We work very closely with all the NPR stations in the state, including Capital Public Radio.

We do stories together with them, our stories go on their air, we work with public television in several places, we'll soon be working with KVIE here in Sacramento. [00:06:00] And we, we try to help, not only to inform Californians about what's going on with their state government and policy and politics, but to help the local news organizations be the ones presenting that to their listeners, readers, audience.

Because they should be the most relevant sources and people, people want to get that information from a trusted local source. And that 

Jeff Holden: trusted local source in so many cases is a spectrum. A very wide spectrum. I actually heard you on KFBK this morning with attribution for a story. 

Neil Chase: Yeah. 

Jeff Holden: The depth of content that you're providing.

is, is really agnostic in its distribution. 

Neil Chase: It is, although you're right that if you want to reach people these days, you can't just be in traditional media organizations. You have to be on TikTok. You have to be on social media. And then, there are a lot of other sources on TikTok, on social media, on YouTube, that are conveying information that isn't necessarily vetted, isn't necessarily accurate.

It comes from a certain position, and it's really hard for people to sort stuff out. [00:07:00] So even though there are lots of different media sources out there, we still believe there are a group of people who strongly believe in their local media organization, know where it came from, trust it, and rely on it for news.

We're never going to reach everybody, but we want to reach everybody who chooses to be informed about this stuff and cares and might want to get engaged. As a non 

Jeff Holden: profit platform, which we are Telling stories for non profits. I think a lot of people don't give thought to the fact that there are many news organizations that are non profit and They're meant to give that that unbiased Resource to the community.

How are you funded? Yeah, you're not sold In the typical commercial way with, you know, advertising and, and subscription, so to speak. 

Neil Chase: Yeah, it's funny because we, we tend to think of non profit news as a relatively new industry, and then our friends in public radio and public TV say, you know, we've been doing this for a hundred years, and they're right.

Jeff Holden: Yeah. 

Neil Chase: Communities have always funded local media organizations [00:08:00] for various reasons, for news, for children's programming, for music, for whatever's important to your community. But the, the non profit news model outside of public radio and TV is relatively new. And it has been spawned in a lot of cases because this drying up of traditional advertising revenue, it caused the market forces to go away that were supporting journalism.

But it didn't cause the need for journalism to go away. We've always needed journalism in our society. It's a part of a healthy democracy. The Canadian government now, if you want to put a reporter in your newsroom covering local or provincial news in Canada, they will support the position. because they believe journalism is important to the operation of democracy.

Some states are doing that. California has put a program together that's going to be going into effect this year. New Jersey, some other states are doing it. New York. It is an important part of our society. And it was once mostly funded by market forces. It now has to be funded by philanthropy and lots of other sources.

And so there are for profit, there are non profit, there are low profit, there are university based. We need all these different news [00:09:00] organizations just to be able to cover The news people need. 

Jeff Holden: Tell us a little bit about your budget. What is the size and scope of it? And how was it originated? How do you generate your revenue to pay for the staffing and the coverage that you've got throughout the state?

Neil Chase: Yeah, uh, that is the source of most of my sleepless nights. Which I guess is in the job description for a non profit CEO. And we're growing, which is important because there's more work to do. But adds to that strain every year. Our budget for this year is about 12 million. It's going to be more next year because we just combined with a technology news nonprofit.

Congratulations. Thank you. It's called The Markup. We, we felt that was an area where we weren't strong. And now, especially with AI and all the regulation coming out of California, we have to be able to cover that. as well. The whole world is looking at California and how we're going to regulate on artificial intelligence, much as they did on car exhaust, you know, 50 years ago.

And so I think when CalMatters was started, the initial funders were people who cared about journalism deeply. That's a great group of people. It's relatively small. I think you and I know most of them in this [00:10:00] area. And as we've grown, we have come to understand that people who want to support journalism don't just do it because journalism is a great thing.

They do it because they care about. The coverage of the topics, if you care about healthcare, education, the environment, you want good quality coverage of those topics, you want people talking about them, that improves the health outcomes, it makes education better. And so about, a little more than half, about 60 percent of our funding comes from foundations.

They are some national foundations, many are California statewide foundations, some are local foundations. We get some money. from smaller organizations that are, you know, based in a county or a city. We get some money from statewide foundations and some of the national foundations that care about certain topics support us as well.

That's about 60%. 30 percent is individual major donors. Oh, interesting. They're the people who give either directly out of their own funds or they give through the Sacramento Region Community Fund or one of the foundation, one of the other giving funds. And they, they are people who care, sometimes, they, they tell us they really want more journalism [00:11:00] in the community, they want to see government held accountable, they believe that keeps their taxes lower, that keeps fraud and waste down, which we like to think we do, we do sometimes.

Some people really want more conversation about a certain topic, and they, they want coverage of, of, of certain issues. We have to be careful as journalists not to let that support bias or change our coverage. So you can give money to CalMatters to support great community journalism. You can give money to support a topic, healthcare, education.

You can't come to us and say, I'll give you money to write about this particular story or do this kind of thing. And we don't involve the funders in conversations about what we cover. We tell them what we're doing. We share all of our impact. We love to hear their thoughts on things and kind of annual check in conversations, but they don't drive the journalism because our community has to understand that we're doing high quality, you know, unbiased work.

And not unlike an advertiser trying to dictate a story. Exactly. This is not a new problem in journalism. It's just something we always have to deal with. The Remain, so it's 60 percent foundations, 30 percent major donors. The Remainer is several different smaller pieces. We have a membership model like public [00:12:00] TV and radio.

Unlike public TV and radio, our membership is a rather small piece of our revenue. It's about five percent. We have some corporate sponsorship. We're frankly looking for more. We're trying to build that out by having events including our annual Ideas Festival that'll be coming up May 7th and 8th at the Sheraton Grand.

May 7th, 2025, that's right, at the Sheraton Grand. And that's an opportunity for companies that want to be enabling and supporting and be part of these conversations to be there in the room with us at the festival. And then we have, we do sell what you could call advertising or sponsorship positions in our daily newsletter.

Our What Matters daily newsletter goes to about 250, 000 people around California. It's free. Calmatters. org slash newsletters. And it keeps people up to date on what's going on in Sacramento, what's being discussed in state policy. And there are organizations that want to be advertising, they want to reach the audience that reaches that, that reads that.

There's a core audience in Sacramento, people who are deeply involved in state government, and outside of Sacramento, people, people whose jobs [00:13:00] and daily activities involve state government. And then there's a broader audience of people who care about one of the topics we cover, or multiple topics we cover, and so we try to serve both of those audiences.

Frankly, I think the folks who are supporting our, our newsletter, specifically, are the ones who want to make sure their voices are heard in the legislative debates. Those ads are often You might be reaching 250, 000 people, but they're aimed at 120 legislators. I say, 

Jeff Holden: there's only a few people that you really want to see that ad.

And I say the people who probably pay attention as well are those people who sit underneath that white dome downtown. They have 

Neil Chase: to, because we write about them, we talk about them a lot, and their staffers complain that they have to follow because their bosses ask them questions about what we do. One new thing we created this year we're really proud of is called digital democracy.

And the idea is that people are so unaware of what happens day to day in state government that we want to make that much easier to access. And so we give you, we collect all of the information you can imagine about every state legislator. where their money comes from, how they voted, every word they speak in a [00:14:00] committee hearing or on the floor, how they're rated by different interest groups.

We put all that information together in a big database. Anybody can use it. It's, we have schools that are using it, we have the person who wants to go talk to the legislature for the first time and has never done that before is using it to research the legislators and see who might align with their, their positions.

We, we show you. every legislator's alignment with every interest group in the state capitals. You can figure out who's, who's aligned, where and where the money comes from. But the fun part is we're applying artificial intelligence to that data and we're looking for story ideas in that data. So senators such and such always voted this way, but suddenly voted that way, or gets a lot of money from this organization that opposed a bill, but then voted for it.

And these aren't. Indictments of you doing something wrong. They're simply story tips. We don't publish them. We only share them with reporters. But the reporters can then use those to try to build story ideas out of them. And the big change this year, in our second year of operation, is we don't just want to share with reporters on our staff.

We want to give those to reporters all over the state. So that you're a [00:15:00] local reporter in a community who no longer has a Sacramento bureau, but you want to tell people what your representatives are doing. We can give you story ideas and data that you can use to, to do those stories. So it's an exciting way to, Use technology to make journalism better, and actually we are hiring reporters to do that reporting as opposed to using it to replace jobs.

How many people do you employ? We have 90 people, altogether. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people, again, go back to my nightmares about paying them all. But we, most of them are in California. With this merger, with the markup, we have a number of great journalists who are in other places. Uh, outside of the state, most in California, originally mostly in Sacramento.

And as we grew, especially during the pandemic, it just made sense to hire people all over the state, both because remote work was more acceptable. Journalism has always been a remote position. You have to be out covering what's happening in the field and our fundraisers have to be out talking to the people who want to support us, but also it's a big state.

And if you spend all your time in Sacramento, and you cover a bill on the floor of the legislature in Sacramento, and you're not in Visalia, or Imperial County, or Humboldt, looking at the impact [00:16:00] of that legislation on the people who actually live there, you're not doing the other half of your job. Yeah, you're missing a whole part of the story.

Yeah, yeah. It's the actual impact. Exactly. So I, I As much as I enjoy being in person with great journalists and having the camaraderie of being in the office, I think we do a better job because we're better spread out across California than we were at the very start. 

Jeff Holden: How about collaborative efforts? Are there other organizations that you work with from a news source that contribute and make it a better product?

Neil Chase: Yeah, yeah. There was a time when journalism was very competitive. Especially in big cities, you know, there are three newspapers. You would go to the, the city hall, and you want to be able to get the, or the courthouse, you want to get the scoop. So you went to the payphone, you took out the little microphone in the old payphone and put it in your pocket, so it wouldn't work until you put it back in, so you owned that payphone.

Silly things like that. It was all about how many seconds you got the story out before somebody else. I don't know if that was ever really relevant to anybody except the journalists, when we all fought over that stuff. But now the industry is different. The financial model is different. We're lucky if [00:17:00] most communities can support one.

Strong local news organization. Some have more. In a larger place like Sacramento, you've got several. But still, nowhere near the scope of journalistic coverage we used to have. Right. So we, across the news business, have very quickly adapted to collaboration rather than competition. It starts with us giving everything away we do for free to all the other news organizations in the state.

But we've built some really strong partnerships. The strongest one is called the California Newsroom. And it's a collaboration among all of the public radio stations in the state, especially led by the bigger ones. So CAP Radio in Sacramento, KQED in San Francisco, KPCC, now LAist in Los Angeles, and KCRW there, and KPBS in San Diego.

Those stations and CalMatters all got together seven or eight years ago now and did a big project together. We each put two people on the project for two years. Everybody worked together on it. It became written stories on the CalMatters site and on their websites. It became audio stories on the, on the radio [00:18:00] stations.

And that led to a thing called the California Newsroom, which is an NPR hub for California. We all report together. We share notes all the time. We collaborate. Hey, we're doing this story. It's coming out Tuesday morning. Great. Can we get that reporter on our radio station Tuesday morning to talk about it for maybe 10 minutes with the, with the host?

Sure, or if you want, give us 30 minutes, we'll bring a couple sources from the story and some of the audio, and we'll dig deeper into the story. And so we, we plan things together, we do coverage, we do big projects where there's a giant amount of data to be analyzed for a story. Mm hmm. And one of us, often us, because we have a bigger data team, we'll take that story and do the data analysis, we'll break it down, and then we can give every publisher in the state.

Not only a story about something happening statewide, but the data for your particular county or city. 

Jeff Holden: That's a fabulous opportunity, knowing and coming from a news background, the expense that no individual entity really can afford to do. 

Neil Chase: That's right. And even in the days when you had a big newsroom, I was at the San Francisco Examiner when there were 275 people in the Examiner newsroom and 275 in the Chronicle [00:19:00] newsroom.

That's a long time ago. That was a long time ago. Yes, that was the late 1980s. But, even at that time, you still had to make decisions about which stories to cover, and how to do it, and where to put your resources. And now that's even more true. We work with college newsrooms. There's some brilliant college journalists in the state, and some great college programs we work with.

Jeff Holden: How encouraging is that to hear, too? Because we know that we'll have them going forward. I 

Neil Chase: am pleasantly surprised, but surprised, every time I meet a group of young students, college and high school. We work with high school students as well. who really believe journalism is important. And they believe it in part because they've seen what has happened politically in this country in the past 10 15 years.

They see the, the changes in the news media, but they, they follow it, and they consume it, and they, they are paying more attention, I think, to what's going on in the world than many of us were at that age, in a few years ago, when we were that age. And refreshing to hear. Yes, really encouraging, and it, it is why we put so much effort in the college and high school journalism program.

Not just as a pipeline for future employees, that's great, too. Right. [00:20:00] But imagine a whole generation growing up with a savvy and understanding of media literacy. What is news? What is not? We've met entire school programs where 60, 70 students are in all the different classes together. And you sit down and you talk to them and you talk about what a high school journalism program, what it could really do for a community that has lost its major newspaper and be the local news source.

And there's some really promising ideas there. 

Jeff Holden: That's a great story in itself to think that you either have a high school or a college campus that is located in a community that's lost its local news source and they become 

Neil Chase: it. I was sitting with 65 kids in the west side, in Norco, in Riverside County.

We were on the west side of Riverside County a few months ago. And I said, I want you to stop and think about this for a minute. I am currently in the largest newsroom in Riverside County. There's no newspaper or TV station, whatever, that has 65 people. Granted, they're all part time and they range from age 15 to 18.

But they are the biggest source of people who want to cover that community. And so we had a great conversation about not just covering the school, but the small businesses and the issues in the community and where's, where do all of your [00:21:00] relationships go? And we came up with an audience of like 60, 000 people in a five square mile area, all affected by things that touch this community.

And that is That's a model right they can provide that service and learn a lot doing it. 

Jeff Holden: Yeah, and that's the essence of it That's the beginning of it if you can get that interest and then the progression through courses which have to be Available and and the campuses to accept and understand 

Neil Chase: and we've run a great training program for new Journalism teachers who want to figure out how to create a journalism program in the school there are ten new programs in California that came out of our training program along with Existing programs where the journalism teacher teacher's been trained and these are these are a chance to bring journalism to these communities It's a chance to train these people But also the best journalist in a community is going to be the one who's of that community who walks the streets every day who?

Knows the people who knows what used to be in that business on the corner five years ago and why it closed There are many high school students who are more qualified to cover a certain neighborhood than the [00:22:00] reporter from the metro radio station a hundred miles away who drops in only when a terrible crime happens, right?

Right. 

Jeff Holden: This is a little deviation from where I didn't know about this particular, you know, piece of CalMatters. I mean, it's so significant and it's gonna parlay beautifully into this next question. You have a budget. What if you didn't? What would the organization look like if it was? Didn't, you mean 

Neil Chase: unlimited, not didn't as in zero?

Unlimited, yes. I thought about that. 

Jeff Holden: No, not the zero. 

Neil Chase: I thought about the zero option. The other way around. The other way around. It's a fascinating question because if I could design, what I would do in that situation is I would figure out what's the best way to bring journalism as a public service to the people of California without regard for how far you are from the nearest city.

There are tribal lands where. There's one local tribal newspaper, it comes out once a week. The delivery route is like 40 50 miles just to get to 30 places you drop off the papers. And there's just very little, and nobody else covers it unless something terrible happens, right? How would you build [00:23:00] quality local and regional journalism across the state?

Imagine having a regional CalMatters editor for each of ten different sections of California. And that regional editor is turning CalMatters national or statewide stories into local relevant ones, is working with the high school and college programs, is working with the small publishers. There's still plenty of small family businesses doing journalism in California.

But supporting all of them to make them all better so they can be stronger, so they can keep their audiences and be a place for this news. And doing these kind of collaborative projects back and forth. And that takes a lot more people, and it'll take more money, and it's often harder to raise money aimed at a certain part of the state than at another part of the state, unfortunately.

But if I had the chance to build something out more aggressively, that's what it would look like. Then there's a fascinating program right now at Arizona State University, which, granted, is outside the state of California, but is very active in California. They have offered to take on News organizations where the family running it is done, or the company running it is done.

They've, it's not making much money, they don't see, [00:24:00] there's not a lot of value in the enterprise to sell it. Donated to the university, they'll operate it as part of the journalism school. And they'll make it a lab, they'll use whatever profits were there to fund some non profit journalism work. And models like that are the reason that I think even if the traditional newspaper business is collapsing, journalism is here to stay in a lot of different forms.

Jeff Holden: Well, and they've got a pre existing infrastructure that they don't have to learn and experiment with. No, imagine taking over 

Neil Chase: a news business that's been in a community for a long time, maybe hasn't been large lately, but is there, is trusted, has a storefront downtown and has some people working there who are known.

The other element to this is a lot of the larger news organizations and midsize ones are now owned by giant hedge funds. And it's not because they came in and decided we're going to take over the newspaper business or some conspiracy. A value investor like that can only buy something when nobody else wants it.

So the reason the Sacramento Bee is no longer owned by descendants of the McClatchy family is that the business model no longer [00:25:00] supported that. So McClatchy family money is going to some really good work in the Central Valley. The Journalism Collaborative is funding. New startups in Merced and Modesto and supporting journalism in other parts of Stockton and Fresno.

But the, these value investors or hedge funds or vulture funds or whatever you want to call them that own a lot of the bigger news organizations, including most of the big newspapers in California. They're in it for the money, 

Jeff Holden: right? 

Neil Chase: They're good at what they do. They're not evil. They're just, their job is to make money out of these properties.

There are newspapers in this state that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit, that have no reporter in the newsroom. Because they're simply producing a newspaper, putting stuff from a corporate company into it, and dropping it on people's doorsteps. And there are many of us who will keep getting a newspaper till we die, just like we'll complain about electric rates, but we won't turn off the electricity.

Right. That business is dying, but it's dying slowly. And that means there are still media companies that have a functioning business, some relevance, that could be turned into a real community service. 

Jeff Holden: And unfortunately, when it's [00:26:00] only based on revenue, it's unlikely to happen. 

Neil Chase: It's unlikely to happen, but as the revenue declines, which it will, there's ideally a pivot point where the company says, okay, we're no longer making much money off of this thing.

We're willing to unload it. Nobody else wants it. Oh, this university will take it. It'll be a tax deduction to give it to the university. And maybe there's enough there that you can salvage it. I should mention one other really important collaborative effort, which is called Solving Sacramento. I 

Jeff Holden: was gonna ask.

Neil Chase: Excellent. A group of news organizations in Sacramento got together and said the same thing that we said at a statewide level, none of us are big enough to do this alone. Mm hmm. And so, you have The Observer, you have radio, you have community newspapers, you have ethnic publishers. All working together on some big Sacramento projects.

And that, that brings a level of investigation, a level of quality, a level of depth to stories that most of these smaller news organizations can't do on a regular basis. And it's a really important example. This, this is one of the best collaborations like that in the country and it's happening right in Sacramento.

Jeff Holden: Ah, it's 

Neil Chase: great 

Jeff Holden: to hear. And that [00:27:00] aggregated community of people in the variety of elements in the community gives so much more value to the content of the story. Yeah. Because it's coming from a variety of different perspectives. This is a very diverse place, right? So 

Neil Chase: if you have a news organization that is covering the Russian and Russian speaking communities, and the black community, and the Spanish language communities, and the the different geographic areas, as well as the different ethnic and language groups, you're gonna have more complete reporting.

You're gonna be more reflecting. Even in the days when we had giant news organizations in every major city, There was still a lack of coverage of lower income areas, of smaller segments of the population, and so Not only are we getting more reporting than we might otherwise have in this economic environment, in some cases we're getting more representative, more diverse, more community centric coverage than we've ever had.

Jeff Holden: Yeah, that ethnic, certainly in Sacramento, that ethnic content and perspective embedded in a story [00:28:00] is so valuable because we don't necessarily see it. Yeah. From traditional media. 

Neil Chase: Right. And we often don't see beyond our own neighborhoods, right? Right. I've had people, when I've said something like, you know, CalMatters is here to bring back the quality of journalism we used to have that diminished, I've had people say to me, Or you could do better than that was.

Right? There's no reason you have to settle for the what we had before. It's different and everything about our business is different but the the need for it is still there. The importance of it is still there and the chance to still do it is a real honor. 

Jeff Holden: We'll be back with more news right after this message from the people who make our program possible.

I was in the media business for over 35 years and had the great privilege of working with Runyan Saltzman, RSE Marketing, Advertising, and Public Relations. We collaborated on many different campaigns, but their commitment to the nonprofit sector hasn't changed since their founder Gene Runyon started the agency.

Over many years and many campaigns, Runyon Saltzman has been committed to improving lives by tackling California's most [00:29:00] challenging issues. Guided by research informed strategies and insightful, creative solutions, RSE develops innovative communications campaigns that raise awareness, Educate and reduce stigma in diverse communities throughout our state and beyond.

To learn more about RSE, visit r s hyphen e. com. 

Scott Thomas: Hello, this is Scott Thomas with CAP Trust in our Sacramento office. I specialize in working with local nonprofits and associations. Annually we survey private and public nonprofit organizations across the country to better understand challenges they see in today's environment.

In our more recent survey, we heard concerns about proper board governance, mission aligned investment, and how to implement alternative investments. If you would like a copy of the survey or to discuss your organization, look me up, scottthomasatcaptrust. com. 

Jeff Holden: I'm thrilled to have Western Health Advantage partnering with us as they do so much to support so many non profit agencies in our community.

As a [00:30:00] truly local health plan, you'll find individual and family options, employer options, plans for CalPERS and Medicare Advantage. From medical services to pharmacy, health and wellness support, as well as behavioral health care, Western Health Advantage has a plan that fits what you need. As an employer, for profit or non profit business, Individual or family, you can find more at WesternHealth.

com. Back to reality with a budget. What is the greatest need as you look at it? What is causing you to lose sleep? 

Neil Chase: Yeah, there are people who will support a specific project. I really want to see more coverage of water issues in California, or of education issues. There are not as many people who say, I'd really love to give you money to pay the rent for your office.

Or to pay your CEO, or to pay your operations director. And so, I'm often tempted to, you know, shut down something and restart it the next day and call it new. Right? We'll end the education beat, we'll start a schools beat, and say we have a new thing because people like to fund new things. And [00:31:00] I'm, I'm not giving most, most philanthropic people are more thoughtful than that.

I'm not giving them full credit. But there's always interest in things that we're not doing yet that someone would like to encourage us to do. And they're often things we'd like to do. It is harder to fund something you've been doing for ten years. That is really important and keeps on many funders will say I like to fund things in a catalytic way.

I like to help some get something started that couldn't have happened otherwise. Then I hope you'll be able to go out and find other funders for it. Sometimes you can sometimes you can't and that's that is not exclusive to news. I know every nonprofit leader has those challenges 

Jeff Holden: and the shiny new object always gets the most attention.

But it's not sustainable if you only get it for a year or two grant. 

Neil Chase: Right, right. But when you get that year or two grant, are you going to say no? I've seen people say no. Sometimes you do say no because it would break your business. It wouldn't be the right thing to do. And we are running a, even though it's a non profit, we're running a business.

We have to have a budget, we have to have a P& L, we have to make certain targets. If I don't hit certain targets, I have a board that's very angry with me. If I do, they love me. And in that business context, you [00:32:00] sometimes have to make a decision that is not just, Oh, we take money from anybody and do anything.

Especially in the journalism business. There are things that we know we need to do more of, and we should do more of. We want to do better coverage of K 12 education. It's the biggest part of the California budget. It affects millions of people. I don't think we have enough people on any story, but especially on K 12 education.

TK to 12 education. Our board chair helped write the TK legislation, so we always put TK in there. I would like to find more money to support that work, and I will greatly take that money. We have more support for higher education money coverage right now than we have for K 12 coverage. Why would you do disproportionately more higher education coverage?

Well, there's a lot to do, and people want to support it, we'll do it. But one of our big fundraising goals for 2025 is to build up support for the TK through 12 Education coverage and early childhood education before that because there's such important areas that we just for whatever reason have not Attracted yet as much funding as we hope to be able to get to do that kind of coverage Well, you just got that that 

Jeff Holden: plea out there I 

Neil Chase: may have [00:33:00] 

Jeff Holden: and what a coincidence and one of the things that we we see is the program itself a lot of nonprofit leadership Enjoy listening to their peers, you know, through the people that we interview.

We got the biggest from Pride Industries down to the smallest, 100 percent volunteer organizations, Sacramento Historical Society. And number of downloads, amazingly, in some cases, is similar or greater in some of the smaller organizations. That's 

Neil Chase: great. I believe that. We, I learned so much from talking to peers, whether it's journalism leaders or leaders of other organizations, because we're, we're all making this up as we go.

We're all learning a lot as we go. Things are changing so fast. In the same way that we have to collaborate on the news gathering side with, with news organizations. If we as a non profit are not collaborating with other non profits, then shame on us. We have an industry association of a lot of non profit news organizations.

I spend a lot of time with people who are leading other non profit organizations in the community. It, we have to have those conversations. We have to help each other through this. And I really [00:34:00] appreciate and try to return the favor whenever, you know, one organization mentions us as somebody else that could be sponsored.

Jeff Holden: As I'm thinking about them hearing this story, they may not be familiar with CalMatters. They may not know that there's this resource out there that even they could repurpose a story into their newsletter or something to their board. Which we love, 

Neil Chase: right? When somebody picks up a story, if we can reach an audience, I'm less concerned with how many millions of people might see one story.

As if we have a story about a certain topic and it gets to the people who care about that topic. Yes. And the best way for that to happen is an organization that has a newsletter that's paying attention to what we do and says, Oh, this is a good story for our readers or that brings us story ideas. We also publish op eds, individual pieces.

We call it our California Voices section. Nonprofit leaders are one of the biggest markets for that. People like to get their views out there and they have really good perspective they need to share. We love getting those pieces and publishing. Oh, thank you so much for offering that. Yes. 

Jeff Holden: Again, a lot of people may not know about CalMatters and if that opportunity even [00:35:00] exists.

And that's a perfect segue to the next question, how? Do they find it? I think you gave the website orientation. 

Neil Chase: Yeah, we're on the web at calmatters. org We are not conceited enough to expect everybody comes to our website. So we love for people to sign up for our newsletter It's called what matters we have a weekly one as well You can get it every day or you get it once a week depending which pace you like We also have Dan Walters who's been covering California for 60 years Plus since he dropped out of high school up in Humboldt County to become a journalist at 16.

He's now in his early 80s Who knows so much about California, writes a, a column for us four days a week. We deliver those in a weekly newsletter. But the website is, is the best place to find ourself and get started. We are on local public radio almost every day. You'll hear us on Cap Radio constantly and other places.

We are often in local newspapers. We're on TV sometimes. We have a daily two minute TV segment we do at PBS in Southern California, which is on YouTube. And usually we use our, and we do public in person events as well in different parts of the state, including this event we have coming up in May of [00:36:00] 2025.

So lots of ways to find us, but the quickest way to start is to go to calmatters. org and sign up for the newsletter and then reach out to me. I'm happy to talk to folks who find us useful or don't and have some critiques. We get those sometimes in the news business as in often, but also folks who are doing other things in Sacramento that we ought to know about or ought to be partnering with.

Jeff Holden: And what I'll do is for the benefit of everybody listening, I'll have Those links in the show notes as well. Yeah, that's great. Or 

Neil Chase: neilatcalmatters. org if somebody 

Jeff Holden: wants to remember it and type it in. Well, there it is. neilatcalmatters. org That's it. Like or dislike? Right. 

Neil Chase: We get lots of both. 

Jeff Holden: Neil, as a former news radio general manager, current board member of, of Cap Radio, you have a herculean task and, and I certainly appreciate what you're doing and the way that you're doing it.

Just with the complexity today of distribution, You know, the technology, you mentioned AI, which is great that you're able to get to that point because budget again, you know, that doesn't come free. That's right. But with this dynamic landscape that we're in [00:37:00] and the distribution necessity for all ages. to be engaged, to hear that we have high schools and colleges actually interested in journalism, that just excites me to no end.

Especially knowing we have the campuses that we have around the state. So for, for what you do, for what your team does, for all those 90 people every day slogging it through the Capitol and any remote field that we know they're out in, Oh, 

Neil Chase: no, I appreciate that. And thank you for what you do, right, both With this, this, this effort to get nonprofit, uh, information out there and being on the Cap Radio board, making media work in this town is not easy.

It's a lot of work. And so I appreciate that. Thank you again for coming. Thank you. Great to be here.

Jeff Holden: Thank you for listening to the Nonprofit Podcast Network. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If what you heard moved you, please reach out to that organization and do what you can to help. If you like and appreciate what we're doing to support local nonprofits, [00:38:00] please give us a positive review, subscribe and share.

If you're a non profit with an interest in participating in an episode, you can reach me at jeff at hearmenowstudio. com. If you have a need for the services or products our sponsors offer, please reach out to them. CapTrust, fiduciary advice for endowments and foundations. Runyon Saltzman Incorporated, RSC, marketing, advertising, and public relations, creating integrated communications committed to improving lives.

And Western Health Advantage, a full service healthcare plan for individuals, employer groups, and families. The Nonprofit Podcast Network is a production of, is recorded at, and edited by Hear Me Now Studio.