Journalism’s Special Master: Why Picking Winners Is Only Half the Battle
Philanthropy isn’t optimized for “forced restarts.” If we’re going to narrow the field, we need to stop celebrating a 93% rejection rate and start building open infrastructure.
There has been a lot of handwringing throughout the industry since Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro published her report two weeks ago. To be honest, the debate over the “evils” of picking winners feels somewhat disingenuous.
What do we think we are doing when 120 newsrooms apply for a grant, but only eight are selected? Usually, we celebrate it. We point to the 112 rejections as proof of “how popular the program is” rather than a failure of capacity. We’ve conditioned ourselves to view a massive bottleneck as a brand-building win.
But let’s be honest: that is picking winners. It happens every day because demand exceeds capacity. When Shapiro told Nieman Lab recently that “to solve systemic problems, [picking winners] is what needs to happen,” she wasn’t proposing a new strategy. She was saying the quiet part out loud.
However, identifying the need to “pick winners” is only a diagnosis. The real strategic challenge—and the one currently being overlooked—is the nature of the strings attached to the money. As I’ve argued before, the math only works if the money actually changes the cost structure of the ecosystem, rather than just stabilizing individual organizations.
In the world of federal bailouts, there is a clear distinction between a short-term fix and a forced restart. When the government bailed out the airlines after 9/11, it was a “no questions asked” check that effectively subsidized existing management while they kicked the structural can down the road. By contrast, the 1979 Chrysler bailout and the creation of Conrail worked because they were painful. They required new leadership, operational overhauls, and the jettisoning of unprofitable legacy baggage.
This history brings us back to Shapiro’s central argument. By calling for funders to “force mergers” and “thin the herd,” she is essentially calling for journalism’s version of Kenneth Feinberg.
Feinberg is the “Special Master” famous for overseeing the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund and the TARP “Pay Czar” era. His career is built on the impossible task of creating a formula for fairness in the wake of a disaster. He is the person who steps into the wreckage and decides, with a cold eye, who gets the resources and who doesn’t.
But there is a massive structural gap here. Journalism philanthropy is rarely optimized for this kind of “Special Master” intervention. Foundation “strings” are typically tied to capacity building—reporting requirements and program evaluations. This is an investment in stability, not crisis intervention. Foundations depend on ongoing relationships and often lack the legal or cultural authority to demand the dramatic changes seen in a corporate restructuring.
To bridge this gap, we have to admit that a “winner” shouldn’t just be a newsroom with a strong localized impact—like a Pulitzer-winning investigative outlet serving 8,000 subscribers but carrying no path toward long-term succession. That is a boutique success existing in a vacuum. If we are going to pick winners, the selection must be based on a newsroom’s ability to build what I’d call open infrastructure.
This requires a shift from funding “products” to funding “tools.” If a newsroom is selected for a major scale-up or merger, the trade-off—the “string”—is that their proprietary successes must become the industry’s open-source utility. Whether it’s a specific subscription workflow, a tech stack, or a proven revenue model, the benefit cannot remain private.
We have to close the distance between a foundation’s desire for stability and the industry’s need for a forced restart. That likely requires new intermediaries—perhaps donor-advised pools or independent “Special Master” entities—that can handle the unpopular work of firing management or sunsetting legacy products.
If we’re going to pick winners, let’s be transparent about the cost. More importantly, let’s be clear that the winners are being funded to build the ladder that everyone else can climb. Without those hard strings, we aren’t saving the ecosystem; we’re just choosing who gets to stay on the lifeboats while the ship continues to sink.
The Conversation
Do you think journalism philanthropy is actually capable of a “forced restart,” or are we culturally too tied to the “ecosystem” narrative to ever let things go? I’d love to hear from the funders and the “losers” of the 93% on this one. Leave a comment or hit reply.
Pass it on
If you know a funder currently staring at a pile of 120 applications, or a newsroom leader wondering why the “ecosystem” feels more like a lottery, send them this.