The Value Of Nonprofit Journalism For Your Work

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I'm your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I'm glad you're with us. I'd be forced to endure the pain of rhabdomyolysis if you broke me down with the idea that you missed this week's show. Here's our associate producer Kate to introduce it.

Kate Martignetti
Hey, Tony. This week we have the value of nonprofit journalism for your work. Monika Bauerlein reveals lessons to learn from when Mother Jones, the magazine, had its nonprofit status revoked in the 1980s. '80s during the Reagan administration. She also shares her thinking on how to proactively protect your nonprofit, how to avoid feeling intimidated, and the importance of local journalism and building relationships with local reporters. Monika is CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. On Tony's Take 2.

Tony Martignetti
Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

Kate Martignetti
Here is the value of nonprofit journalism for your work.

Tony Martignetti
It's a genuine pleasure to welcome Monika Bauerlein to Nonprofit Radio. Monika is CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit multimedia investigative news organization producing Mother Jones, the magazine started in 1976, Reveal, the radio show and podcast, and the podcast More to the Story, new this year. She's held her role since 2024 when Mother Jones merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting. You'll find Monika on Blue Sky @MonikaB, and you'll find nonprofit investigative journalism at motherjones.com, revealnews.org, and their podcast, More to the Story. Welcome to Nonprofit Radio, Monika.

Monika Bauerlein
Thanks for having me, Tony.

Tony Martignetti
It's a genuine pleasure. I've admired— I've known Mother Jones the best And the Center for Investigative Reporting. I've just admired their work from afar for years. So I'm, you know, some people say, well, like, I'm excited to have you with us because my excitement is just overspilling. And but I'm genuinely excited. I am excited. I've been looking forward to this. We put it all together in just a couple of days with the help of your very savvy comms guy, Sean. And so, I am excited to have you representing the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Mother Jones, and David Corn. And we just— he doesn't know it, but we go back a long ways. So, one way, because I admire his work, and I've just admired the outlets for years. Oh,

Monika Bauerlein
I was hoping you would have some stories about David that I could, you know, spring on him at some point.

Tony Martignetti
Oh no, I think I do. I think I have a sighting of him at a— where were we? This was in Portland, Oregon. I was at a nonprofit conference. It was the Nonprofit Technology Conference, NTC, last year. And he was not at that conference because his work is not nonprofit technology. He's not a technologist, but he was at a meeting that took place before the N10 meeting after hours. So people saw him walking out and they were all excited. I didn't get to see him. I didn't get to see David, but he was at a reception that preceded our reception entering the room. But I didn't get there early enough to see him leaving. So that's the closest I came. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, you know, I mean, you know, the outlets, I just, you're— I'm a fanboy. What can I say? I'm just admitting, uh, and I'm also a recent donor to Mother Jones. So, uh, I guess I should reveal all that, even though I'm not a journalist, but I still feel like I should reveal that I am a recent donor to Mother Jones.

Monika Bauerlein
Thank you so much, Tony. That means, that means the world.

Tony Martignetti
Well, because of the special, the special environment that, uh, that we're in. So let's do some history because you have a lot of information that can help our listeners in small and mid-sized nonprofits. This I did not know. My relationship with Mother Jones doesn't go back this far, but under the Reagan administration, the IRS revoked— didn't just threaten to revoke, revoked— Revoked. Your 501 status when it was just— when you were Mother Jones. Please tell that story.

Monika Bauerlein
Yeah, I found myself going back to that story recently. This was obviously also before my time at Mother Jones, but I had always heard of it. And, you know, this is a year when a lot of nonprofit organizations have really been worried about what kind of action could be taken against them by a hostile federal government. And the IRS is a really obvious tool given how important the nonprofit status is to an organization. And so I thought, well, Mother Jones, you know, is here now as part of our newly formed Center for Investigative Reporting. We've been here for 50 years, just about. And so clearly we survived this encounter with the IRS in the '80s. Let me go back to that. Okay. And see if there's some lessons and maybe hope to be drawn for organizations now. And the primary lesson that I took from it is that, as with so many other things, you know, we have been here before in different ways. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. But literally in the Reagan years, there was an attempt to defund what they call defund the left. Richard Viguerie, who was One of the godfathers of the modern right, had said what the federal government needs to do is remove the nonprofit designation from organizations that do things that we disapprove of, such as registering voters, especially Black and brown voters. We know, how dare you do that? Organizations that advance the rights of women, et cetera, et cetera. And Mother Jones specifically had been going through a routine audit that started in the Carter administration. You know, the magazine was just a baby magazine at that time. They were— it was 3 years old, but it had already become one of, I think, actually the biggest progressive-leaning magazine in America. There was a real appetite for the kind of investigative investigative journalism that it was doing. And so the team sent over all the information that the IRS asked for and waited. And then Reagan took office and they started getting these increasingly aggressive requests for information. And it dragged out for years.

Tony Martignetti
Information like donors or what types of How deep was the inquiry? What were they seeking?

Monika Bauerlein
Well, some of this I had to extract from some dusty filing boxes, but some of it is also lost to history. But what I could see was it was really about whether, because Mother Jones, at the time there were not a lot of nonprofit news organizations. There was public radio and television, And there were a handful of nonprofit magazines, National Geographic, Harper's, you know, organizations like that, but it was not yet a really common thing. And so the IRS was saying, well, look at this, you're selling subscriptions. Isn't that— doesn't that make you not qualify as a nonprofit organization? And so the magazine team, and at that point they Hired a lawyer who's named— is Tom Silica, one of the godfathers of nonprofit law in the country. Now I've said godfather twice. It must be you rubbing it off on me.

Tony Martignetti
No, I said podfather. I said podfather.

Monika Bauerlein
Well, it's inspired me. So they would send over the information. They would show essentially the IRS ended up claiming that this was a profit-making enterprise. And so they sent over a lot of information saying, are you kidding? We lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. We're paying our staff a fraction of what staff would be paid at a fancy glossy magazine. We are— the mainstays of magazine advertising at that time were car ads and cigarette ads. And right out of the gate, Mother Jones had invested— had investigated the Ford Ford Pinto and the tobacco industry. So, you know, bye-bye to that revenue. But the IRS eventually determined that Mother Jones was not a nonprofit, did not qualify for a nonprofit designation, even though it had previously already received it, and pulled that designation. And so the second lesson that I took from this episode is that's not the end of the story. Right. There is an appeals process. It is not easy. You would rather not have to go through it. But Mother Jones in fact appealed to a higher level of decision-making within the IRS and actually prevailed at that point. And the letter that the— I think it was the, you know, office for the Western region essentially wrote back was, it, you know, we do notice that Everything you're doing is antithetical to making a profit, like making the car and tobacco companies mad. So we prevailed at that point. This was 3 or 4 years into the process. So there had been quite a bit of legal expenses. There had been, you know, an incredible amount of staff time put into it. The editor-in-chief at that time was also audited personally 3 years in a row. So it was a lot of, you know, probably put a couple of premature gray hairs on her head. But the appeal did prevail, and had it not, there would have also been an option to appeal in the courts. So this is not a, you know, once and done kind of process. There is— there are rules around it, and Hmm. You can make a nonprofit organization sweat and struggle and pay, but you can't make it go away overnight.

Tony Martignetti
So there's a lesson of tenacity, not surrender. There's also a personal aspect to it. You said the CEO was personally audited?

Monika Bauerlein
Yeah, the editor-in-chief was. And I only learned this when I spoke with her Recently she said, oh yeah, by the way, I had to go through 3 years of separate audits and there's no way to prove that this was targeted, but what a coincidence.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah. The likelihood of an individual being audited is, even then, was very, very small. And coincident with the organizational inquiry. Yeah, yeah. Of course, the concern today is that, you know, that higher level of appeal starting within, whether it's IRS or Department of Justice or FBI, wherever you might be appealing to, is not going to be as objective as it would've been in— sounds like this was all early 1980s. It sounds like this played out like '79 to '83, '84, somewhere around there. Yeah. I guess I should reveal too, at that time, oh, at first I was a student, but then in 1984, I joined the Air Force. So I was actually part of the, you know, I mean, I was a military member of the Reagan administration.

Monika Bauerlein
Thanks for your service, Tony.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Monika. So, but to my— our concern today, now, 40 years later, is that you're not going to get a level-headed appeal. And then even if it ends up in the courts, you know, we're so divided. I'm just— I'm not saying I wouldn't be optimistic, but— and I'm certainly not saying that I wouldn't pursue all potential appeals, but it just feels like more of an uphill climb than it would've been in the early 1980s.

Monika Bauerlein
For sure. And I will say, even back then, the advice of the lawyers representing Mother Jones actually was, don't put too much hope in the IRS bureaucracy because the climate is such that they're not going to want to stick their neck out And, you know, find in favor of you, you probably will have to go to court. So it was a pleasant surprise when they prevailed at the appeals level. And I think there too, maybe we shouldn't assume that everybody in these vast bureaucracies is equally willing to carry out a political vendetta, should that be the case.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah.

Monika Bauerlein
And, you know, certainly taking your case to the courts is, is a roll of the dice, but it's a roll of the dice within a system that still does exist and that still has rules and laws and rules and laws that affect a wide range of organizations. You know, that's, I think, the other piece that's worth remembering is there are nonprofits representing every, every type of political and ideological and, you know, mission provenance. And so there are many, many— there are, you know, for example, conservative news organizations that don't want an IRS to go after them for political reasons, just as much as they might not want the IRS to go after a perhaps more progressively inclined organization. So it's not that easy to pick out one set of nonprofits and not have others take notice and think, well, am I at risk if this becomes standard?

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, absolutely. So then, given that history, how do you overcome the The fear of, you know, capitulating or, you know, of censoring the investigative work, of creating prior restraints on your own speech. Because there's a history. So I know you're not, but how do you overcome those fears, concerns?

Monika Bauerlein
For us at the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones and Reveal, it's just in our DNA. It's what we do. And if we started dialing back, that really goes to the core of what people expect of us. The credibility that we have as journalists is that we report without fear or favor, that we follow the story where it leads. And so If we start defanging, compromising that commitment, then we might as well shut down. Then there's really, you know, we have compromised the core of our mission.

Tony Martignetti
Fair enough. Have you done anything to proactively protect The institutions, you make sure organic documents are I's dotted and T's crossed, make sure that compliance with whatever state registration and fundraising and solicitation. I'm just scratching the surface. You're based in California. California is renowned as a high regulatory state. Nonprofits are not an exception to that. Yeah. Have you just sort of created the safety zone around these things that could potentially be used to pick at you?

Monika Bauerlein
That's right. That's, I think, really the biggest lesson for us having been in the— our work is making powerful people mad by reporting the truth that Some people might not want out. And so we have been in the crosshairs for a long, long time, and we have had to make sure that our financials are buttoned up, that our fact-checking is rigorous, that we are really paying attention to compliance in all 50 states. And that's something that organizations that are a little less on the front lines in that respect have really had to grapple with. Yeah. Recently, and one of the things that we have been doing, drawing on all that experience, is offering our services to other primarily nonprofit media. But I'm starting to talk to nonprofits in other fields just to help them get their, their head around how they need to, what they need to button up, where they need to be careful, how many years they need to hang on to their key financial documents for. Right. Because you don't want to be, you know, Al Capone who gets taken down for taxes. In fact, you don't want to be Al Capone.

Tony Martignetti
Well, you don't want to be Al Capone, first of all. Yeah, you don't want to be Al Capone.

Monika Bauerlein
No, but you don't want to be a, you know, a righteous, well-meaning, law-abiding nonprofit that gets taken down for a mistake.

Tony Martignetti
And yeah, because avoiding those charitable solicitation documents in Wisconsin are a year old. Or were signed by the treasurer and not the CFO or something like this. All right. Yes, exactly. All right. Yeah, we're gonna get to services that you have for nonprofits, especially newer nonprofits. I do want to talk some about that. So yeah, you have to make sure things are buttoned up. We've had episodes on the show about that, about what to do with— You have a very smart nonprofit attorney in San Francisco. I don't know if you know Gene Takagi, but—

Monika Bauerlein
Yes, I do.

Tony Martignetti
He is the legal—

Monika Bauerlein
I love Gene's blog.

Tony Martignetti
You know it, nonprofitlawblog.com. Wildly popular. He's the, um, he's the legal contributor for Nonprofit Radio, so he's on every few months talking about legal topics. And he just joined us recently for our 750th show last month. But Gene has been with the show as a legal contributor for I don't know, since like show number 7 or 10 or something like that. And we just had show number 750. We love Gene. So I'm glad, I'm glad you know him. Yeah, he's in your backyard. The— so he's talked some about— he's helped our listeners understand what to do to be proactive.

Kate Martignetti
It's time for Tony's Take 2.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Kate. We are recording this on Wednesday, the 10th of September, in the evening. This is the day that Charlie Kirk was killed, just around 2 o'clock or so Eastern time. It's awful. I want to— I'm going to read the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry to start. Charles James Kirk, October 14th, 1993 to September 10th, 2025, was an American right-wing political activist, author, and media personality. He co-founded the conservative organization Turning Point USA in 2012 and was its executive director. He was the chief executive officer of Turning Point Action, Turning Point Academy and Turning Point Faith, president of Turning Point Endowment, and a member of the Council for National Policy. I had a very different, completely unrelated Tony's Take Two planned, but I've moved just in the past couple hours to to talk about this senseless, awful act of violence. This is just not what I want our country to be, that people are attacked and in this case murdered for their opinions. He was at a university in Utah speaking on behalf of Turning Point USA from his conservative perspective. He was under a tent that said, prove me wrong. So he was open to people challenging his opinions. In fact, he was waiting to debate a liberal progressive guy when he was murdered. That was all part of the program, and they just hadn't gotten to that yet. Wow. So, you know, there he is, opening himself to criticism and challenge and debate, which is what we do in the United States. We do criticize opposite opinions, differing opinions, and we challenge them and we debate them. We don't— well, obviously we do. We shouldn't. be killing each other or in any way attacking each other over our opinions. You know, this week's show, Charlie Kirk would probably disagree with a lot of what Monika Bauerlein is saying, what Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting reports, has reported. But he wouldn't advocate violence against Mother Jones, I'm sure. It's it's kind of uncanny for me. I don't want to make this about myself, but just this past Saturday, I bought a ticket to America Fest in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. America Fest is a right-wing conservative event that Turning Point USA hosts a couple times a year. And I wanted to hear what Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck and others have to say. Uh, I don't agree with it. You know, you know, we don't do politics on Nonprofit Radio, but You know, my leaning is probably obvious. I don't agree. It's not like I was going to have my mind changed, but I wanted to hear these guys firsthand without, you know, I just wanted to see them live. So I'm still going, and I imagine it'll be a different kind of event. They'll be celebrating Charlie Kirk's life. Yeah. In in this event in December, which which he deserves. You know, he leaves two young children. He leaves a wife, and I I wish this had not happened. This you know I said earlier we don't. I was about to say we don't kill people. We don't attack people, but for their opinions. That's obviously wrong. We do. It's just happened again. You know, there were legislators in Minneapolis, Minnesota targeted recently in their homes. There was the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Judges attacked. You know, there are, there are other instances that are not coming to mind, but this is just not where we should be. And I deeply regret that this is the awful place where we are. And I hope, I hope it stops. So, Charlie Kirk, rest in peace. Thank you. That is Tony's Take 2. Kate?

Kate Martignetti
Um, I don't think any children should have to sit and watch their father be shot just for having— everyone has the right to speak and voice their opinions and their concerns. That's what makes America so great. And so his 2 children should not— they were there. His children and his wife were there, and they should not have had to see that at all. They should not have had to go through that. But we also can't forget that today there was a school shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado. Do not let those stories get buried underneath all this either. Wow. big problem with gun violence in our country. And so hopefully moving on, the administration that we have now can do something about this and not just start pointing fingers at one side or the other. The problem is gun violence, not who's right, who's wrong.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Well, you're right that we don't want to see finger-pointing. You know, it doesn't matter who the, who the killer is.

Kate Martignetti
Um, you

Tony Martignetti
know,

Kate Martignetti
it's not who did it. It's who, like, everyone has access to it and we need to start limiting access, in my opinion. Even, I'm sorry, I feel like your nonprofit is like not political. You can cut that if you want.

Tony Martignetti
Go ahead.

Kate Martignetti
Um, we've got beaucoup but loads more time. Here's the rest of The Value of Nonprofit Journalism for Your Work with Monika Bauerlein.

Tony Martignetti
You want to talk some, and I do too, about the value of nonprofit journalism in our environment, and then we'll get to local relationships, but just a broader, bigger picture, please, about the important role of nonprofit journalism.

Monika Bauerlein
Where do I begin? My favorite topic. But I think what I would say in a nutshell is we have had the good fortune in America that for some time, not by any stretch forever, the marketplace, the commercial marketplace functioned in such a way that for-profit media were able in many cases to do really high-quality journalism. This has to do with the fact that newspapers, radio stations, television stations largely had A monopoly in their markets, and so they could charge you for that subscription. And more importantly, they could charge advertisers. You know, if you were a car dealership and you wanted people to know about you, you had to buy advertising in that local newspaper, that local radio station. And some of that money went to pay for local newsrooms that in many cases did excellent work. The same on a national level. That's how you got, you know, investigative and public service teams at National newspapers and broadcasters. That entire model has been going down the tubes since the '90s, first with the advent of Craigslist that pulled the rug out from under classified advertising, and then with the advent of large digital platforms like Google and Facebook that can tell that local car dealership, we can actually target your ad exactly to the people who are searching for a new car. Hmm. Right now. So why don't you take all that budget to our platform? And that is exactly what happened. Those platforms ended up with 90 to 95% of the advertising budgets. They also work at scale. There's a, there's a lot there. And so commercial for-profit publishing is essentially a dying industry in this country. It's still hanging on, in some cases hanging on as You know, what we think of as zombie news organizations that still, you know, they might still deliver a hunk of dead trees to your house. There is still some content in there, but it's being put together by a skeleton crew. It might not even be, you know, it might at this point be generated by people somewhere else in another country by AI. And so the only There are some exceptions, but by and large, that for-profit model is dead. And we do have a nonprofit model for news that is of longstanding, including public radio and television, as well as nonprofit news organizations like the Center for Investigative Reporting that put together some commercial revenue. We, for example, we still sell subscriptions. But that's not enough to pay for quality journalism. So we also rely on philanthropic support from mostly individual people who may give, you know, $5 a year, $50 at the end of the year, $2 a month, in a wide range, and from larger philanthropically inclined gifts. So that model has now created hundreds and hundreds, I think a total of 500 or so nonprofit news organizations around the country. And those are just the ones that are members of the Institute for Nonprofit News. So if any of your listeners are interested in finding a local nonprofit news organization in their community, or a nonprofit news organization that covers the things that they care about, such as climate. They can go to the Institute for Nonprofit News and find one. These are great news organizations. They're mostly brand new within the last 10, maybe 20 years, many of them as recent as a year or 2 or 5 years old. Mm-hmm. And so the challenge of growing those organizations fast enough to replace what is being lost in commercial news is huge. It's not growing fast enough. Americans are by and large not used to supporting news in the same way that they might support the arts or social services. But that's where we're going to have to end up in order to have a functioning, accurate news ecosystem in the country. Because if we don't, and, you know, I'll, I'll shut up after that.

Tony Martignetti
Hmm.

Monika Bauerlein
The only really commercially viable way to produce news, there are primarily 2. One is providing really specialized information for people who can afford to pay for it. Um, and the other is basically mass-produced crap. Um, All right. That is, you know, pennies, pennies to the page, and that generates, you know, very small amounts of advertising revenue. That's why you get a lot of websites advertised to you when you're on the internet that look like they're providing news, but it's really, you know, increasingly just artificial intelligence-generated garbage. So those are the options that we have.

Tony Martignetti
All right. Well, we don't need any shoutouts or examples of the AI-created crap. But in the other instance, the highly personalized and specialized Just what are, what are a couple of examples of those?

Monika Bauerlein
Well, when you think about, you know, who has money to pay for news that they think can advance primarily their professional interests, for example, you have a lot of specialized news that speaks to people in the finance industry. I mean, the Wall Street Journal is a general interest newspaper, but, you know, when you have an audience of people who work as, you know, who work in that industry, you probably have a revenue model. There are specialized trade publications that might speak to, you know, people in a particular industry where your office pays for a subscription because that's valuable to you. And you might be somebody who really loves all things cats, and you might be paying for A Substack newsletter that tells you a lot about what's going on in the world of cats. Those are some examples.

Tony Martignetti
Sure. Yeah, Substack's grown just within the past year.

Monika Bauerlein
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Grown enormously. Okay, I see that. That's an example as well as the others you mentioned. All right.

Monika Bauerlein
And some of your listeners, for example, might be subscribing to a philanthropy publication. Those are also special interests that have a business model because there are people professionally interested in getting that information.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, Chronicle of Philanthropy is probably the, the most renowned. Do you know Stacy Palmer, the CEO there?

Monika Bauerlein
I know, I know of her. I haven't met Stacy.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. She was a guest a couple of weeks ago.

Monika Bauerlein
Oh, fantastic.

Tony Martignetti
You know, for a long time she was editor-in-chief, and then she, when they created their nonprofit, she became the CEO of the nonprofit, and they hired Andrew Simon as the The editor on that side, and they were both on a few weeks ago.

Monika Bauerlein
And that's a great example, Tony, of an organization that has found that being a nonprofit, that basically quality journalism is not a profit-making enterprise, and that you might as well face that fact and commit to being a nonprofit and accountable to your readers and supporters.

Tony Martignetti
They're also doing interesting work with the AP. They have a— they're doing training for reporters to help them better understand and therefore better cover the nonprofit community so that it's not all about the fraud, you know, the Navy veterans fraud charity, helping them understand how to do better research, etc. So it's They're trying to broaden the understanding of the community in the broader investigative journalism community.

Monika Bauerlein
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
You have advice too about bringing this to the local level, about creating relationships with local reporters. So I was heartened to hear that there are 500 independent nonprofit journalism sites. I wouldn't have guessed there were that many. So I do take your point that we're not creating them fast enough to offset the hemorrhaging on the commercial side of local reporting and investigative work, which is just so critical. Yeah, I mean, it's just, we have to, what is it, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Investigative journalism, it's just so central. So time-consuming. I mean, it can be years, years of— I mean, you know better than I. Who am I telling you? Who am I telling? I'm sharing the little bit that I know, that it can be years investigating something and having it come to fruition or not, or not even. I mean, every investigation, just like every criminal investigation, doesn't lead to a revelation. You know, they don't all create the MeToo movement.

Monika Bauerlein
You know it, Tony.

Tony Martignetti
So, you know, just the work is just so central, but often fruitless and thankless for the stories that don't end up being stories.

Monika Bauerlein
And let me put in a plug too for, you know, like you said, just the sort of shoe leather grind of covering stories that might not be investigative in nature, but somebody has to go down to City Hall and ask the questions. Somebody has to figure out, you know, what's going on with a local developer. You know, there's just so many stories that don't get done when you have— when you don't have boots on the ground. And one of the challenges for a lot of these local nonprofit news organizations is they might be 2 or 3 people, they might be one person. And so I really would urge your listeners to find the local or national or topic-oriented news organizations that covers the work that they care about and just check them out. Their content is always going to be free. And then you can always make a decision down the road about whether you want to support them. But even just engaging with the content, letting them know that you're there and that you care about the work that they do is so valuable.

Tony Martignetti
And let's say more about creating these relationships with local reporters. You know, exposing them to your work and, but getting them to know you before you are pitching a story. You know, like we don't, you know, first date, you know, you're not asking for a hand in marriage. So help us create these relationships with burdened, under-resourced, but still story hungry. I mean, these journalists still have to produce stories. Yeah. And content, but creating that relationship before you're asking for something.

Monika Bauerlein
That's such a great question. And let me just share with you what it looks like from the perspective of a local journalist, which is where I started in my career. Everybody wants you to cover what they do. Everybody wants you to pick up their press release. Everybody basically wants publicity for their organization. And as a journalist, you're thinking about, well, what is it that the people who go to my website, who read my content, actually care about? They might not care about a press release, but they might, and they might not care about, you know, an appointment of a new CEO. But what they care about is, here's an organization in my universe, in my community, that does something that is making a difference, that is changing things that might even be relevant to me personally, or, or that is in the middle of an important story for this community that they can help me unlock. So that's, I think, the mismatch sometimes can be as a nonprofit, leader, a nonprofit person, you're looking at how can I get the media to cover the work that I do, the organization that I represent. And as a journalist, you're looking for, can you tell me a story of how something is changing that my, that my audience will care about? And every nonprofit has a story of how things are changing. You know, they might be And they're usually in the middle of really interesting stories. So let's say, you know, you're a food bank and you're finding— I'm, you know, this is a pure hypothetical, but let's say you're a food bank and at this moment in time you're finding that people are much more hesitant to come to you because there's— because they're afraid of immigration enforcement and some of them might be undocumented. Just that fact that you are seeing these repercussions is something that's going to be of interest to a reporter. You might also be— again, this is pure hypothetical, but, you know, maybe you've thought about, is there a way that we can get our services to people who are afraid of coming to our location? That's an incredible story. Now you've not only identified a new phenomenon, but you also are sharing a solution that is giving people some inspiration and hope. So those are the kinds of stories that reporters will connect with. And the best way that I know to get to make those connections with those reporters is, of course, first to follow their work. If you work in a community, you are naturally going to be interested in the work of a local or topic-specific newsroom anyway. You are, you know, if you work— let me give you an example. If you work in San Francisco in the Mission neighborhood, you're going to want to follow the work of Mission Local, which is a nonprofit newsroom there, because that is a newsroom that serves the same community that you serve. So once you're following them and you see the kinds of stories that they cover, And you see the names of the reporters, they're only going to be a handful because, you know, those newsrooms are all very small. Um, all of those reporters are going to want to hear from you. Their bylines will probably be linked to an email, or they might be on a social platform that you're also on that you can message them on. So it helps immensely to say, I follow your work. I saw your story on X. Hmm. I have something related that I would love to share. And that might feel like a lot of work, but it's only one more step from ingesting the information that you probably need anyway about your community. It's that one more step of identifying who is this reporter, and can I let them know that I'm already familiar with their work so that I'm not one of the 999 unsolicited

Tony Martignetti
Press releases, you've mentioned those a couple times. Do those, do those work anymore? Are they— is there, is there any value in them?

Monika Bauerlein
It depends on who you are. I would say, you know, if your story is potentially of interest to a major media outlet, Well, there are a couple of reasons. You might just want a press release because press releases end up being on the internet via organizations like PR Newswire, and you might just want to have created a record. It's like making a— it's like creating a blog post. You may have wanted to send out a press release about your new CEO, and it's really just so that in the future, you know, for example, any funder that might be interested in your organization can find that press release about your CEO. Okay.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Monika Bauerlein
That's a legitimate reason. It's not really designed for the press. If you're looking to gain press, I think the only releases that are effective are ones that are going to be of interest to a broad number of news outlets because your, your odds of any one reporter, any one news organization seeing your particular press release are pretty slim. So, you know, let's say they're 1 in 100. You're gonna wanna make sure that there's at least 100 that are potentially interested. So that rules out most local work, I would say. If you're in a local community and you have news to announce, you're probably better off identifying— there's probably only 2 or 3 reporters max who are covering the kind of work that you do. Say you're a housing organization. There's not a city in America with the exception of maybe our 2 or 3 largest cities that is going to have more than 1 or 2 housing reporters. So you just want to find those people and send the information to them directly.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Okay. And then how about just the relationship, again, just without having something to pitch in the moment, but just having awareness in your— at the local paper. I'm thinking of the one— I live in a small town in North Carolina, and 2 towns over, there's a little outlet. It shares a building with a yarn shop.

Monika Bauerlein
Amazing.

Tony Martignetti
Just kind of like creates an image of a sleepy, You know, small news outlet. But they're, you know, their paper boxes are throughout the— I don't know, throughout my part of the county anyway. That's fantastic. So they're producing the paper, what do you call it, the dead tree, you know, the dead tree model, there's that. And they're online, of course, too. But there's just the fact that they're with a yarn shop is like, kind of like, Just creates an image of something small and sleepy. But still—

Monika Bauerlein
Shall we say homespun?

Tony Martignetti
Homespun. Homespun. Oh, very good. So just having them, local outlet, be aware of your work and how you could potentially relate to a bigger story, just so they know what you do. Without any idea now for what we might do together?

Monika Bauerlein
Yeah. I think reaching out and just letting them know that you follow their work and—

Tony Martignetti
They're organic.

Monika Bauerlein
This is what you do. And if they ever are interested, reporters need sources. So, you know, Tony, let's take you as an example. You know, you are a local expert on nonprofits and philanthropy. Mm-hmm. If you contact somebody in that newsroom and say, you know, I know you probably don't do that much coverage of the sector that I'm in, but I just wanna let you know I'm here, I love your work, and if you ever need somebody to talk to for a story on a nonprofit here locally, I'm happy to help out. That's gold for a journalist. That's really helpful.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. I may go to the yarn shop and Tidewater News. It's Tidewater News. Let's shift to what the Center for Investigative Reporting is doing for nonprofits. You've got some services. I think especially for newer nonprofits, how can we reach these services? What are they?

Monika Bauerlein
So the genesis of this is we have, because we have been in the crosshairs for some time, we have always had to be pretty buttoned up on our non-program side, you know, our finance team, Our HR team, etc., have all had to be top-notch. And so we used to get a lot of requests from folks who wanted advice, who wanted to help us out, help them out with a project, who wanted us to help them find somebody who could handle their finance, their accounting, their budgeting, etc. So we finally said, maybe, maybe they actually need us. Yeah. to do this for them for a fee. And so we started offering a service where we handle— it's not, you know, we're not a huge consultancy, but we feel that with— it started with media organizations. And as a fellow nonprofit news organization, we just understand the challenges and the issues that those organizations are dealing with. Better, I think, than a, you know, local bookkeeper or a third-party accounting service. And we also handle some of the things that these organizations need to do, like figuring out their newsletter strategy or figuring out if they happen to have a print magazine like we do. That's a big challenge. We can sometimes run that for them. And What we've seen in the past year or so is that it's not just media organizations that have these challenges of, you know, making sure their financials are audit ready, making sure that they're in compliance with labor law in all the states that they operate in, making sure that they understand this is an area of expertise that obviously news organizations have, but that is relevant to other organizations, making sure that they understand libel law. You know, if you put out a report that you publish on the internet or that you send out via your newsletter, you need to be thinking, have I looked at whether this is defaming, potentially defaming anybody? You know, we just saw a huge defamation verdict against Greenpeace. That is, you know, we always— we see regular SLAPP litigation, strategic lawsuits against public participation, against local nonprofits and activists. Those are often grounded in defamation law. And so we obviously can't be somebody's lawyer, but we can bring some expertise in how you waterproof your content ahead of time so that you don't end up in trouble for libel or slander.

Tony Martignetti
So the work is beyond media nonprofits now?

Monika Bauerlein
Exactly. So we have started offering this to other nonprofits who deal with some of the same challenges that media nonprofits do.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. And we can find help. You mentioned human resources. Media, I'm sorry, marketing communications. What categories can we find help in?

Monika Bauerlein
Primarily, and, you know, I will say this is still something that we are exploring how we can be the most useful. It's not, you know, we are not one of those large third-party vendors that just has a suite of, you know, services Okay. And that is going to give you an upsell. We're really trying to tailor what we do to the partners that we're working with. The primary areas in which we have expertise that really is ready to go are, you know, finance, accounting, budgeting. Financial planning is one big area. Compliance on every front is another big area. And we have some trainings available on things like media law that we can also help people out with that usually come with some of the other services.

Tony Martignetti
And where do we access these?

Monika Bauerlein
We are just in the process of sharing this information more widely. What I would recommend is in the Um, what I would actually recommend, uh, right now to your listeners is, um, just, uh, email me directly. Okay. Uh, that's going to be monika@cir.org. Uh, we will have a more public-facing set of materials available, but at the moment we really want to work with people one-on-one To make sure that we can help them, and it's Monica with a K. So monica at cir dot org.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, all right. And let's close with your own little infomercial, please, about Mother Jones and Reveal and the new podcast More to the Story. Share what. I mean, I know Mother Jones. I'm not familiar with the other channels, the other outlets, but share what folks are going to find through your work.

Monika Bauerlein
Thank you so much. What I have found recently is that a lot of people are really dialing back their news consumption. They're finding the news that is coming at them from all sides depressing, overwhelming, exhausting. You know, you name, you name the adjective. What we do is we try to not hit you with content 24/7. You know, we do publish new content every day, but we might do it 2 or 3 times a day and not, you know, 20 times a day. And a lot of what— and those are going to be updates on stories that are happening that are the most important or the ones that people aren't going to see elsewhere. But then the core of our work really is deeper reporting, investigations, immersive stories that Are for those times when, you know, you're not ready to go doom scrolling for 3 hours. That's not good for anybody's health, but you're ready to spend a half hour or an hour listening to somebody telling you a really important story. That's via our podcast and our radio show, both of which people can find by searching for Reveal Podcast. And people might also already be hearing the show on their local public radio stations. That's also happening via our print magazine. You know, it comes to you just 6 times a year. So it's not this onslaught of information. It's 6 times a year. We've— it's almost like a subscription package, right? We've thought about, you know, sending you 5, 6, 12 articles that we have really thought deeply about that are written compellingly, that have amazing photography, and that tell you something deeper about the world that you're living in. All of that content is also on our website. We don't have a paywall. We want to make sure that it's available for everybody for free. And people who choose to support the work do that. And we are, you know, that means the world. That's the lifeblood of our journalism. But that's what we try to do is bring you in-depth and investigative reporting that is missing from the news landscape that you see elsewhere and that is not assaulting you 24/7.

Tony Martignetti
Well, thank you for your work, Monika.

Monika Bauerlein
Thank you so much.

Tony Martignetti
Monika Bauerlein, Monika with a K. You'll find her on Bluesky at Monika B. And you'll find Mother Jones at motherjones.com and Reveal at revealnews.org. And again, the podcast, the newer, the newest podcast is More to the Story. Thanks very much for sharing all this, Monika. Thanks for your work.

Monika Bauerlein
Thanks so much for your work, Tony. What an incredible news source for the nonprofit community.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you.

Kate Martignetti
Next week, Amy Sample Ward and Gene Takagi together to share what they're hearing about cybersecurity, AI, the state of the sector, and more. If you missed any part of this week's show,

Tony Martignetti
I beseech you, find it at tonymartignetti.com.

Kate Martignetti
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I'm your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show's social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for Nonprofit Radio, Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%. Go out and be great.