Lindsey Millar, editor of Arkansas Times, has founded a “nonpartisan news project dedicated to producing journalism that matters to Arkansans.”
Lindsey Millar has a message for furloughed or laid-off journalists: “Give me a call!”
Millar, the editor of the Arkansas Times, is reviving his semi-outside project, the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, with a coronavirus-age fervor. He expects more work than he can handle for a while at the public journalism startup, founded in 2016.
“It’s about doing good work that maybe other outlets can’t,” he told Arkansas Business last week. “But it also is helping journalists who do need some money in these rough times. They should get in touch.”
The network is an independent, nonpartisan project “dedicated to producing journalism that matters to Arkansans,” according to its mission statement. It partners with the Arkansas Times, local newspapers and other outlets to publish public service and investigative news, but has been largely silent over the past year.
Veteran Times and ANNN reporter Benjamin Hardy took a job at one of the nation’s prominent public journalism sites, ProPublica of New York. David Ramsey, another ANNN and Times stalwart, now lives in New Jersey and writes for a show on Quibi. That’s the new streaming app for watching content on your smartphone, mostly TV shows of fewer than 10 minutes.
“So ANNN was pretty moribund for a while,” Millar said. “The value when we started was seeing the benefits of investigative and public service reporting. And David and Benji were regular contributors and editors, with regular help. They both got busier and got bigger jobs or full-time jobs and were able to contribute less.
“That coincided with me getting more responsibilities at The Times and having less time for it. Benji had been the most reliable contributor. So we took time to step back and think about how to move forward.”
But once the pandemic started altering all aspects of life, Millar said, it “seemed like we had to get ANNN going again, no matter what.”
Public journalism isn’t easy to finance, but ANNN is in surprisingly good financial shape at a time when many outlets are slashing staffing and coverage.
“The kind of happy consequence of being dark for so long in 2019 is that we had a really successful fundraising effort at the end of 2018,” Millar said. “We participated in NewsMatch, which matches donations to nonprofit news organizations” with money from sponsors like the Knight Foundation, the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Community Foundation of Miami, and many others.
“And for some of our five grand or so in donations, we got triple matches from another funding source,” Millar said. “So we’re sitting on quite a bit of money, and it’s been easier to hire contributors now because freelancers we’ve long worked with have more flexibility now. Other work has slowed down or dried up.”
Ramsey “has got a little extra time to work, and Benji, though he has a full-time job with ProPublica, is doing yeoman’s work for us before work and at lunch and at night, doing a lot of the heavy lifting with editing. That’s something we’ve got to figure out soon, as we have more reporters than editing capacity.”
Alice Driver, an Ozarks-born reporter most recently based in Mexico City, offered a typically solid ANNN report last week, headlined “Arkansas poultry workers amid coronavirus: ‘We’re not essential, we’re expendable.’” That piece, the first of several notable projects in the pipeline, was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, another nonprofit.
Another report in the pipeline is a collaboration with The Nation, which engaged a reporter and is counting on ANNN to round out the fee. Millar wouldn’t disclose the topic of that reporting.
He said he eventually would like to hire an editor to manage ANNN, but that will have to wait.
Asked about the Arkansas Times’ resilience in the COVID crisis — it switched from weekly newspaper to monthly magazine format at the start of 2019 — Millar spoke generally, referring more specific financial questions to Publisher Alan Leveritt.
“We’re continuing on and we haven’t had to lay off anybody,” Millar said. “We continue to publish our flagship monthly, and we haven’t cut any of our special pubs.”
Revenue from events has, of course, taken a beating, Millar said.
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