NBC Stations Seek Nonprofit News Partners in Nine Markets
More NBC-owned TV stations will seek local news sharing partnerships with nonprofit online news organizations, under the company’s local news commitments it made when Comcast acquired control of NBCUniversal from GE. The partnerships will be modeled on KNSD-TV San Diego’s relationship with voiceofsandiego.org, NBC said. Monday, it published requests for proposals from nonprofit news organizations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Washington, and Hartford-New Haven, Conn., it said.
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The RFPs seek general information about potential partners, such as what is an applying nonprofit’s core mission, what its area of news coverage is and how it distributes content. They also ask about the organization’s leadership and bylaws, whether it has any governmental ties and how diverse its leadership and governance is. They seek financial statements from 2008-2010 and ask about the organization’s journalistic standards and whether it endorses political candidates. They also ask information about the potential partner’s audience and the extent to which it uses social media tools.
The San Diego partnership is a model worthy of expansion, but it’s too soon to tell whether any of the new ones will pan out, said Corriell Wright, policy counsel for Free Press, which has been a critic of Comcast’s NBCU takeover. “By all accounts it’s a pretty successful partnership,” Wright said in an interview. “The thing is it took Voice of San Diego about five years to get up and running, and the commitment Comcast has made and that was adopted as part of the merger order, is only for three years,” she said. There are local nonprofits that could benefit from such partnerships, Wright said. “Partnerships can be tricky things,” she said. “They need to be true collaborations and the partners need to consider each other’s resources and needs."
Responses to the RFPs are due July 22, and NBC said it hopes to identify successful candidates by the end of the summer. “This initiative is a key step in addressing the commitment we made to increasing localism,” NBCU Executive Vice President and General Counsel Rick Cotton said. NBCU’s regulatory affairs and standards and policy executives will select winning applications, along with senior counsel and NBC Local Media news directors, the company said. “As we roll out the search process, we'll focus on groups that apply the same high standards of credibility and professionalism that NBC brings to all its news coverage,” NBC Local Media President John Wallace said.