Non-profit D.C. news agency folding; impacts Gazette coverage

Updated, Wednesday, Sept. 14

Capitol News Connection, the Washington, D.C., non-profit news agency The Gazette has used for localized Eastern Iowa news from federal government, is folding by the end of September.

This is disappointing news for reasons beyond the business relationship, drilling moreso into the continually evolving state of journalism. Media leaders at all levels, at for profit and non profit entities, continue to seek ways to support the collection of news while methods that pay for that effort dwindle.

I received word of Capitol News Connection's move on Tuesday, Sept. 13, in an e-mail from Melinda Wittsock, the agency's CEO and founder. The news service lost its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provided a large bulk of Capitol News Connection's operating income, she reported. The move has been reported on the Capitol News Connection web site.

The Gazette was Capitol News Connection's first and, it appears, only newspaper customer. The news service had supplied public radio stations with news content but wanted to expand into newspapers and their web services. We wanted to be part of this experiment and signed up in spring 2010. We received several solid stories, particularly from reporter Ana Radelat; see the tags on this blog for some of them.

Our use of stories diminished this year after the organization revamped its pricing structure. Fewer stories were available for the cost we expected, given our first year contract, but what we arranged with Capitol News Connection worked for our needs. Wittsock and I spoke by phone on Wednesday, Sept. 14. The money is gone, including what we paid for services through April 1, 2012. "Our runway is exceedingly short," an apologetic Wittsock said in the phone conversation about the time left to pay bills.

Meantime, here is a link to one non-profit effort in Iowa that I've written about previously that promotes public affairs journalism,

the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism's Iowa Watch.