The Power of Youth
I read a great quote the other day.
“If you don’t have dreams, you have nightmares. My view is in this business, we need more dreamers. We need more people who see the potential for this. If we say this is hard, we can’t do it, the nonprofit news sector will never go anywhere.”
Evan Smith said that. Smith was the founding CEO of The Texas Tribune from 2009–22 and now is a senior adviser at Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective and a professor of practice at The LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He said those words during a candid conversation with Richard Tofel, the former founding general manager and president of ProPublica.
Smith was talking about earned income in nonprofit news through editorial events, business sponsorships, and advertising. But his message could be a call to action for education, government, or any industry that is risk averse.
“I think risk aversion is the thing that’s killing our business right now, as much as or more than anything. Because the cost of failure is so high. If you try something that is not almost certain to succeed, you’re supposedly making a mistake. I believed coming in the door, before day one, that an editorial events strategy was the right thing for the Tribune, that it would generate revenue, it would build audience, and it was journalism.”
