The last decade has witnessed a dramatic decline in the presence and influence of legacy news organizations. This has led to concerns about the future of our democracy. News nonprofits are emerging as one of the most promising ways to fill that gap.

Konieczna’s research, published this summer in a new book titled Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails, examines three very different news nonprofits. She uses their stories to chronicle the growth of the field, and to suggest what we should expect of journalism in the post-truth era.

The theoretical question at the heart of the book is where public service journalism will come from in the digital age; the core empirical question in the book asks what enables nonprofit newsrooms, so tiny, new and tenuous, to do something that their for-profit predecessors cannot.