Thousands of newspapers across the country would instantly collapse if advertising completely disappeared, but for one small newsroom in San Francisco it’d just be one more story to tell in the next issue of the paper.

For the past three years, the San Francisco Public Press, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, has been distributing a newspaper throughout the Bay Area that is completely free of advertising. The paper sells for $1 at nearly 50 locations around San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, and the quarterly newspaper is also available through the mail for $4 an issue.

Michael Stoll, a seasoned reporter, editor and educator who wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Examiner before becoming a journalism instructor at San Jose State University and the University of San Francisco, created the Public Press after attending his first JTM gathering inAmherst, Massachusetts.

“The open-space format of the meetings creates a natural serendipity where you can meet people who are doing similar projects and taking similar approaches across the country or abroad,” said Stoll on his experiences attending three JTM gatherings in which the participants define the agenda using an organizational technique called Open Space Technology. “The San Francisco Public Press benefited from this environment by starting out with the architecture of openness we saw permeating Journalism That Matters. More than anything, the meetings, and the email conversations that followed, encouraged us to just get started and try new things.”

After hosting several brainstorming sessions with Bay Area journalists in 2008, the Public Press received its first grant from the San Francisco Foundation in March of 2009 and launched a website later that year with publishing partners that included both the New York Times and McSweeney’s Panorama, a unique edition of the literary journal David Eggers publishes quarterly. 

In December of 2009, the Public Press contributed the cover story for Panorama, the 33rd issue ofTimothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, which for the first-and-only time was published in the form of a newspaper. Clocking in at a massive 320 pages, the one-off newspaper-format was Eggers’ attempt to ask the question whether there’s still life in printed news. 

The nationally-renowned author received his answer when the paper immediately sold out across the Bay Area and a second printing was quickly ordered. Six months after helping Eggers publish Panorama, The San Francisco Public Press released the first issue of their own print publication in the Summer of 2010. 

Unlike Panorama, which relied on advertising to fortify the money generated selling the paper, the Public Press has been staunchly advertising-free since inception. During the early meetings I attended while the newspaper was only a loose concept, Stoll seemed open to any ideas about where to take the paper unless they included advertising. Instead of ad-revenue, the Public Press relies on individual donors and foundation funding along with the money generated by selling the newspaper, which is made available for free at some senior centers and other community spaces in San Francisco that serve lower income residents.

“I think that the nonprofit model is under-utilized in new business,” said Stoll. “Especially since the commercial news model has so disastrously gone off the rails with the collapse of the advertising business.” 

The Public Press just published it’s 11th issue last month. Each paper is divided into two sections. The front half of the paper includes in-depth coverage focusing on a particular public policy topic — the latest edition explores global warming and includes analysis of “California’s grand plan to curb climate change,” which was financed through the Fund for Investigative Journalism — and the back of the paper is comprised of follow-up coverage on topics previously tackled by the paper along with stories provided by its numerous nonprofit partners.

“There are many examples of corporations that have no compunction at all,” Stoll said when asked why the Public Press has chosen to only partner with nonprofit organizations. “Journalistically there are very many similar start-ups to ours that share our values and outlook, but we would rather support the community that grew up around the culture. … There’s a sense of camaraderie in the nonprofit sector.”

Lila Lahood works full-time as publisher alongside Stoll. The paper also employes a part-time news editor, a part-time membership manager and is hiring freelance writers on a regular basis. To support this growing infrastructure, the Public Press is now focused on developing its base of paid members. Right now it has over 200 supporters, but Stoll says he hopes to increase that number in the months ahead.

“The conversation in the nonprofit world — the buzz word — is membership and community support. And even though our program isn’t very big, we have some significant experience doing it and now we’re getting organized and realizing what an asset the community is,” said Stoll. “We’ve only had a concerted membership program for the last six months and that’s really been paying off.”

There is a lot of venture capital flowing into today’s startups, but it can be very challenging to convince people to invest in new journalism enterprises.

Matter is changing that with an incubator designed to help media startups succeed. Based in San Francisco, Matter announced its first call for participants late last year. The six companies that were chosen for the first session have since graduated, and Matter has opened its doors for a whole new class.

The program runs from the beginning of October until the end of February, and applications are due by July 28. At the end of the four months, the teams will demo their products in both San Francisco and New York.

Matter is inviting teams of two to four cofounders to submit a short proposal. Matter CEO Corey Ford, said at an info session last year that successful teams would be made up of hackers, hustlers, designers and storytellers. Hackers to write the code. Hustlers to promote it and sell the idea. Designers to revise the product until there is something viable, and, of course, storytellers.

Next week Matter will hold info sessions in Boston, New York, Washington DC and Chicago. They will also host sessions in San Francisco and Los Angeles in early July and there is a virtual session scheduled as well. The sessions are likely to fill up, so register today if you plan to attend.

One of the most important components in creating a successful proposal — and a successful company — is to have the right team. In order to help entrepreneurs who are interested in pitching Matter find their future cofounders, JTM has created this form to help you find the hacker, hustler, designer, or storyteller you’re looking for.

I will be using the information you submit to put potential team members in touch with each other, and I encourage you to tell other people about it so that there are enough hackers and hustlers to go around.

If you look around or talk to your journalist friends and colleagues there is no shortage of flawed business models and dying publications to steer away from. But it’s much harder to find out about what’s actually working in the news and information ecology.

Although failure can be a powerful lesson filled with invaluable insights, it’s a lot less painful to model success than it is to learn from your own mistakes and those of others. By highlighting successful — whether economic or otherwise — new forms of journalism, we’ll develop a catalog of new and underexposed innovations in our news and information ecosystem. It is our hope that this work will spawn future successful enterprises that deliver vital information to our communities and serve civil society.

In the spirit of modeling success, The Illuminations Project will showcase what’s working in journalism both on this blog as well as through our Twitter feed @jtmstream, we’ve also started using the hashtag#wwjtm (whats working — journalism that matters) and encourage you to also use it to highlight journalistic endeavors that seem to be working.

We’ll be posting here every week as part of a new column on what’s working in journalism, and if you or someone know is doing something that’s working, please feel free to drop me a note.

The seeds of the illuminations project are tied to the origins of Journalism That Matters itself.  JTM Co-founder Peggy Holman tells this story of what inspired her to seek out journalists as partners:

When a racially motivated shooting occurred in 1999 at a Jewish Community Center, such events were rare.  As a student of Appreciative Inquiry — a process of asking possibility-oriented questions that focus on what is working and what is possible to inspire collaborative and wise action, I thought, “The stories that we tell ourselves shape the way we see the world.  And that shapes our behavior.  Our cultural storytellers — journalists — are telling us stories that aren’t serving us well.  I wonder how an appreciative approach to journalism might help?”

Since the topic wasn’t central to the conversation among journalists at that time, Holman listened for any sign of it as a place from which to build.

When JTM convened its 2007 conference in Memphis, Geneva Overholser, former Washington Post Ombudsman, introduced herself by talking about finding stories of hope.  That theme continued to evolve throughout that gathering and beyond.  When JTM met in 2008 in Silicon Valley, the idea inspired the idea of a sixth “W” to add to the journalist’s traditional who, what, when, where, why and how: what’s possible now.  It also resulted in a blog post — Possibility Journalism: An Emerging Trend?

Fast forward to 2012.  When JTM became a 501(c)(3) in 2012, its newly formed board met to ask, “Now what?”. Among the outcomes of that meeting, a breakthrough occurred that focused us beyond the convenings for which we were best known.  We defined our value proposition as:

• Bringing together a wide array of people so that journalism engages communities and communities engage in journalism.
• Using breakthrough engagement that fosters collaboration, innovation, and confidence to address complex challenges.
• Making visible the emerging principles of journalism by, for and of the people by sharing stories of the evolving news and information ecosystem.

That third element — making visible the emerging principles of journalism — led directly to this project.