Indiana University School of Journalism

Beginning his journalism career at San Jose Mercury News reporting on school board meetings and government relations, Johnston knew little about the world of nonprofits. After all, he was only 19 years old when he started at the newspaper.

But he was eager to learn.

While at the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, Johnston—along with uncovering scandal as an investigative reporter—became the first reporter in America to develop nonprofits as a hard news beat.

During this time, he discovered many aspects of the nonprofit sector, including how nonprofits can represent communities in certain ways.

“News coverage of nonprofits is a good way to tell people about the quality of life in the community,” he said.

Despite the negative slant of most news coverage, it’s important not to be cynical about people who manage nonprofit organizations, Johnston said.

“Most who run them are very good guardians of the assets they have,” he said.

Johnston gets an insider view of nonprofit organizations from his wife, president and executive director of the Rochester Area Community Foundation in Western New York.

From observations of his wife’s dealings with reporters, he offered “real world” advice to students looking to work in the nonprofit sector one day. He said to take a proactive, confident approach with the media.

“Be straightforward with reporters and deal in facts,” he said. “Don’t think defensively; think proactively.”

He also advised these students to gather thoughts before commenting to the media, taking a few minutes to call the reporter back to deliver a thoughtful response.

He told future journalists to stay away from the “he said” journalism and to add in more analysis and context.

“The (‘he-said’) journalist has no idea what he’s writing about, even though he is accurately quoting,” he said.

This lack of in-depth analysis and context can be surprising to some, considering the vast amount of information available to reporters in general. But Johnston said this is precisely why there is less context with news reports; the Internet simply provides too much information for reporters to sort through.

Johnston emphasized the importance of weeding through large amounts of information to understand problems at hand. Eventually, he said, it will pay off.

“Serious investigative reporting is reading a lot and seeing what it’s all about,” he said. “You have to get people to talk to you.”

Johnston knows the importance of getting people to talk to him. While at the Los Angeles Times, he once had to write an investigative piece on a drive-by gang shooting. While hard to discover just who the killer was, he eventually found out—and had to confront him. His hard work paid off by seeing his story on the front page.

This was one of his main points of his talk, emphasizing how important it is to get people to open up and speak freely. Once you build an open relationship, he said, reporting will be much easier.

“Good reporting skills are like good dating skills—you try to get intimate with a stranger,” he said.

These good reporting skills are sometimes hard to use when dealing with a sector that is so complex like the nonprofit area, Johnston said. With stories about nonprofits labeled as “good” or “bad,” reporters tend to overlook the many intricacies of nonprofit organizations.

“There are outliers at both ends, but that’s not where the story is,” Johnston said.

When it comes down to it, Johnston said, good reporting—whether as an investigative or nonprofit journalist—will always provide contacts, in-depth stories, and relevant sources.

But he also talked about topics in the nonprofit reporting world, too, such as episodic volunteering and donating.

Class co-professor Leslie Lenkowsky talked about how giving increases during a disaster and then falls off when the topic ebbs out of the media. Another form of episodic giving is when giving rises during a certain part of the year, such as around Christmas and Thanksgiving, and falls off during other parts of the year.

Clolery said volunteerism isn’t embedded within the culture as it used to be. He attributed this to increases in women working, social media and a personality-driven society.

Attracting and retaining volunteers is another topic. Student Jennifer Pocock said she tried to volunteer for an organization once, around the holiday season, and was turned away. Clolery said the infrastructure for handling volunteers is not at its peak and that organizations are not making good use of the volunteers who are out there. He said volunteers should be sent to other organizations where they can be of use and organizations should network with each other to make this easy.

Clolery also talked about the numbers of nonprofits, numbers that are diluting the system and effectiveness of programs.

“Restrictions need to be put in place by the government that would limit the number of organizations that are allowed to be registered as tax-exempt charities,” he said. “The government is going to be in a situation where it will have to say we can’t afford any more tax-exempt organizations.”

Gronbjerg’s work through the Indiana Nonprofits Sector (INS) project at Indiana University showed that only 60 percent of nonprofits in Indiana are on the Internal Revenue Service list and only 10 percent of Indiana nonprofits are charitable filers.

Gronbjerg said her data is a good indicator of most states. States that have more nonprofits will likely have just as many, if not more, nonprofits that are unaccounted for. This means that the nonprofit sector could be worth close to $3 trillion or more in revenues.

“Nonprofits provide big dollars,” she said. “In 2005, nonprofits made up close to 10 percent of total employment in the U.S.”

In fact, nonprofits include hospitals, health facilities, higher education, human services, charities, arts and culture, environmental and animal organizations.

“The bulk of the dollars are in hospitals, public charities and foundations,” Gronbjerg said.