In the new era of digital media, everyone's a publisher -- celebrities, nobodies, spy agencies, house plants and, especially, brands. Building "the plumbing" for brands that want to be part of this new era, and a market for writers who need to make a living in it, was the goal Contently started with in 2010.
But while brands may be on a level playing field with The New York Times and CNN now, and while the content they produce may take up more and more of audiences' attention henceforth, they'll never be a true substitute for traditional media outlets. (Neither will the CIA or a plant, for that matter.) That's because they'll never produce the kind of content that's costly to produce and yields no tangible benefit beyond advancing the public good.
To help prevent that part of the content ecosystem from atrophying, Contently is launching a new nonprofit foundation dedicated to investigative journalism. The Contently Foundation -- contently.org -- is "our way of planting trees as a company," says cofounder Shane Snow (a member of the FORBES 30 Under 30 in Media). "We've always considered ourselves a tech company that cares about the future of media."
Contently.org launches with a single full-time editor, Brad Hamilton, who started a social justice site called NotJustUs after taking a buyout from the New York Post, where he was investigations editor, earlier this year. Contently is seeding it with "a pretty hefty donation" and will maintain it with monthly five-figure contributions, paid for out of the venture-funded company's profits, says Snow. The overhead will be extremely low, with
No one's savvier about the power of content marketing than a content-marketing company, and Snow readily acknowledges that being seen as a patron of public-interest journalism could benefit the core business in multiple ways. "At the end of the day, the board of directors sees this as a way to differentiate ourselves," he says. "You look at companies like Warby Parker and Tom's, they have a great time with hiring, retention, business success in general by caring about something."
Ideally, he says, Contently will get such a brand glow for its efforts, its competitors will feel they can't afford not to do likewise: "What we really want to do is pressure other companies making money from content marketing to support the kind of journalism we don't want to go away." That includes journalism about crime, corruption and the environment.
But insofar as it might include investigations into the business of news or content itself, someone else will have to see to that, he says. "We'll stay away from our own industry. Whether or not there's an editorial wall, we don't want even a perceived conflict of interest."
