Seattle LONC "Crosscut" goes nonprofit

Crosscut, the Seattle-based local online news community (LONC), has moved from for-profit to nonprofit. Announcing the news on their website, publisher David Brewster said that after years of trying to build a for-profit model, they now believed the best model for the future would be nonprofit:

"...I began to suspect that an advertising-only model for revenue was not going to support high-quality journalism. The migration of advertising to the Web had slowed and the rates were staying low. The board weighed further investment against other models, notably the public-broadcast, member-supported model." 

Helping to finance this move will be grants from the Seattle Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with $50,000 from individual donors.