Donohue and Lewis spent 2009 trying to answer that question. With the division of labor they had established—Donohue leading the editorial piece, Lewis directing the business and technology side—VOSD was building a sturdy reputation on a fairly solid financial foundation. The site’s influence extended far beyond its relatively modest audience of about 100,000 unique visitors a month—one Voice investigation had, for example, brought to light conflicts of interest in a city redevelopment agency, leading to one firing and one high-level resignation. Partnerships with the local NBC affiliate and two local radio stations—on which Voice reporters appeared frequently to discuss their stories—brought them even greater exposure, but no additional revenue.

To their regret, however, Lewis and Donohue themselves were increasingly distant from the accountability reporting that had made them so passionate about Voice in the first place. Lewis continued to write a political blog—“Scott Lewis on Politics,” nicknamed SLOP. But he rarely had time to squeeze in writing during the day and sometimes wrote his column at four in the morning the day it was due. As editor, Donohue says, “I’m involved in journalism, but I don’t write anymore either. That’s just a sacrifice we both had to make.” The two were still adjusting to their unaccustomed leadership roles, but the news site—and with it, their livelihoods and those of nearly a dozen other staffers—depended on their ability to perform those roles well.

Meanwhile Gustafson continued to stitch together community initiatives to draw in members. In January 2009, Lewis and Gustafson came up with a novel way to use some of the site’s marketing budget: they hosted an essay contest for a $2,500 scholarship. [1] Gustafson remarks:

We could have just bought an ad in San Diego Magazine for $2,500 and hope someone saw it and went to the website. But in [having a contest] you guarantee that you’ve got people at least interested enough to actually go to your website and see what you’re all about. And then you’ve got people saying nice, this is fantastic to be able to give a student scholarship.

Voice ’s second open house in June 2009 was free for members and $20 for non-members, and over 20 new members joined. That, and continuing quarterly email funding drives, meant Voice was on track to hit 1,000 contributing members by mid-2009—a modest number by the standards of public radio and public broadcasting, but a milestone for Voice .

At the same time, the staff had grown to eight staff writers and a handful of freelancers, focused on water, housing, science, and environmental issues. Their stories had brought to light misleading crime statistics, excessive water use by a reputedly environmentalist local politician, and the devastating poverty of migrant camps along the Mexican border, among other things. Voice had won awards from such national organizations as Sigma Delta Chi and Investigative Reporters and Editors. It had been featured in a front-page story in the New York Times , which described the site as a potential model for the future of news. Other organizations were experimenting with the nonprofit website model themselves—such sites had sprung up in St. Louis, New Haven, and Minnesota. Lewis and Donohue frequently advised the new start-ups.

In 2009, Voice ’s revenue stream continued to be 40/30/30 from foundations, major individual donors and small donors. On the expense side, Voice had upended the business model of the typical newspaper. Where newspapers typically spent up to 70 percent of their budget on distribution, Voice spent 70 percent of its budget on reporting—with about 14 percent devoted to marketing and 16 percent to administrative expenses. “Almost every single dollar that we’ve had has been invested in reporting,” says Lewis.

But was Voice , with its relatively small audience and small donor base, really a success? What did success mean in the absence of profits? In the for-profit world of ad-supported content, site traffic had a direct effect on how much a site could charge for ads, and hence on profits. In the nonprofit world of Voice , foundations cared as much about intangibles like “influence” as they did about measurable traffic statistics. Judging by the national attention it had received and the policy changes its reporting had effected, Voice arguably exercised influence that far outweighed its traffic statistics; at around 80,000 unique monthly visitors in 2009, the numbers were modest compared to those of newspaper sites, including the Union-Tribune ’s, that often counted unique visitors in the millions. Was that the measure of success?

Finally, could charitable contributions, grants, and advertising really sustain a local news business the way they sustained museums, symphonies, and other cultural centers? Grants ran out, contributions were fickle, and advertising dollars typically were low. The tricky question was whether the public valued local news as highly as it valued art, music, and education. Lewis says:

Probably our single biggest concern and challenge going forward is that some of these [foundation] grants are only one, two or three years. So what happens when they run out? The good thing is that we’re obviously attracting more interest from different people, different foundations... Everybody asks me, are you sustainable? I don’t know what that means. I don’t know any small business, for instance… who could say that within two years we’re going to be around no matter what. On the other hand, we still need to prove that in two years, if all these grants run out, that we have other sources of revenue... So that’s the kind of issue that we’re working through right now. What is the definition of sustainable? How big do we grow?