Thursday, October 02, 2003
Covering non-profits in the business pages: I happen to know Dan Cook, who recently resigned as editor of the Portland (Or.) Business Journal over the spiking of a story/interview his paper was about to publish about the local Planned Parenthood chapter. Read the article till the end, where it reprints an email interview conducted by the reporter with the head of the local PP chapter. The questions are pretty standard fare when it comes to doing business stories on non-profit health care companies -- expansion plans, new types of service, reaching out to male customers, federal funding, the political and financial fallouts from the bombings of other PP clinics, how the local chapter stacks up financially with PP's other units etc. ... Imagine if the Herald, Globe or the Portland paper's own sister-publication, the Boston Business Journal, decided not to cover the business dealings of Massachusetts' hopsitals, HMOs and health clinics -- the vast majority of them non-profits -- just because they were non-profits. ... Dan, a good man, got blindsided on this one. The publisher ought to get the boot, pronto.
