NY Times editor, Bill Keller, leaves for non-profit media org

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/business/media/bill-keller-former-editor-of-the-times-is-leaving-for-news-nonprofit.html

Bill Keller, a columnist at The New York Times and its former executive editor, will leave the paper to become editor in chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism start-up focused on the American criminal justice system.

The website, scheduled to start in the second quarter of this year, plans to raise money from foundations and individual donors and is modeled on other nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica. Its budget is projected to be about $5 million a year, which would pay for a staff of about 30.

Mr. Keller said the site would include “strong original journalism” as well as an “aggregation of interesting research and interesting voices, including voices from inside prison.” It is intended to be, he said, “a bit of a wake-up call to a public that has gotten a little numbed to the scandal that our criminal justice system is.”

The Marshall Project is the latest journalistic venture aiming to produce journalism outside the bounds of traditional news organizations. But Mr. Keller said he did not see his move as similar to those of Nate Silver, the statistician and writer who left The Times to join ESPN, or Ezra Klein, the former Washington Post journalist who is starting a site at Vox Media.

Instead, Mr. Keller said, he sees himself as more closely aligned with Paul E. Steiger, who left the top editor’s post at The Wall Street Journal in 2008 to join ProPublica as its founding editor in chief.

#media - #activism - #startup