Fremont-Smith
Paper Evaluates Role of Nonprofit Organizations in
Journalism
CAMBRIDGE,
MA. — A
review of current law strongly suggests that, under present
circumstances, a nonprofit newspaper could qualify for tax
exemption without the need for legislation by Congress or
new rulings by the IRS, according to an analysis
commissioned by the Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy.
The analysis was done by
Marion R.
Fremont-Smith, one of the nation's
foremost authorities on nonprofit law and author
of Governing Nonprofit
Organizations: Federal and State Law and
Regulation, which was published in 2004
by Harvard University Press. Ms. Fremont-Smith is a
senior research fellow at the Hauser Center for
Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government and a lecturer in law at Harvard Law
School.
At a time of great jeopardy
for newspapers, the option of converting them to
nonprofit status has become an issue of great moment.
Ms. Fremont-Smith argues in her paper that the law and
IRS rulings are already in place to allow such
conversions, and that current efforts at new legislation
are unnecessary.
Her detailed legal analysis
is called Can Nonprofits Save Journalism? Legal
Constraints and
Opportunities, and it examines the issue
of nonprofit status for newspapers in light of detailed
scrutiny of current law and the tax interpretations that
the IRS has established relative to existing
law.
"We believe that Marion
Fremont-Smith's analysis has opened the door to creation
of nonprofit newspapers, without having to wait on
Congress or the IRS to act," said Alex S. Jones,
director of the Shorenstein Center. "We feel her work is
not only authoritative, but revolutionary in its view,
and extremely timely."
Read the full paper on the Shorenstein
Center's website
Marion R. Fremont-Smith's full
biography
