Eighteen months ago, the Texas-based venture capitalist John Thornton approached Evan Smith of Texas Monthly with an idea for a news organization dedicated to their home state that would combine a largely philanthropic business model with public-interest journalism. Smith, who'd helped his magazine win a number of National Magazine Awards (including two for General Excellence), had known Thornton, a general partner at Austin Ventures, for decades, ever since both men moved to Texas around the same time. The big-time magazine editor listened to his friend's pitch—that journalism is a public good, like clean water and clean air, and should therefore be protected from the whims of the marketplace—and thought, How quaint. How charming. How wonderfully idealistic.

Smith offered some advice to his pal, and after a few months of helping him search for someone to put this venture together, he left his professional home of 16 years and became the CEO and editor in chief of the Texas Tribune, that quaint, charming, wonderfully idealistic project. With a combination of grants from organizations like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and donations from average citizens (and some not-so-average one like T. Boone Pickens), the Texas Tribune will launch in November.

"When we started off on this thing, we were out on the edge of the plank," Smith told Portfolio.com. "And now the plank has become the lifeboat. What you're going to see now is a lot of momentum behind this. You're going to see a lot of people jumping in this space," he said of nonprofit journalism.

"The more the better, honestly."

Smith's not kidding. Two weeks ago, another nonprofit news group calling itself the Bay Area News Project announced its formation. Funded with $5 million in seed money from private equity investor F. Warren Hellman, the News Project will combine the editorial talents of San Francisco's KQED-FM radio station and Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and intends to be up and running in early 2010. (In the meantime, they need to come up with a proper name.) A week before that, another group calling itself Voice of Orange County officially presented itself to the world with Norberto Santana Jr., a longtime investigative reporter for The Orange County Register, as its co-founder, editor, and lead reporter.

Santana, who'd left the Register this past June after five years, said Voice of OC was "born from a community-wide frustration with the L.A. Times and OC Register being in financial doldrums for over a year." Voice of OC, which will publish in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, will launch by the end of the year.

"The key to this kind of nonprofit is to have a mission that's understood by the community," Santana told Portfolio.com. "Every morning I wake up, I make another new connection. I've got people coming out of the woodwork to try to help."

One of those people is Andrew Donohue, the editor of Voice of San Diego, a five-year-old nonprofit site. (Donohue offered some guidance to Santana, but the two organizations are unrelated despite similar names.) When Voice of San Diego was started in 2004 by retired venture capitalist Buzz Woolley and Neil Morgan, a local newspaper legend who'd been fired from the San Diego Union-Tribune (the San Diego Union won a Pulitzer under his stewardship in 1987), the idea of a nonprofit news organization (much less one that would publish almost entirely online) "was a really foreign idea," Donohue said.

"I can't stress enough how silly an idea people thought this was when we started," he continued. "This is a movement now."