As with most movements, nonprofits have their detractors. A few days after the Bay Area News Project was announced, the San Francisco Chronicle's Metro editor Audrey Cooper told her staff they'd "smash whomever is naive enough to poke their noses in our market," according to an email leaked to the website SF Appeal. Evan Smith tells of one unnamed editor of a major Texas paper who said of the nascent news organization, "We're gonna crush the Texas Tribune."

Slate's press critic, Jack Shafer, offered a tough-minded critique of nonprofits in late September, writing, "In the current arrangement, we're substituting one flawed business model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately. No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions." (John Thornton of the Texas Tribune responded the next day on the Huffington Post.)

"To some degree it's wishful thinking on their part that we'd just go away," Smith says of traditional news organizations' attacks. "They just refuse to acknowledge that we're doing something potentially worthwhile. We see ourselves not as the disease, but a cure."

One thing that may be upsetting traditional news organizations is the whiff of revolution in the language of the nonprofits, an echo of the old chestnut that "the workers control the means of production" implied by much of the rhetoric surrounding nonprofit sites.

Voice of OC's Santana says part of his and his colleagues' interest in nonprofits comes from "the reporter looking around and saying, 'Remind me again what this centralized corporation is doing for me?'"

"The nonprofits are kind of saying, 'Hey guys, we waited for you.'"

Criticism of each other's models notwithstanding, most nonprofits are willing to partner with their corporate comrades. Many of the newer organizations are following the model set forth by ProPublica which has worked closely with for-profit news organizations like the New York Times on producing stories like this summer's lengthy (not to mention costly) New York Times Magazine report on what happened at one New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. The story ran in the Times and on ProPublica's website simultaneously.

"There's literally not a major publication or other publisher in the country that does the kind of work we do that hasn't expressed enthusiasm for publishing it," ProPublica's general manager Richard Tofel said. (When a reporter referred to the 16-month-old site as "an elder statesman in the field on nonprofit reporting," Tofel didn't miss a beat: "Elder statesman at not even two—yikes!")

Despite the change in business model and the heavy emphasis on online distribution, the nonprofits are in many ways a throwback to an older (somewhat overly mythologized) time in newspapers when reporters were aggressive, entrepreneurial, and animated by a sense of public service. Voice of Orange County's newsroom may be in a building full of artists' lofts, but to hear Santana describe it, it might as well be full of old-time reporters in fedoras with press cards tucked in the bands. "It's a return to the energy of the old-fashioned newspapers," he says, pointing towards what he describes as "the aggressiveness and the working-class perspective."

After years of working in the relative comfort (at least until this most recent downturn) of corporate-owned media, does Santana have any fears about starting his own newsroom—especially one entirely reliant on donations and grants to stay afloat?

"The only fear I had was to do nothing," he said.