A large pile of cash is now sidling up to all the chatter. In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward.
Journalists and publishers on the local scene in markets across the country have worked nonstop to bring their neighbors important stories and experiment with ways of paying for the service. The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.
The even bigger imperative, however, is to elevate local news on the philanthropic food chain so that national and hometown funders prioritize this pivotal American institution. Failure on this front places more pressure on public policy solutions, and government activism mixes poorly with independent journalism.
There’s no shortage of need. According to 2022 research by Penny Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and a former executive at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, newspapers are closing at an average rate of more than two per week; since 2005, more than one-quarter of U.S. newspapers have vanished. Digital-only start-ups haven’t plugged the gap, leaving too many communities without pressing information about themselves. The contraction has led to the proliferation of “news deserts”; there are 200 counties, home to 70 million people, with no newspaper.
No surprise: It turns out that areas with thin and declining news coverage also have lower voter turnout, less robust political competition and declining civic engagement. Into the void have seeped misinformation and disinformation.
What’s more, local news stands as the industry’s front line against the erosion of public trust. News consumers, after all, needn’t venture far to judge the veracity of a report on a three-alarm blaze up on Main Street; nothing dispels “fake news” quite like a freshly charred facade.
Who’s to blame? The internet, mostly. Whereas deep-pocketed advertisers formerly relied on newspapers to reach their customers, they took to the audience-targeting capabilities of Facebook or Google. Web-based marketplaces also siphoned newspapers’ once-robust revenue from classified ads. Local news entrepreneurs these days attempt to get by with a mix of advertising (or “sponsorship,” in the case of nonprofit news organizations), subscriber revenue and grants from philanthropic institutions. “If you’re going to do a big mission, you’ve got to have multiple sources of revenue,” says Eric Barnes, CEO of the Daily Memphian.
It’s a scramble for the dollars to support city hall coverage, a crime beat reporter or a serviceable content management system. Even a $100 million yearly grant pool can do only so much. Divvying that money among existing digital-only state and local news sites (545, according to Ms. Abernathy’s 2022 paper) and newspapers (6,380) would leave a pittance for each one.
One of the goals for Press Forward, accordingly, is building out the infrastructure — “from legal support to membership programs” — relied upon by local news providers to deliver their product. Jim Brady, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, says it’s easier than ever for news entrepreneurs to launch a local site because they can plug into existing technologies hammered out by their predecessors — and there’s more development work still to fund on this front.
So where to go from here? Local philanthropic interests across the country could take a cue from the Press Forward partners and invest in the news organizations down the street. A step in that direction is underway in Springfield, Ill., where the Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln — a Press Forward partner — has established a permanent endowment fund for local news. “This is going to be a different way of looking at journalism,” says John Stremsterfer, the foundation’s chief executive, noting that many donors haven’t viewed it as a “basic philanthropic cause in America.”
That’s changing, however, because American democracy and American journalism both need help. Though funding journalism was formerly viewed as being outside the “democracy tent,” in Mr. Brady’s formulation, it’s now squarely inside, along with voting rights, civic education and other long-standing priorities of charitable organizations.
There it belongs, the better to watchdog local governments and businesses — and provide recaps of Friday night’s high school football games. Lighter fare mixes well with democracy, too.
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