After Shaky Start, Philanthropy Coalition’s $500 Million Local News Effort Takes Shape

Can 100 small grants to news organizations across the United States help revive local journalism — and build valuable alliances and resource-sharing among the recipients? Press Forward, a massive effort led by the MacArthur and Knight foundations, hopes that the answer is yes.

Press Forward’s long-awaited announcement this week that it will offer 100 grants of $100,000 apiece, isn’t just an attempt to bolster small organizations that operate in news deserts across the United States. Press Forward also is betting that it can share insights across newsrooms and among funders to help revive a sector that has fallen on hard times.

For journalism leaders and regional grant makers, there’s been an undercurrent of frustration that Press Forward’s funding has been slow to materialize despite abundant talk about the big dollars flowing. Even this new grants initiative, totaling $10 million, represents just 2% of the $500 million Press Forward has amassed in funder commitments.

With news organizations nationwide facing massive cutbacks, even as a pivotal election year puts a premium on strong local coverage, one newsroom leader said the delays at Press Forward forced journalism outlets into a “Hunger Games” fight for a limited supply of foundation grants.

Critics of Press Forward have nicknamed the effort “Press Release,” for its ability to generate headlines rather than quickly disperse money to understaffed and financially strapped newsrooms. They fear that the splashy effort has chilled their broader fundraising, as potential donors sit on their cash waiting to see how they can piggyback onto Press Forward grants.

Meanwhile, community foundations and newsroom executives worry that national foundations will call the shots. Another concern is that future funding will be siphoned by intermediary journalism groups, rather than actual newsrooms, particularly those serving people of color and non-English speakers.

Still, Press Forward’s big vision — untested but intriguing — is that simultaneous support for many individual newsrooms and participation from foundations that had previously not supported journalism can create something bigger than the sum of its parts. Perhaps local journalistic leaders will learn from one another about what kinds of revenue models, reader participation, public services, and story mix can revive their business prospects and help regain public trust. Shared case studies, joint workshops and gatherings of regional funders are on the drawing board, too. Ideally, philanthropy will help “connect the dots” to build a stronger local media ecosystem.

To lead its efforts, Press Forward earlier this year picked Dale Anglin, a community foundation veteran, who started six months after Press Forward’s September public launch. While not a journalist herself, Anglin led journalism grant making as a vice president of the Cleveland Foundation, which invested in the Documenters Network and Marshall Project. Earlier, she worked at the Victoria Foundation, where she helped launch the educational news site Chalkbeat Newark.

Various foundations have made more than $50 million in journalism grants since Press Forward launched, something Press forward takes credit for. Press Forward also has more than doubled its list of participating grant makers, to 57. It has collected its goal of $500 million in commitments, a number it hopes to keep growing over the next four and a half years.

In its announcement Monday, Press Forward said local news outlets with an annual budget of less than $1 million will be able to apply for grants of $100,000 each beginning April 30. The grants are intended to throw a lifeline to small news outlets that operate in “news deserts” where there isn’t much local news, or to provide coverage for communities of color, non-English speakers, and other people who have not been adequately served by existing news organizations.

Half of the money will be awarded this year, with the rest contingent on a progress review next year, said Anglin, Press Forward’s director. She said the money could go toward a range of things, including hiring a new reporter, a fundraiser, or for training. Further grants to support other approaches, including public-policy changes designed to benefit journalism, are promised.

Press Forward

The goal, she said, is to help news outlets that have been “traumatized” by layoffs and revenue challenges, and give them time to plan how they can last into the future. The most important criteria for grant winners, she said, is that they have a plan to work with other news outlets or journalism organizations.

“We don’t want to dictate exactly what people do with the money,” she said. “We’re hoping that most, if not all, of these 100 newsrooms, will get into some collaboration. It’s really hard now to go it alone.”

Foundation leaders had been in discussions about creating Press Forward for two years before its introduction, with great fanfare, in September. But more than half a year into the effort, many newsroom leaders and their philanthropic supporters have expressed impatience with Press Forward’s progress. They complain they’ve been in the dark about how to apply to receive money.

While local news leaders say they’re glad to see the grant window has finally opened, the seven-month waiting period since Press Forward’s public launch has left its strains. That long interval generated a “deluge of frustration” among newsroom leaders and local foundation executives unable to learn anything about how the money would be distributed, said Jean Friedman-Rudovsky. She is executive director of Resolve Philly, a news outlet that emphasizes the “elevation of community voices” in Philadelphia.

Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey, found herself drafting a detailed application for a grant that hadn’t been offered yet. Every time a MacArthur or Knight foundation leader blogs about Press Forward or makes a speech about supporting local news, Murray says, she and other potential grantees parse every word for clues about how to land a grant.

“Everyone reads the tea leaves.”

A Three-Pronged Strategy

When Press Forward was publicly launched last September, John Palfrey, MacArthur’s president, said propping up local news was essential to creating an informed electorate and a stable democracy.

The idea was to provide direct support to newsrooms, while also funding cost-saving centralization of functions like legal advice or technology services. In addition, Press Forward set out to reach under-served audiences, while pushing for policy changes that could build the case that journalism — like libraries or clean water — is a public good deserving of taxpayer support.

The troubles of the American newspaper industry are well documented. Circulation has faltered; advertising revenue has slumped, and over the past decade, tens of thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. In 2023 alone, more than 2,500 journalism positions were eliminated by one count, and 130 newspapers were shuttered, according to the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. This year has seen layoffs at NBC, Time, the Wall Street Journal and others.

To help rethink how news and information-delivery can be financially sustained, Press Forward has developed three distinct efforts. These begin with its grants from a pooled fund, which includes the just-announced small newsroom program, as well as a second round of grants, to be announced as soon as late summer, which will concentrate on “local news transformation.”

Second, Press Forward will help create local fundraising hubs, which will rally foundations and donors to support journalism at the city and state level. Press Forward has put about $13 million toward these efforts. So far there are 17 such groups, in locations such as New Mexico, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Springfield, Ill., which are each eligible to apply for grants of up to $250,000.

Third, Press Forward will promote journalism as a philanthropic priority, nudging donors to give “aligned” funding that is independent of Press Forward’s pooled or local funds.

MacArthur’s Palfrey counseled patience. Because Press Forward is a group effort — it has grown from 22 to 57 funders in seven months — it is not always simple to get people on the same page.

“We understand and appreciate that news organizations have been anxiously awaiting dollars to flow into their coffers,” he said in a statement. “Activating donors to move from individual grant-making strategies to a shared vision and coordinated action takes time.”

Fast Journalism, Slow Philanthropy

While Press Forward earlier this year seemed to be stalled out of the gates, Palfrey notes that nearly $55 million in aligned grants has been committed to organizations since September. These include $500,000 to Rebuild Local News, a policy nonprofit, and $1 million to Catchlight, which provides video to local news outlets.

It is not clear, however, how much of that money was already set to be distributed by participating foundations and donors or whether the creation of Press Forward led to new grants.

“I understand that people are feeling literally traumatized” at depleted newsrooms, Press Forward’s Anglin said. “They’re feeling like everything should have happened yesterday. But philanthropy doesn’t often move very fast.” Critics of the tempo at which money is being deployed “don’t know philanthropy,” she added.

A big part of her job is to spread the word about the importance of local journalism. Philanthropy has put hundreds of millions of dollars toward journalism in recent years, including $300 million the Knight Foundation committed to local news in 2019.

What makes Press Forward different, Anglin says, is that it is the first coordinated attempt to share ideas about what approaches to journalism work, and to sell the idea that philanthropy must support the news. Anglin said a number of the effort’s donors at the national and local level had little or no experience giving to journalism.

“Philanthropy alone is not going to solve this problem,” she said. “What it’s going to do is galvanize a lot of people in spaces that don’t normally think about news and information. It shines a spotlight on it.”

What that means for local journalism supporters is that they need to start fundraising.

The Center for Cooperative Media’s Murray is part of a group of New Jersey foundation and news leaders who have worked for several years on a plan to boost support for journalism. When Press Forward was announced, she said, many in the group expected that they would be in line to receive a hefty grant.

The group received a designation as a Press Forward local in February and received a grant for $250,000 in mid-April. Press Forward provided logos and branding materials, held meetings to discuss strategy, and basically told the group to go out and raise money she said.

Now that the group has the Press Forward money Murray hopes that it lures bigger funders with “national firepower.” But she fears fundraising may have been made more difficult because until this week’s grant announcement, other foundations and donors were waiting for a signal from Press Foward about what it would support.

“No funder is going to say, ‘I am sitting on this money because of Press Forward,’” she said. But, she said, the lack of follow-through on grants after Press Forward was announced raised suspicions among potential grantees.

They’d say “I can’t get a meeting with my program officer or ‘I thought I’d be able to apply to this foundation and they’ve kind of shut me down,’” she said.

Others said Press Forward failed to check in with existing local funding efforts before it launched its local hubs, a failure that could result in missed opportunities to get the biggest results out of a local-national partnership.

Paulette Brown-Hinds, publisher of Black Voice News in Riverside, Calif., organized a November meeting of community foundation leaders at Stanford University following Press Forward’s announcement. At the meeting, she said, regional funders vented that there was not a single local Press Forward group on the West Coast and that Press Forward leaders hadn’t made an effort to investigate what foundations were already doing to support journalism in the state.

Courtesy of Paulette Brown-Hinds

Brown-Hinds, who serves on the boards of the Inland Empire Community Foundation and Irvine Foundation, said she is part of a group that applied to be a Press Forward local group within the past three weeks. She hopes the money will add to the efforts of the 11 community foundations in the state that already support journalism.

But the months following Press Forward’s roll-out was a “botched” effort, she said. Said Brown-Hinds: “There was really no engagement with community philanthropy.”

In response, Press Forward’s Anglin said she wouldn’t comment on how Press Forward reached out to potential local partners before her arrival. She said she is meeting with California funders in the next month, to help “manage pent-up expectations” related to the original announcement.

She also stressed that local funders will not be micromanaged by the national foundations leading Press Forward. Local donors should be ready to “join in” and contribute to a larger effort to raise money for journalism, and be willing to collaborate with others. Beyond that, Anglin said, Press Forward won’t tell regional philanthropies how to structure their efforts.

“Locals know best,” she said.

John Stremsterfer, president of the Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln in Springfield, Ill., got on the phone with MacArthur executives shortly after Press Forward was announced.

A donor to the fund had left an unrestricted bequest of nearly $1 million, and Stremsterfer was interested in whether MacArthur would match the grant as part of Press Forward. There wasn’t an official document creating Springfield as a local hub or a formal application, he said, Through a process of “feeling our way through it” the foundation received a matching grant from MacArthur of $1 million.

John Stremsterfer

Though Springfield, the state capital of Illinois, has a cluster of news organizations, much of the surrounding rural area served by the foundation has seen its local newsrooms shuttered or diminished, Stermsterfer said.

Stremsterfer is using the Press Forward money to pay the American Journalism Project to conduct a survey of local news needs, and to create an endowment to support future grants. The need to revitalize local news and the role journalism can play in a functioning democracy is critical in smaller communities with few news sources, Stremsterfer said.

Press Forward is helping to make journalism a more popular philanthropic cause, he said, and he’d like his foundation to attract money from national funders.

“We’re not a major metro area. We don’t have a lot of formal philanthropy that you’ll find in Chicago, Indianapolis or Cleveland.”

Public Policy to the Rescue?

Whether all the effort and money will make a difference is unclear. Anglin and others insist that the news business needs to be transformed, and that it will take years — and a variety of approaches — to find a solution.

For Jim Friedlich, chief executive of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, a nonprofit that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and is a donor to Press Foward, one key effort is to support public policy as well as local community giving. He points to New York, where state legislators this week provided $90 million in payroll tax credits to journalism outfits.

“The clearest path to creating billions of dollars of support for local news is public policy,” he said in an email. “The likelihood is that Press Forward creates a multiplier effect, generating new policy support and new commercial investment as well as new local and national philanthropic interest.”

In the meantime, newsrooms are struggling, and policy changes can take time. Sarabeth Berman, chief executive of the American Journalism Project, which invests in nonprofit news outlets, expects to receive money through Press Forward’s efforts. The money will be wasted, she said, if it goes only to support the day-to-day functioning of news outlets.

“We need to get money into the hands of organizations as quickly as possible.” she said. “But we also need to think holistically about how we are building a field that can thrive over the long term.”

Karen Rundlet, president of the Institute for Nonprofit News, agreed. Rundlet, who previously worked on Press Forward while at the Knight Foundation, said philanthropy can play a limited, but vital, role in that effort.

“I think other things will come during the five years besides just a philanthropic solution,” she said. " I think there are going to be other levers that get pulled and invented.”

Press Forward, she said, “is buying time.”