On October 12, Gannett, America’s largest newspaper chain, sent a staffwide email announcing a mandatory week of unpaid leave, a pause on hiring, and a suspension of contributions to employee retirement accounts. The latest cost-cutting moves, which follow waves of layoffs and buyouts, are hardly unique to Gannett. The signs of peril for local news have become so frequent that they are barely, well, newsworthy.
But the demise of local news is by no means inevitable. In the last few years, a surprising good-news story has emerged that offers a hopeful antidote to the struggling local media industry — and, along with it, the nation’s faltering democracy. Powered by foundations and individual donors, promising examples of nonprofit news organizations across the country are showing how to turn the tide on what was widely viewed as a dying business.
Consider the story of Signal Cleveland, a major outlet launching this week. The newspaper will aim to fill gaps left by the shrinking newsroom of the once-mighty Plain Dealer — a publication Winston Churchill described as having “the best newspaper name of any in the world.” Signal Cleveland — named for the three-signal traffic light invented in the city — is backed by more than $6 million in philanthropy.
In addition to hiring some of Cleveland’s best-known journalists, the all-digital news site has trained hundreds of what it calls “documenters” — community members who will monitor local public meetings that would otherwise go uncovered. The organization intends to create a network of similar nonprofit newsrooms across Ohio.
Such innovative approaches to covering, financing, and distributing news distinguish many of the new generation of local news organizations from their predecessors. In a speech last spring at Stanford University on combating disinformation, former President Barack Obama hailed similar start-ups in Baltimore, Houston, and Chicago for “providing essential coverage of what’s happening locally and in statehouses.” These “new models,” he said, are “smart ways for communities to reinvigorate local news.”
Bipartisan Support
The recent surge in efforts to reimagine local news has drawn praise from both sides of the aisle. An essay published by the George W. Bush Institute discussed local newspapers’ critical role in strengthening democracy and celebrated the ingenuity of these new enterprises. It likened nonprofit-news upstarts to grassroots efforts during World War II to protect democracy, including millions of Americans cutting back on using rubber so enough would be available for military vehicles.
The number of nonprofit newsrooms across the United States has doubled since 2017 to 121, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News’s 2022 Index report. From my vantage point as CEO of the American Journalism Project, a fund that launches and expands nonprofit local-news organizations, including many of those mentioned here, this progress is encouraging.
Original Reporting
As in any field, some of these outlets will thrive, and some may not. But to a degree that is often missed by those outside the business, nonprofit local news has established itself as a viable model and has become the dominant source of original reporting in several parts of the country. The Texas Tribune, for example, which was founded in Austin in 2009, dedicates more journalists to the coverage of state politics than any newsroom in America. Beyond the statehouse, it has also led coverage of major news events, such as the Uvalde school shooting and last year’s failure of the electric grid during a historic freeze in Texas.
Similarly, coverage of a massive welfare corruption scandal and a drinking-water crisis in Mississippi has been led by an all-digital nonprofit called Mississippi Today, which was founded in 2016 by philanthropists and journalists in the city of Jackson. When the New York Times reported on the corruption scandal earlier this month, it noted that the welfare scheme had “seeped out over years now, largely because of the dogged reporting by Mississippi Today.”
In July, Mississippi Today announced plans to launch a sister organization in New Orleans, under the name Verite. And, in Vermont, VTDigger, yet another digital nonprofit, has grown into the state’s largest newsroom since launching in 2009. Writing recently in the New Yorker, Bill McKibben, noted that VTDigger has “won a steady stream of awards and, just as important, it has won an audience.”
At the core of this trend is a fundamental change in the way Americans pay for local news. In each of the cases above, the new nonprofits — much like public radio — attract individual donations from their audiences and corporate sponsorships. But philanthropy is an indispensable player in these efforts. Spurred largely by the goal of fortifying democracy, philanthropists have significantly increased their giving to develop larger, more ambitious local-news enterprises.
Most recently, a coalition of local and national donors committed $20 million in initial funding to launch a nonprofit news organization next year in Houston. In Maryland, the Baltimore Banner started publishing in June, drawing on a commitment of $50 million from its lead donor, the business executive and philanthropist Stewart Bainum. In Kansas, the Wichita Community Foundation made a more than $1 million donation, its largest discretionary investment ever, to help create the nonprofit Wichita Beacon, which started operations last year.
Shelly Prichard, CEO of the Wichita Community Foundation, came to believe that achieving the organization’s other goals was impossible without a shared basis of reliable facts. “We looked around us and realized, without local news, people didn’t have the information they needed to engage in Wichita,” said Prichard. “All of our other philanthropic priorities, from education to entrepreneurship to the arts, were reliant on strong local news.”
According to recent research by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, an average of two newspapers close each week in communities across the country. The consequences for democracy are well documented and dire: Communities without local news are more polarized, have lower rates of voter and civic participation, and suffer a higher incidence of government and corporate corruption.
The latest news of further cost-cutting at Gannett is a blunt reminder of the urgent risks posed by economic pressures on conventional news organizations. But the Gannett announcement is also an occasion to register an encouraging fact: Every day, philanthropists, community leaders, and journalists are seizing the initiative to address the local-news crisis.
This trend is accelerating but not guaranteed. America needs greater investment from wealthy individuals, foundations, and readers to foster a new generation of nonprofit news organizations that can strengthen democracy and become the beating heart of news coverage in communities nationwide.
