The Knight Foundation hopes to bring life back to locally based journalism with a $300 million commitment to ensure that people who live in “news deserts” have a trusted source of information on their region.
The grants, which will be made over five years, are an attempt to build muscle in local newsrooms that have atrophied after years of staff cutbacks. Despite the increased access people have to information on their computers and mobile devices, the general public lacks a solid understanding of local issues, says Alberto Ibarguen, Knight’s president.
“We all love to talk about how we have more information in our pockets than the Library of Alexandria” in ancient Egypt, he says. “But the fact of the matter is, local news is simply not available. It’s easier to find out about politics in Washington than what happened in my city council.”
In recent years, philanthropy has stepped up its support of the study of journalism. Much of that work has been focused on studying the role of a free press in a healthy democracy, Ibarguen says, citing programs at foundations including the Ford, Hewlett, and Open Society foundations. He stressed that Knight’s support is focused squarely on the practice of digital journalism, rather than theoretical studies.
“That’s not everybody’s cup of tea,” he says.
Declining Readership
Newspaper circulation has plummeted since the 1980s, and the number of working reporters in the United States has been cut in half over the past decade, according to a Knight-funded report released earlier this month.
The decimation of American newsrooms has been accompanied by a decline in trust in the news media and other institutions, the report found, citing an analysis of Gallup data by Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zuckerman found that only the military, small businesses, and the police engender trust from more than half of the American public. Less than a quarter of Americans trust the news media, and about one in 10 trust Congress, according to Zuckerman’s findings.
Growing Support for Media
The Knight commitment is part of a growing interest in philanthropic support for journalism. From 2010 to 2015, foundations made $1.8 billion in journalism-related grants, according to figures compiled in a report by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. In the past year, donors have continued to pour money into news efforts. Perhaps most notably, Craig’s List founder Craig Newmark has made more than $55 million in gifts to journalism education and training programs in the past year.
The Shorenstein report found that foundations threw the bulk of their support behind research, college journalism programs, technology development, and legal support. Only about 20 percent of the grants went directly to digital news nonprofits, and only a quarter of that went to organizations operating at the local or state level.
Ibarguen is not interested in joining the “national shouting match” about how the press treats national political figures.
“There’s a major crisis of trust in institutions in the United States,” he says. “Part of that is a crisis in trust in the news. It’s not simply the accusations that politicians may hurl against the press. It’s the demise of the institutions themselves that used to produce a really extraordinary amount of consistently reliable daily news in virtually every community in America.”
Role of Technology
One of the approaches supported by Knight sees a role for technology to help cash-strapped local newsrooms.
“The budget cuts in the news industry have really stopped local news organizations from covering their communities deeply like they used to with shoe leather on the ground,” says Deb Roy, co-founder of Cortico, a nonprofit technology startup. “Often the most polarizing voices carry the furthest and get more airtime.”
That’s what Roy found as Twitter’s chief media scientist for four years. While some loudly bloviate online, the concerns of a larger number of people get drowned out and isolated. His time at Twitter and his research on how people interact on social media and talk radio as director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Social Machines convinced Roy that technology can help reconnect people to the world around them.
At Cortico, Roy and his team have developed a tool they call a “digital hearth” where members of a community are invited to participate in structured conversations moderated by trained facilitators.
The talks are recorded by the device, which compiles them and uses a “machine learning” tool to sort them by geography, theme, and demographics of a speaker. Reporters can use the aggregated data as a “listening channel” to search for viewpoints they may have not considered.
Finding Solutions
The Solutions Journalism Network is also helping reporters find stories they have missed, particularly from potential readers or viewers that have been marginalized because of their race, sexual orientation, or disability.
Through intensive training on source-building and by collaborating with other organizations, such as libraries and academic centers, the network hopes that news outlets can provide their customers with ways they can weigh in on, and potentially help fix, vexing problems such as lack of access to health care or decaying roads and bridges.
“Nobody is voiceless,” says Liza Gross, the network’s vice president for newsroom practice change. “Everybody has a voice, it’s just that up until this point journalists didn’t hear it. The conversation is there. The dialogue is there.”
Over the past four years, Gross, who ran newsrooms at the Miami Herald and Puerto Rico’s Nuevo Dia, has taken teams of consultants from the network to 140 newsrooms across the country.
One of them was the Richland Source, an online publication in Mansfield, Ohio. Through a Solutions Journalism Network grant, the Source initiated a yearlong series called “Rising From Rust” to thoroughly cover efforts to transition from its industrial past to a vital job market in the future.
It’s not easy for a town to make such a change, acknowledged Larry Phillips, the Source’s managing editor at the outset of the series.
“But there are approaches being tried, some in their infancy stages, that have dynamic potential,” he wrote. “We want to explore some of these notions with impact and raise the level of conversation and ingenuity already in place here.”
The articles caught the notice of local readers and institutions, who felt good journalism was worth paying for. Local community members chipped in $70,000 to help keep the Source in business.
The reason, the Solutions Journalism Network’s Gross says, is that readers thought they couldn’t do without the Source.
There’s no magic formula for monetizing news content and help local papers and broadcast stations regain financial stability, she says. But if residents feel that a newsroom is producing stories that help them become more informed about an issue, and ultimately spurs them to take part in public debate, then readers and viewers — and local philanthropists — are more likely to see the organization as indispensable — and worth a subscription or donation.
“Everybody goes to their supermarket to get their milk or their meat,” she says. “That is how we want the community to feel about their news organization.”
Seeking More Support
Knight’s Ibarguen hopes the foundation’s large commitment galvanizes other donors to give to the nonprofits already vetted by the Miami grant maker.
“This is not something that’s sustainable by one foundation,” he says.
The full list of Knight’s grants announced so far includes money for organizations to enhance journalism training, develop technology, conduct research, raise money, and improve local coverage:
- American Journalism Project ($20 million) to make grants to local nonprofit news organizations
- ProPublica ($5 million) to establish partnerships between ProPublica and local investigative news outlets.
- Report for America ($5 million) to provide on-the-job training for young journalists.
- Frontline ($3 million) to establish “hubs” around the country that will help develop ties with local journalism organizations and produce documentaries with local content.
- NewsMatch ($1.5 million) to support a fundraising campaign for local newsrooms created by Knight and supported by other grant makers, including the Democracy Fund and the MacArthur Foundation.
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press ($10 million) to triple the number of lawyers nationwide who provide pro bono legal support for news organizations.
- Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund ($10 million) to help local news organizations overhaul their digital products.
- News Literacy Project ($5 million) to help build a community of news-literacy educators, including an expansion of NewsLitCamps, a program that invites journalists to meet with librarians, teachers, and students.
- Solutions Journalism Network ($5 million) to train more newsrooms in methods to connect with the communities they cover and encourage greater levels of civic engagement.
- Cortico ($2 million) to develop a machine learning system journalists can use to aggregate and investigate themes that come to the surface during community dialogues.
- Research ($35 million). The foundation will make grants to research centers to investigate how society can remain informed in the digital age.
