First the good news: Philanthropy is starting to respond to the demise of local journalism with the urgency it deserves. In the past few years, major national efforts, such as the American Journalism Project, Report for America, and NewsMatch have generated well over $200 million in philanthropic giving to news organizations across the United States. NewsMatch’s annual gift-matching campaign, which kicked off November 1, raised a record $47 million in individual donations in 2020 alone.
Some local foundations are also stepping up, recognizing that the projects they support in areas such as health, hunger, the environment, and the economy need local journalism to succeed. New data from Media Impact Funders shows that community foundations made $1.1 billion in media grants since 2009, out of a total of $19.6 billion from all U.S. foundations.
Despite such progress, too many philanthropic organizations, especially at the local level, have yet to make the connection between their work and the necessity of maintaining vibrant journalism in their cities and towns. That needs to change. Since 2004, more than 1,300 communities in the United States have lost local newspapers. When we lose local news, communities struggle and democracy as a whole suffers: Voting rates decline, climate problems worsen, fewer people run for office, and government waste grows.
During the pandemic, local news has been a lifeline for information about testing, vaccines, and how to stay safe — but these local media outlets are rapidly disappearing.
Through our work at Democracy Fund’s Public Square program, which partners with foundations across the country to build more equitable and sustainable local news, we’ve seen how local foundation funding can transform local journalism. But we’ve also come to understand the obstacles that stand in the way of increased giving. These include limited knowledge about how to assess the health of the local media ecosystem; difficulties making the case for journalism funding to staff and boards; and uncertainty about where to direct funding.
We believe the following strategies, honed through our work with local foundations, can be adopted by any philanthropic organization interested in supporting efforts to keep journalism alive in their community but uncertain where to start.
Connect the dots between healthy communities and the health of local media. Journalism should be viewed as part of a larger strategy to support healthy and resilient communities. We’ve seen this clearly during the past 18 months as many local health-focused donors invested in media as a core strategy during the pandemic.
For example, the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, which provides health-related grants to underserved North Carolina communities, gave $495,000 to fund the creation of a newsroom called the Border Belt Reporting Center, which provides in-depth reporting in rural communities on issues such as health, education, and poverty. The foundation also granted $150,000 to the North Carolina Local News Lab to help media organizations in the state expand coverage of the pandemic and its disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx people.
In New York City, the Charles H. Revson Foundation supported an effort that resulted in the city delivering $9.9 million — more than 80 percent of the city’s ad budget — to community news organizations. This helped ensure that publications such as the Haitian Times and the South Asian Times, which were struggling with ad-revenue losses, could continue to deliver critical Covid-19 safety information to readers.
Making the connection between the local news environment and larger community challenges isn’t always easy. Many foundations are unaware of the problems facing their local news outlets until they notice that issues they care about aren’t getting covered. Even then, program officers often aren’t sure where to begin and how to have the most positive impact. Simple steps, such as donating to a local nonprofit newsroom, placing ads in a local newspaper, or funding stories in a foundation’s focus area are good first steps. For more ideas, we created a resource guide to help foundations assess the local news needs in their communities and better determine how journalism connects to their larger strategic goals.
Boost impact by building partnerships with other donors. Supporting local journalism is more effective if it isn’t done alone. In fact, collaboration between national and local foundations has proven critical to transforming local journalism in many areas of the country.
We’ve worked with leaders from more than 15 community and place-based foundations to set up pooled funds to support local news in Chicago, Colorado, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and New Jersey. The results have been transformative. This past spring, for instance, the Colorado Media Project, a pooled fund created by the Gates Family Foundation and the Rose Community Foundation — and supported by almost a dozen foundations, including the Democracy Fund — facilitated the rescue of a chain of 24 local community papers from a potential hedge-fund buyer.
Local foundations can also team up with national journalism funds to fill gaps in news coverage. The Wichita Community Foundation recently partnered with the American Journalism Project, which supports local newsrooms across the country, to launch the Wichita Beacon in Kansas, a nonprofit news organization focusing on public-service journalism.
One of the most effective collective journalism-funding efforts is the annual NewsMatch end-of-year matching-gift campaign, which so far this year has generated $3.8 million in matching funds from national and local foundations. Newsrooms in almost every state use those funds to attract millions of dollars in additional donations — a perfect example of national foundations using their resources to lower barriers for entry by local donors into the local news arena.
Foundation staff can point to successful models like these to make the case for increasing local journalism funding to their boards and donors — often the biggest barrier to finalizing that check for local news support. Having successful models to emulate, or just plug into, can help boards and donors feel more comfortable taking that first step.
Focus on equity. More funding for local media should not result in repeating past mistakes, especially those that perpetuated racial inequity in newsrooms and in the type of stories covered. Unfortunately, national data shows that such practices have continued unabated, with only a small percentage of journalism funding going toward increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism.
A group of media donors recently issued a call to action for achieving funding equity, including investing in journalism leadership from communities of color and moving support away from white-dominated newsroom cultures ill equipped to reflect diverse ideas and voices in their news coverage.
Strong models exist for such efforts, including the national Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which invests in news organizations led by and serving people of color across the country. Similarly, the Field Foundation’s Media and Storytelling Program funds dozens of independent media outlets in Chicago that focus on issues facing the city’s communities of color. Another local example, the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, uses advisory boards made up of a diverse group of community members to pick grant recipients.
Each offers exciting new models for local donors that could be copied in other communities. If the proportion of philanthropic dollars going to local news is small, the slice supporting more equitable local journalism is even smaller. That needs to change.
Funding news is new for many foundations. Aside from public radio, the nonprofit newsroom model has emerged as a major part of the American journalism landscape only in the last 15 years, and it has already grown to some 350 newsrooms nationwide. Philanthropy is still learning how to best support and invest in news, understand its role in communities, and protect its independence. But thanks to leaders in communities across the country, we have plenty of examples of what works. Let’s do more of it, together.