While traveling through my home state of Georgia this past year — from coastal Savannah to the Alabama border — I met the new faces of local journalism.
In the city of Warner Robins, there was Monica Pirela and her cameraman husband who create and post video reports on Facebook and Instagram for their news outlet, Notivision, and then syndicate them on Spanish-language radio.
In LaGrange, I spent time with April Ross, who started out using her phone to stream news reports on Facebook Live before she was given a chance to own a small cable TV station.
And in Savannah, I connected with Elizabeth Garza, whose Paz La Voz Savannah, a Facebook page serving Spanish speakers in the port city and nearby rural areas, has more than 16,000 followers.
These unconventional news entrepreneurs, all people of color, recognize that reliable information is essential to the communities they support in areas such as health, environmental protection, and electoral participation. Yet their scrappy, nontraditional news organizations have largely been overlooked by the national grant makers and community foundations that invest in local news.
That needs to change. This new generation of journalists is using social media to inform and engage residents of their communities, especially Black and Hispanic people who weren’t well served even when the newspaper industry was flourishing. They are the first line of defense against disinformation campaigns from social media and partisan operations that look like news sites but disproportionately target people of color with false information, most notably about voting.
Critically, these journalists possess an asset that money can’t buy — audience trust — and represent a huge opportunity for grant makers.
Most were motivated by similar challenges as they embarked on journalism careers. Ross, for example, couldn’t land an on-camera TV news position after graduating from historically Black Alabama State University. Instead, she decided to post news updates on Facebook. Two years ago, she covered the shooting of a sheriff’s deputy using Facebook Live. TV news crews from Atlanta tapped into her feed, tracking the story until they arrived hours later. That changed the course of her career.
The owner of a Christian TV station was also watching. He asked Ross to fill in as a reporter and anchor and later confided that he wanted to sell the station. With the help of a bank manager whose wife followed her on Facebook, Ross bought the station and is now uniting its predominantly white, evangelical audience with the mainly Black audience that followed her on social media. The station, now known as BeeTV, reaches 600,000 homes through the Spectrum cable network. It is cited by both Black and white residents as their go-to information source, unifying the demographically divided city around a common set of facts.
Outlets such as Ross’s build loyalty by providing reliable information that helps audiences understand the world around them. But most of these independent journalists are at the mercy of Facebook’s algorithms and opaque standards that can shut them down. Even rare success stories such as Ross need investment, business expertise, staffing, and a level playing field to achieve sustainability.
That’s why the organization I founded, the Pivot Fund, is supporting each of these news organizations and several others that have relied on more conventional models to build trust in their communities — but are still barely scraping by. Our method is to provide them with a combination of direct funding and individually tailored consulting to help them increase revenue, develop digital and reporting capacity, and expand audiences. The goal is to help them become permanent, self-sustaining news outlets.
Ross plans to use BeeTV’s share of the combined $2 million in first-round grants to hire an advertising sales manager and a sports reporter. Notivision in Warner Robins and Pasa La Voz Savannah will build out digital publishing systems so they are no longer dependent on Facebook. And in Columbus, Ga., the bilingual Courier-Eco Latino will launch a joint newsletter with and supply on-air news content to Davis Broadcasting, the state’s largest Black-owned radio network.
We use a simple method to determine whom to fund. We start by asking residents what sources of information they trust and which journalists they rely on to deliver that information. We then conduct site visits, where we vet the journalists’ work and examine their sources and the accuracy of their content.
Overlooking Bright Spots
This quiet revolution in local media is undoubtedly playing out nationwide, and more donors need to join us with their support.
Philanthropy has overlooked these bright spots of news and information because they don’t always resemble traditional news organizations and often serve communities that aren’t familiar to most grant makers. But these organizations are filling a vital role in journalism. If they are to survive and thrive, philanthropy is going to have to step up.
According to Media Impact Funders, nearly $800 million has flowed from philanthropy into journalism, news, and information in the United States since 2020, when George Floyd’s murder focused the country’s attention on the systemic inequities Black Americans have experienced for decades.
But most of those funds go to white-led organizations, even when they’re earmarked for publishers of color. For example, when the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a $3.2 million investment last year in Black-owned local media, the funds went through the white-led Local Media Association to administer licensing and integration of publishing technology, generally supplied by white-owned companies.
Philanthropists have long espoused support for diverse voices in news and media, but the money hasn’t followed. Leaving people of color out of philanthropic efforts and funding conversations will have a predictable result: rebuilding the same kinds of information systems that are already failing us and our democracy.
Without the help of larger traditional news organizations, upstart journalists are showing us a new way to get fact-based, carefully reported information to their communities. We should listen — and support them.