Press Forward awards $20 million to 205 small local newsrooms

Press Forward, the philanthropic coalition with a mission to inject at least $500 million into local news over five years, announced $20 million in grants to 205 small local newsrooms across the United States on Wednesday.

These grants, which mostly provide $100,000 in general operating support over two years, were reserved for some of the smallest newsrooms in the country; all have annual budgets under $1 million, and many have just a handful of reporters on staff. Some serve small towns; some specific neighborhoods or communities within cities; others operate at a county, regional or state level. Grantees from The Nome Nugget (“Alaska’s oldest newspaper” and the “trusted sole source of locally and regionally relevant news for more than 10,000 people living in a vast and isolated area of western rural Alaska”) to Washington, D.C.-based Ethiopique (“empowers, informs, and connects the Amharic-speaking community in the Washington, D.C. metro area”) are receiving a kind of support that some of the smallest newsrooms say can be game-changing.

The grantees are the first to receive funding from an open call by Press Forward, though funders have already invested more than $80 million in separate “aligned grantmaking,” director Dale Anglin told me. (Press Forward, first announced 13 months ago, now includes more than 60 funders, and counts 30 local chapters across the country. It is still on track to invest more than $100 million in the field by the end of 2024, Anglin added.)

When they announced the open call on closing local coverage gaps in April, the months-old Press Forward team, led by Anglin, expected to award $10 million to 100 newsrooms. They ended up doubling both the funds and number of grantees due to staggering interest, Anglin said, and the high quality of applications. In total, 931 local news outlets applied for funding.

The Press Forward grants provide unrestricted general operating support — a much sought-after category of funding that gives newsrooms flexibility to use funds as they see fit. The overwhelming majority of newsrooms will receive $100,000 over two years; eight small newsrooms are receiving $50,000, Press Forward spokesperson Marika Lynch said. Grantees told me they plan to use this funding for everything from salaries, to enhancing tech stacks and developing apps, to public records requests.

This open call limited eligibility to newsrooms with budgets under $1 million. Press Forward said it would prioritize news organizations “producing and delivering news and information to underserved audiences, such as communities of color, linguistically diverse communities, low-wealth rural communities, and others not adequately served, reached, or represented.”

Grantees are diverse in geography, business model, medium, language, and age.

• The 205 grantees represent every U.S. state (as well as Puerto Rico and Guam);
• 59% are for-profits while 40% are nonprofits;
• 40% are led by Black, Indigenous, or other leaders of color;
• a quarter serve rural communities;
• Eight are college newsrooms (a few more are youth-led, by my count). (Anglin described her enthusiasm for supporting student journalism to me in an interview this spring.)
• The grantees also include some local public radio stations, which advocated for inclusion.

That range represents the diversity in models needed for the future of sustainable local news, Anglin said. “No one of them is the only model that’s going to save us.”

Anglin and her team wanted this open call to be accessible to the smallest, most cash and time-strapped newsrooms. “We didn’t just want the usual suspects,” Anglin told me, “and I think we did a good job at that.” They sought to make the application process streamlined and manageable, provided free coaches to work with newsrooms on their applications, and publicized the rubric used to evaluate newsrooms (though some applicants said they were unaware the rubric was public; Press Forward addressed those complaints).

Anglin was concerned that the smallest news organizations, with annual budgets under $250,000, still might not have time to fill out the grant application — but those outlets were represented in the application pool and grantees, she said.

The rubric includes sections on addressing gaps in coverage, community-centered, collaboration, sustainability, and leadership. Anglin told me she thought because investigative journalism is sometimes more visible, and valued more highly, than bread-and-butter community reporting, it was especially important to acknowledge and reward community-centered reporting in this open call.

“We want the field — other outlets and foundations — to understand, in our mind, those two are equal,” she said. “You need both investigative and community building, and no one is better than the other.”

Before receiving this funding, Colbert’s Indy was a signatory of a different open letter to Press Forward. In February, some members of the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets (ANNO) signed a letter asking Press Forward to “consider giving $100,000 per actively-producing local nonprofit newsroom every year for the projected five-year lifespan of Press Forward” in general operating funding.

Colbert feels that $20 million, in the context of the $500 million Press Forward touts, is a drop in the bucket — especially when some aligned funders have given millions to single organizations that are not newsrooms (like Automattic, which received $5 million “to onboard and support hundreds of small and mid-sized news publishers” on Newspack.)

“We’re incredibly grateful to have been selected,” she emphasized, “but we’re also painfully aware that we could just as easily have been among the [700+] organizations that weren’t and need this funding just as badly as we do.”

Isaiah Buse is the owner and editor of Missouri’s Houston Herald, a nearly 150-year old legacy print publication serving Texas County, which has a population of about 24,000 (Houston, his hometown, has a population of 2,000). He purchased the publication last spring at age 20, fresh out of college.

Buse has been thinking about how to modernize the publication, and is considering using the funding to develop an app, but first plans to “go buy a pizza and…get 10 more community members in a room” to start a conversation about other ideas for how best to use the funding.

“It has to be spent well to have a return,” he said. “I don’t want to spend it on an app, and it turns out nobody wanted an app…I want to make sure I get it right with the chance I have here.”

The Independent Florida Alligator, the University of Florida’s independent student newspaper, was one of eight college publications to receive funding from Press Forward for this open call. The Alligator has applied for grants before, editor-in-chief Siena Duncan told me, but this was the first grant they’d applied for with a person on staff “specifically looking for grants,” she explained (that would be Caleb Wiegandt, the Alligator’s part-time philanthropy and development consultant).

Student newspapers are not immune from the financial pressures causing contractions in newsrooms across the country; the Alligator has “had to routinely cut down payment for stories, photos, and editing,” Duncan said, as well as consolidating positions across the newsroom. The grant will help alleviate some of the financial barriers to student journalism, she said — like paying for Ubers and Lyfts to reach assignments for students who don’t have cars, and providing cameras for photographers rather than expecting them to have their own.

Duncan told me the Alligator has the largest staff of any news publication in Gainesville today — and it balances coverage of student life with serving the surrounding community (Anglin told me Press Forward only selected college newspaper grantees that also served the community beyond their campus). The Alligator’s broader focus is evident in its coverage of both recent hurricanes.

Press Forward’s next open call will be announced after the election in November, Anglin said, and will focus on infrastructure — another of the four stated pillars of Press Forward. She expects the coalition to distribute “bigger, fewer grants” from that open call, and it will not have the same limit to budgets under $1 million.

As part of this application, all newsrooms had to create a profile in JustFund. That profile lives beyond this open call, and could connect applicants who didn’t receive this grant to other funding opportunities; it’s part of Press Forward’s plan to create a centralized database of vetted potential grantees that’s accessible to all other funders involved in the coalition, including community foundations rooted in the local chapters and other aligned funders.

“The promise of Press Forward is 1+1=3,” Anglin said.

Within this open call, Anglin told me that there were 100 to 200 newsrooms that were “close to making the cut.” She hopes the strategic thinking and work that organizations put into this application can be a “stepping stone” that makes applying to other grants, or approaching other funders, easier. To the majority of newsrooms that didn’t receive funding, she said, “I just don’t want people to feel like this is one and done.”