It’s time for local news funders to pick winners, scale up, and force mergers, a new report argues
Last summer, Press Forward made almost $23 million in grants to 22 organizations aimed at bolstering the infrastructure for local news. The grants were the culmination of a request for proposals process that began accepting applications in November 2024, and elicited 559 proposals.
Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, with support from Arnold Ventures (disclosure: an occasional consulting client of mine), was given the opportunity to review in depth all of those proposals, and has prepared a provocative and thoughtful report, entitled “Rebuilding local journalism at scale: A field-level analysis of infrastructure needs,” which is beginning to circulate in the industry, and will be published next week by Media Impact Funders. (I’ll add a link here, and revise the wording of the previous sentence when that happens.) She generously agreed to talk with me ahead of the report’s formal publication.
Hansen Shapiro was the cofounder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News (for which I also did some consulting) from 2020 until February of last year. She has had research postings at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and sociology from Harvard Business School. Our conversation, which took place earlier this week, has been edited for length and clarity.
I know for a lot of the small newsrooms that I’ve worked with, what I have heard is that it’s a real mixed bag in terms of the value that they receive from some intermediaries. There needs to be some sort of intelligent mapping and then to make some difficult choices about where there’s redundancy and where there’s services that might sound good on a program report, or in a funder pitch, but in terms of actual value delivered, don’t actually live up to that promise.
Listen more to audiences, less to funders
I think there’s two ways to handle it. One is on the philanthropy side — and I think this is starting to happen — to be asking about audience, responsiveness, and not just impact; things like how many people you’re actually reaching, how many people you’re engaging.
And then I think on the newsroom side, leaders need to have sophisticated strategies that distinguish between what’s our content strategy that helps us make the philanthropic case, and what is our content strategy that helps us really build audience and be certain that we’re providing a valuable service to the community.
There is one very big asterisk: the rise of artificial intelligence is both a strategic enabler for lots of these solutions, but also will be a disrupter in all kinds of ways that we don’t really understand yet.
Richard Tofel was founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica, and was its president from 2013 until September 2021. This post originally appeared on Second Rough Draft, his newsletter about journalism — subscribe here.