A new report looks at 559 funding proposals to determine local journalism’s biggest problems

Journalism-funding-world spicy isn’t the same as, uh, regular-world spicy. But for the journalism-funding world, ProPublica founder Dick Tofel’s recent interview with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro about her new report, “Rebuilding local journalism at scale: A field-level analysis of infrastructure needs,” contained some . (Too many journalism nonprofits! Too many intermediaries! Nonprofit bloat! Funders don’t understand what audiences want! Innovation is over!!!) Among the things Hansen Shapiro told Tofel:

• “I don’t think all philanthropic institutions are optimized for picking winners, but to solve systemic problems, that’s what needs to happen. Because when you have so many competing solutions, such as on publishing infrastructure, it just ends up being a waste of philanthropic capital. One more thing on the picking winners: the flip side of that is being willing to let things die. One of the challenges of being in a predominantly nonprofit field is that there aren’t market mechanisms for things that are not working to stop.”
• “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.”
• “Audiences — citizens — have different tastes and orientations than philanthropic individuals and institutions, and it is really hard to serve two masters.”
• “I don’t think we’re in a stage, any longer, of innovation. It really is a challenge of what are the scaling solutions.”

Tofel says the interview was his most-viewed Substack ever and it spurred some discussion on LinkedIn. We republished the interview last week here and on Monday, Media Impact Funders published Hansen Shapiro’s actual report, which “draws on nearly 560 applications submitted to Press Forward’s nationwide infrastructure open call, offering one of the most comprehensive practitioner-defined datasets on the infrastructure needs of local journalism to date.”

Press Forward executive director Dale Anglin has a good sum-up of the report’s major takeaway:

The most significant threats to local journalism are not isolated newsroom-level problems. They are ecosystem-level infrastructure challenges. If we want local news to thrive for the long term, we must lower the marginal cost of producing reliable civic information through smarter, systemic investments. That means building shared infrastructure that benefits many newsrooms and addresses structural barriers; work no single funder can accomplish alone.

Hansen Shapiro’s report is significantly drier than her interview with Tofel. Names are not named, specific failures are not called out. But, read alongside Tofel’s interview, the report serves as a key document for understanding where local news funding should go from here. Here are a few bits I found especially important or interesting:

[The] effectiveness of infrastructure investments often depends less on the specific tool or service funded than on whether it meaningfully changes how burden and risk are shared across the ecosystem over time, rather than reassigning long-term maintenance and support costs back to individual organizations.

Applicants repeatedly surface the high marginal cost of producing local journalism in fragmented, under-resourced environments. These are conditions that recur across geographies and organizational types regardless of mission or editorial focus.

In many cases, the constraint is not the absence of skills, but the field’s limited ability to attract, compensate, and retain experienced business and leadership talent. Chronic undercapitalization suppresses pay scales, narrows career pathways, and produces a cycle in which organizations struggle to sustain capable leadership as strategic, financial, and operational demands increase.

Grant dependence can stabilize organizations without enabling resilience. Absent such infrastructure responses, philanthropic support can unintentionally stabilize a fragile equilibrium. Organizations remain alive but under-resourced, dependent on recurring grants to maintain basic operations, and unable to accumulate the capacity required for long-term resilience. In this equilibrium, grants function as life support rather than as capital for transformation, and the system as a whole struggles to evolve beyond subsistence.

Leadership thinness is not simply a pipeline issue; it is a systemic outcome of maintaining a large number of small, standalone entities operating below efficient scale.

Fragmentation is especially pronounced among journalism support intermediaries. Indeed, the consolidation challenge appears particularly acute among journalism support organizations themselves.

As the proposal pool makes clear, the field has moved beyond the point at which bespoke, organization-by-organization infrastructure development is efficient or realistic given available talent and capital. Yet the limited presence of consolidation-oriented proposals suggests that while the need for shared systems is widely recognized, the organizational configurations most capable of supporting them remain underexplored.

In many cases, outlets maintain print products not because digital transformation is seen as undesirable, but because transition requires expertise, investment, and organizational change that are not readily available. As a result, the incentives to preserve existing print access (and the costs of doing so) are often highest in the same places where modernization is hardest to execute.

Because philanthropic funding often requires significant time and organizational attention to secure and maintain, it can weaken the role of audience response as a primary signal shaping newsroom priorities. Success can become partially measured by alignment with funder interests, narrative frameworks, and reporting categories rather than by sustained audience use or support.

New nonprofit outlets have clustered disproportionately in major metropolitan areas that are themselves philanthropic centers. This pattern reflects a rational response to funding availability, but it produces a structural inversion: the communities most likely to require ongoing subsidy to sustain local news are often the least likely to have access to philanthropic capital, institutional donors, or dense nonprofit ecosystems. As a result, geographic inequity in journalism provision is reinforced rather than mitigated by reliance on place-bound philanthropy.

You can read the full report here.