How universities, publishers, local funding can alleviate news deserts
My focus for 2024 will be on helping newsrooms, universities, community stakeholders provide trusted local news
It was wonderful to see our Knight Chairs in Journalism together in Miami last week. The work these professors do is inspiring, from considering the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism, to working with data visualizations, to expanding fact-checking networks, to supporting press freedom. And we even got to hear Tom Rubin from OpenAI (which runs ChatGPT) and Sarabeth Berman from American Journalism Project (AJP) discuss their innovative partnership.
Before I dig deeper into the important role that universities can play in supporting the field, I want to note that the Knight Chairs meeting was also a “passing of the torch” for Knight leadership. It was the last meeting as CEO for Alberto Ibargüen before handing the reins to Maribel Pérez Wadsworth—showing just how important these Knight Chairs are to the foundation. Since the program began in 1990, Knight has endowed 26 professors at 23 universities. In total, the Chairs oversee endowments that have grown to more than $100 million in value to support innovation, research and projects in media and journalism. Not bad.
So what role can the academy play in helping the field? It’s not just producing important and timely research or educating the next generation of journalists. It’s also creating university/newsroom partnerships to help address news deserts. This work has been tracked and supported by the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, led by Richard Watts. A Knight grantee, the Center has created a map overlaying these growing partnerships and the counties without local news (see above). We are also supporting a collaboration between academics and local newsrooms through The Conversation to help get better information into the hands of the public.
Adjacent to that work is our group of Carnegie-Knight deans, who come from prominent journalism programs around the country. How can they be part of the solution to the local news crisis? They will be hosting a meeting at the upcoming Knight Media Forum (KMF) in Miami next month, and will talk about ways that universities can increase collaboration—among themselves and with newsrooms—to help serve and engage more communities.
Another priority area for me this year will be supporting existing newsrooms expanding to cover news deserts. Despite the narrative about the decline of legacy publishers, some are actually taking steps to create bureaus and expand. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has said it wants to expand, as has the nonprofit Salt Lake Tribune and the Post & Courier in Charleston, S.C. We’ve already seen this happen in Louisiana, where NOLA.com and The Advocate launched a new digital publication covering Shreveport and Bossier City. We want to find more independent publishers who have ambitious and sustainable plans to expand, while also supporting startups in places starved for trusted news sources.
And finally, all this will come together in the new crop of Press Forward Local chapters I am helping to launch around the country. These efforts are centered on bringing more local money to the table to support local news. The national Press Forward effort is only slated to run for five years, but activating local funders is something that has the potential to have a much longer impact. The hope is that local Press Forward chapters will show many funders, including community foundations and high net-worth individuals, just how vital support for local news is to their communities—and for democracy.
All of my 2024 priorities have a throughline of sustainability. Let’s give universities a larger role in creating local news stories and channeling new, value-creating resources from the academy into the news ecosystem. We can also help existing publishers expand into news deserts to drive better content, expand readership and diversify the revenue base. Plus, an increase in local funding through Press Forward local chapters can make these efforts a long-term success. I hope to see many of you at KMF next month to discuss how we can work together to make this a reality.
Other news around the horn…
Investments
💰 AJP invests $5.4 million in four nonprofits. AJP continues to fund a variety of nonprofit newsrooms, networks and startups to help fill the gaps left behind by legacy newsrooms. AJP announced its latest investment of $5.4 million in four newsrooms, helping them boost capacity on the business and editorial sides. Each grant has its own flavor. Deep South Today received $2 million to help the network of Southern newsrooms, including Mississippi Today and Verite News in New Orleans, expand into more underserved communities. Environmental news site Grist received $925,000 to embed more climate journalists into local newsrooms, and bring in more money from climate-focused philanthropy. Statewide nonprofit New York Focus will get $1.5 million to place more reporters around the state while boosting operational capacity. And a new statewide nonprofit Spotlight Delaware will receive $1 million to help build its founding business team. “Each of these organizations have compelling visions for journalism that strengthens their communities. We’re thrilled to partner with them to help them build enduring organizations,” said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of AJP.
🔔 Lenfest to run Infrastructure Fund, set statewide news benchmarks. The Eagles might have been eliminated early from the football playoffs, but Philadelphia’s largest news funder still finds ways to score. The Lenfest Institute announced it would launch the Local News Infrastructure Fund to help make critical technology more accessible to publishers, with a three-year $7.25 million investment from Knight Foundation. The first two recipients of the fund are Newspack and BlueLena, who already serve hundreds of local news publishers. On another front, Lenfest is partnering with the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) to create benchmarks for the growing number of statewide nonprofit newsrooms (see item above) using INN Index data. An early look at the data found that statewide nonprofits had an increase in national and global foundation funding in 2022, and more than two-thirds of the newsrooms have 15 or fewer full-time employees. We look forward to seeing more insights from this collaboration.
Legal & Policy
⚖️ Pro bono legal support for newsrooms coming to Indiana. How many journalists and news outlets have had to sit around for years waiting for state agencies to release important data? Too many to count. But the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) has been changing the dynamic with its Local Legal Initiative, funded by Knight, which places attorneys into various locales to provide pro bono legal support. Now, the initiative is expanding to Indiana, at the urging of the Hoosier State Press Association and funding from Lumina Foundation. Already, the initiative’s work has helped reporters tell stories that “exposed how much taxpayer money governments paid to settle legal disputes. They prompted renewed scrutiny into deaths at the hands of law enforcement. And they revealed what happened when school board members met behind closed doors to discuss their response to a school shooting,” according to RCFP’s Katie Townsend. She notes that they’ve also helped shape laws and policies to increase government transparency.
🔍 VTDigger gets Vermont Senate to increase disclosure rules. Speaking of transparency, anyone who has had to find forms on government websites knows the headache-inducing feeling of going in circles nowhere. That was the case with VTDigger’s reporters trying to find the state lawmakers’ ethics disclosure forms that politicians were supposed to file. The only way to get them was to go to the state Capitol in person, so the newsroom found all the ethics forms for all lawmakers and put them online in a searchable database. After writing a story about this effort last April, the Vermont Senate recently voted to require senators to disclose more ethics information. It used to just ask them for income sources over $10,000 a year, majority ownership of a corporation or board service. Now they have to include employment, investment or other income over $5,000, ownership greater than 10 percent in a company, and lobbying activities. While the Senate was quick to pass the new rules, the House has no plans to change its ethics requirements. When asked if the state would create its own online database of these disclosures, Vermont’s secretary of state said “these projects are ridiculously expensive.”
Surveys
✨Pivot Fund finds support for grants to BIPOC-led outlets. For critics of Press Forward’s approach to funding, The Pivot Fund turned the tables and asked local publishers and founders how they would spend the $500 million. The results were fascinating, with the majority saying direct grants should go to BIPOC-led news outlets, with 18 percent mentioning funding technology in newsrooms and 45 percent talking about capacity-building. As The Pivot Fund’s Tracie Powell summed up on LinkedIn, respondents liked multi-year grants, fair compensation to retain staff, and strengthening ties between newsrooms and communities with events. “I would do grants in a minimum of 3-year increments for established orgs, and 5-year increments for new ideas so that there is a runway to start,” one respondent said. “I would set aside a portion from each pot to fund organizations that support news infrastructure so that the whole ecosystem is stronger.” They’re singing from our songbook!
🌍 Publishers consider social platform shift, stick to reader revenue. Despite talk of “carnage” in the news industry, a recent survey of 314 digital news leaders in 50 countries by Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford found that nearly half are confident about their prospects for the year ahead. And wow, lots of these folks were planning to create more video (64 percent), launch more newsletters (52 percent) and even produce more podcasts (47 percent) this year. To counter news avoidance, many publishers are planning more explanatory reporting (67 percent), solutions-oriented stories (44 percent) and inspirational human stories (43 percent). As you can see from the chart above, these pollyannas believe digital subscriptions would rise a lot (30 percent) or go up a bit (43 percent). As for the advent of AI, nearly half believe they won’t make much money from it, but 56 percent saw the utility in back-end automation for AI.
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Quote of the Week
“Many people—and not just consistent news avoiders—say that news is depressing, irrelevant, unintelligible, and that there isn’t anything they can do about the problems they see in the news anyway…It does not have to be this way. A news organization could differentiate itself from an abundance of relentlessly depressing news-as-usual by stating clearly and explicitly, ‘we want to be different,’ and telling people—over time, showing people—that they are not afraid to lead with news that is uplifting, closer to people’s lived experience, presented in more accessible ways, and focused on things they can influence.”
— Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, in an excerpt from their new book, Avoiding the News
News @ Knight Credits
Written by Duc Luu, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Jim Brady, Jessica Clark and Kara Pickman
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