Knight research shows news ecosystems, newsrooms improving
A look at the latest research reports, along with plans for the new Pew-Knight Initiative
At Knight Foundation, we strive to be a learning organization. We believe that research can have a significant impact when insights are widely shared. As Knight’s vice president of learning and impact, I’m excited to guest-author this newsletter because there have been some important research developments over the past few months I want to make sure you haven’t missed.
In mid-February, we published two research projects from 2023. The first was an update on a project originally funded in 2020 with Democracy Fund and Google News Initiative. For that initiative, Impact Architects created an easy-to-follow framework to understand news ecosystems. It’s a process that includes understanding the community, the information providers in the community and the relationship of the community to their information providers. Impact Architects then applied the framework to nine communities, including some Knight communities.
For the second project, we applied the ecosystem framework to all eight of our Knight resident communities. So, for five—Charlotte; Detroit; Macon-Bibb County, Ga.; Miami; and Philadelphia—this was the second application of the framework and we are able to observe change over time. For three communities—Akron, Ohio; San José, Calif.; and St. Paul, Minn.—the application served as a new baseline.
Overall, we found that most of the communities’ news ecosystems were trending in the right direction, with some cities seeing growth in nonprofit news providers. For those that were baselined, we found some bright spots, such as greater access to news in Charlotte and opportunities for growth, particularly around collaboration in some cities. The report describes the status of these communities as of early 2023.
We’ve also been tracking Knight’s investments in local news sustainability since 2020. To do that, we collect revenue and audience data from the newsrooms that are enrolled in programs that are run by our grantees, such as American Journalism Project and the Institute for Nonprofit News. Our latest report shows:
Newsrooms generally followed digital audience trends in the wider industry, including peaks in 2020 during the pandemic and declines since. Programs that bucked this trend serve startups and/or newsrooms that were just making the digital transition and thus had the most opportunity for rapid growth.
Revenue increases from 2020 through 2022 are largely a result of increased philanthropic support for newsrooms, especially for nonprofits.
Targeted interventions by newsroom support programs with clear goals yield the most direct short-term and long-term impact with respect to sustainability.
These two projects help us better understand the supply of local news but we’re also moving to better understand demand and what people do with the news they consume. At the Knight Media Forum, we announced that Knight and Pew Charitable Trusts have committed a total of $20 million to the Pew-Knight Initiative, which will produce new research on how Americans absorb civic information, form beliefs and identities and engage in their communities. Stay tuned for the first batch of research to come out in late spring.
Lastly, in late March, the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University and the Center for Sustainability and Innovation in Local Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted the Local Journalism Researchers Workshop in Durham, N.C.
It was a packed day and a half that featured more than 60 presentations from researchers studying local news across the country. Topics ranged from the impact of local journalism, funding models, trends in news audiences and mapping local news ecosystems to local news collaborations and much more. Participation in the workshop more than doubled from last year, showing how research on local news continues to grow. You can get to know more of the local news researcher community here.
For anyone who is new to funding local news or wants to learn more about why it matters and what interventions work, we welcome the opportunity to share research with you or point you to researchers who might be able to help with your particular questions. I’m easy to reach at zohn@kf.org.
Other news around the horn…
Impact
🎉 NewsMatch newsrooms break record in fundraising. Each year between November and December, hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms run fundraising campaigns through NewsMatch with each dollar raised from the community (up to a certain threshold) matched by local and national foundations. And last year’s NewsMatch was the most successful yet, with 340 newsrooms raising a collective $47 million, up 24 percent from 2022, marking a record haul. Since 2017, when Knight helped start NewsMatch, the program has helped newsrooms raise nearly $300 million. And it’s not just the cash that matters, but the impact it has allowed newsrooms to have on their communities. A profile of newsrooms that benefited from NewsMatch covers Arizona Luminaria—a bilingual publication that launched in 2022—which was able to raise $36,000 in total matches and bonuses. “It’s just important that we support these organizations for holding people accountable, who are asking the questions of folks in power, who are diving deep into issues that impact our community,” said Veronica Cruz-Mercado, a donor and a member of Arizona Luminaria’s board of directors.
Investments
💰UC Berkeley Journalism gets transformative gift. Ten million dollars seems to be the magic number for journalism school gifts lately. First, Craig Newmark gave $10 million to the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY to help make tuition free. Then, the Jesse Paul duPont Fund donated $10 million to endow the duPont Columbia Awards at Columbia Journalism School. And now, Angela and David Filo have given $10 million to UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, the largest gift in the school’s history. David Filo is the co-founder of Yahoo, and Angela Filo is an alumna of the school. The goal is to help the school raise more than $50 million over five years in a campaign that will promote diversity, debt-free graduation and investigative journalism. “We really care about building institutions and supporting an infrastructure that will carry the work far into the future,” Angela Filo said in a press release. “Berkeley Journalism is an enduring institution that is dedicated to excellence and innovation in the field.”
💸 Press Forward to open applications for Pooled Fund on April 30. Press Forward has gone from an idea to a more fully formed project that now has a director and an associate director (congrats Christina Shih!). Now it’s time for more of the $500 million that has been committed to get out to the field. Press Forward announced that applications will open on April 30 for grants from the Pooled Fund focused on one of Press Forward’s funding priority areas. Could it be strengthening newsrooms? Closing long-standing inequalities? Scaling infrastructure? Advancing public policies? Helping reporters retire early? (That last one was just to make sure you were paying attention…) We will find out later this month. Meanwhile, Press Forward is hiring a “well-rounded, innovative, and equity focused leader” to be its Network Manager. Learn more about that job here.
💡 Listening Post Collective offers grants for ecosystem assessments. Before newsrooms can truly serve communities, they actually have to understand what information communities need. Jesse Hardman has been doing this work for years at the Listening Post, and later as the Listening Post Collective, using non-traditional outreach through signage and SMS. Nieman Lab profiles the Collective and its work, noting that there’s an updated self-paced playbook to anyone who wants to do their own information ecosystem assessment. The Collective is now offering up to $30,000 in grants to support that work through its three phases: listening, seeding and cultivating. Hardman told Nieman Lab he envisions Listening Post Collective as “kind of a strategic redistributor of funds that also supports the people getting those funds… I love that this peer space has grown and…is getting funded—that is a dream come true.”
Expansion
🇺🇸 ProPublica expands investigations to 50 states. ProPublica is creating what might be the most extensive network of local/national collaborative investigative journalism ever. That includes the growing number of journalists and local news outlets in the Local Reporting Network, funded in part by Knight Foundation, along with regional news hubs and an innovative investigative journalism training program for people from underrepresented communities. Now ProPublica is seeking to bring collaborative investigative journalism to all 50 states over five years, with applications open for the first five partnerships (due by May 1). Why is ProPublica taking on this big task? “We want to provide even more investigative resources to places that are profoundly under-resourced,” said ProPublica president Robin Sparkman. “We know that there are many funders who share this concern, and we are actively looking for additional support for this important work.”
🏛️ States Newsrooms now covering every state capitol. Over the last few years, States Newsroom has expanded to one state after the next, launching new nonprofit newsrooms to cover politics and government. And this year, its mission is complete as it is now in all 50 states, with recent additions of North Dakota, Utah and a partnership with Delaware Spotlight, according to a recent profile in CJR. States runs 39 independent newsrooms alongside 11 partnerships with existing publishers. While it was initially funded by the Hopewell Fund, with money from left-leaning billionaires, States Newsroom is now a free-standing nonprofit, though it still gets most funding from liberal donors. News coverage tends to be ideologically neutral, with the commentary being more liberal. “Like most legacy newspapers, we have an editorial voice and it happens to be center-left, and we have a robust nonpartisan opinion section that includes views of conservatives on a number of local issues,” States Newsroom president Chris Fitzsimon told CJR. Nonprofit newsrooms are becoming much more prevalent in statehouse reporting, with States Newsrooms journalists (who typically come from newspapers) making up the bulk of those reporters.
Jobs
Searchlight New Mexico, Executive Director
Learn more here.
City Limits, Executive Director
Learn more here.
InvestigateWest, Development Director
Learn more here.
Student Press Law Center, Development Director
Learn more here.
Fellowships
New America
$10,000 to tell a “comprehensive American story”
Apply by May 3
Local Investigations Fellowship
New York Times
One year; fellows stay in their newsrooms
Apply by September 2
Training
Branded Content Project & VuePoint Advertising
Free and online
April 24 at 1 pm ET
Free, plus $1000 stipend
In-person at Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Apply by April 25
Upcoming Events 📅
Collaborative Journalism Summit
Detroit
May 9–10
San Diego
June 11–12
Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA)
Milwaukee
June 12–14
National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ)
Hollywood, CA
July 9–13
Oklahoma City
July 25–27
National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ)
Chicago
July 31–August 4
Minneapolis
August 15–16
LION’s Independent News Sustainability Summit
Chicago
September 5–7
Travel stipends available to members; apply here by May 5
The Association for LGTBQ+ Journalists
Los Angeles
September 5–8
Journalism Women & Symposium (JAWS) CAMP
September 13–15
New Orleans
Online News Association (ONA24)
Atlanta
September 18–21
News Product Alliance (NPA) Summit
Online
October 11
Quote of the Week
“We decided to chart a new course and build our own custom metric. The result was a new baseline we’re calling total journalism reach, or the number of times our journalism, in its many forms, is consumed by our audiences…Total journalism reach still gets us closer to accurately representing all of the ways our audiences consume our journalism. And that, in turn, will help us innovate for a changing world.”
—Alexandra Smith, The 19th, explaining why they created a new metric in a guest post for CJR
News @ Knight Credits
Written by Ashley Zohn, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Jim Brady, Jessica Clark and Kara Pickman
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