Knight Rider 2: The power of showing up, and focusing in
After 41 meetings in eight cities over 15 days, here are some lessons learned
My road trip to the eight cities where Knight has dedicated staff concluded last Tuesday with a trip to San Jose. I attended 41 meetings in eight cities over the 15 days of the journey, and it was a wonderful and enriching experience that I plan on making an annual summer event.
There were two major lessons I learned from this barnstorming tour: the impact of being on the ground, and the value of complete focus.
I’m coming up on a year of being in this role, and so much of my work has occurred on Zoom, on phone calls and at conferences. Each of those can be effective methods of communication, but none of them allow you to see the impact of grants with your own eyes. And that’s where spending time with Knight’s directors in these cities was so valuable.
In Charlotte, Charles Thomas – Knight’s Charlotte director – gave Marc Lavallee and me a terrific driving tour of Charlotte’s Historic West End, where Knight funding is driving transformation and promoting economic opportunity. In Macon, director Lynn Murphey showed me around the city’s urban core, where we’re funding economic development opportunities and the upgrading of public spaces. In Akron, director Kyle Kutuchief took me to the non-descript parking lot that will soon become Sojourner Truth Plaza. Seeing the businesses, homes and public spaces being developed to help local communities is more than meaningful; it’s inspiring.
The second lesson learned was the value of focusing on one city for an entire day. I’ve learned quickly that philanthropy requires constantly juggling dozens of priorities, grant proposals and deadlines, and that can easily splinter your time and attention into tiny shards. On this trip, I was able to spend full days listening to perspectives on the state of media in a single city. I would hear something in the morning I was able to query someone else about in the afternoon. I was able to read local publications, watch local TV. and listen to local radio. And since most of these visits were followed by a long drive, I had time to think about what Knight might be able to do to best help each city.
That level of focus can’t just be a feature of trips like this. The entire Journalism team needs to find ways to create that focused time around the many broad topics we’re strategizing about. We were able to spend two full days focused on infrastructure in May – along with 30-plus other folks who joined us in Miami– and that gathering prompted some transformational ideas that we’re working through and excited about (more on that coming soon).
As a result of this trip, the Journalism team has already started planning days where the team will schedule meetings on a single topic. This should allow for efficient information gathering, more focused discussions, diverse perspectives and, in the end, quicker and better decision making.
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Other News around the horn…
Cohorts
🖥️ 25 newsrooms get tech boosts. If local newsrooms are to reach sustainability, they need the modern technology underpinnings to make it all possible. That’s the philosophy behind the Sustainable Publishing Solutions (SPS) initiative, funded by Knight and managed by News Revenue Hub. SPS has announced a new round of 25 newsrooms joining the program, with each receiving $20,000 to adopt, manage or upgrade their digital publishing platform. This is the third round of SPS grants, and previous participants have provided a lot of positive feedback about how this small investment has paid dividends. (Check out all the SPS newsrooms on our updated Civic Bright Spots Map!)
💸 New cohort takes fundraising to the next level. If the pandemic was “good” for one thing, it gave for-profit newsrooms a reason to better learn how to fundraise. Since 2020, the Local Media Association’s Lab for Journalism Funding has helped 36 publishers raise more than $10 million for local journalism projects. Now, with additional support from Google News Initiative, LMA is launching a new Advanced Fundraising Lab, with nine mostly for-profit newspapers taking the next step in raising money from their audience.
✨ Breaking up is hard to do…with print. No matter how much we’ve talked about “digital-first newsrooms,” there remain a number of legacy newspapers still primarily focused on print production schedules and products. Luckily the American Press Institute is on the case, announcing a new Beyond Print cohort that will help four newspapers create digital-first products and workflows. They will also receive coaching on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging from the Maynard Institute. The new program is funded by the Andrew and Julie Klingenstein Family Fund with additional funding from the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund.
Funding
💰“You get a million dollars, and you get a million dollars…” The American Journalism Project (AJP) is a bit like the Oprah of nonprofit local news funders. No, not everyone who attends INN Days or the Online News Association conference will find a money bag under their seats, but the list of winning newsrooms getting big investments is growing. AJP announced funding for another three nonprofit newsrooms – Verite in New Orleans, The City in New York, and ICT (formerly Indian Country Today). That trio will receive a combined $3.15 million in funding, with a focus on helping them build out revenue teams and business infrastructure. This brings the total number of nonprofit newsrooms under the AJP umbrella to 33, and its investment outlay to nearly $37 million.
Opportunities
🔎Bring investigative journalism to your town. ProPublica has not only won Pulitzer Prizes for its own work; it also won one for collaborating with the Anchorage Daily News in 2020. The Daily News was part of ProPublica’s Local News Network, which now has openings for five newsrooms to join in November. Joining the Network means you can tap the expertise of a top investigative journalism outfit, and it also means you can pay a reporter on your staff (or a freelancer) up to $75,000 to work on a deeply reported piece or series for a year. Learn more about the Network and apply by August 22!
🧪Google’s cornucopia of labs for publishers. Google News Initiative (GNI) has become a mad scientist when it comes to helping smaller digital news publishers. Just how mad? There are three GNI Startups Labs this year. Via a partnership with LION Publishers, GNI will launch labs focused on managing money, building and managing a team, and planning for revenue growth. But if you aren’t a startup, GNI has three more Digital Growth Labs, these focused on digital technology, sponsorships, and subscriptions. Apply for the Startup Labs by August 8, and the Digital Growth Labs by August 11.
💥Signing up for sustainability: Registration is open for the first Independent News Sustainability Summit, which will take place from Oct. 27-29 in Austin. Jointly organized by LION Publishers, News Revenue Hub and RevLab at Texas Tribune (and funded by Knight), the Summit will feature a keynote interview with former New York Times editor Dean Baquet. Summit organizers are also accepting travel scholarship applications for the event. The deadline for the first round of scholarship applications is August 12.
Trust
🤔Media trust is at a record low. ICFJ aims to fix that. Perhaps the least surprising news is that Gallup found Americans’ trust in newspapers and TV news is at an all-time low. More eye-popping is that only 16% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and only 11% said the same for TV news, placing the latter scoring 15th out of 16 American institutions (kudos to Congress for bringing up the rear!). But projects like Trusting News and The Trust Project are trying to turn the tide, while a new global cohort at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) aims to build trust through a 10-week solutions challenge.
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Written by Jim Brady, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Jessica Clark & Kenny Ma