Legal services are key infrastructure for local news, so we’re expanding them

Our $1.3 million grant to ProJourn will expand pro bono legal support for local newsrooms

Oct 18, 2022

When Knight talks about the need for a stronger local journalism infrastructure, we’re not simply talking about core technology such as a content management system or customer relationship management software. To us, building up infrastructure must also include services that are not needed every day but are essential to the success of any serious news organization.

A perfect example of this is legal services. While newsrooms do not need constant access to lawyers, when the need arises, it is often urgent and critical. And, thanks to the increasing number of smaller news organizations in the United States, the number of newsrooms without easy access to legal advice has increased dramatically.

Like roads, water systems, and other public resources we sometimes take for granted, a process for connecting lawyers to newsrooms can save enormous time, money–and anxiety. Eliminating those often hidden and unexpected costs for the entire journalism ecosystem is important to us because it means that newsrooms can focus on growing, experimenting and reporting instead of scouring their personal networks for legal help.

That’s why Knight has been a longtime funder of legal initiatives. We’ve been a funder of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) since the 1970s. We supported the creation of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in 2015. We created an endowment for the Student Press Law Center in 2003. We’ve also provided funding for the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale University, the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, the First Amendment Foundation and other legal efforts. Along with support for keeping journalists safe around the world, and defending the First Amendment domestically, we view legal support for journalists as a core value we must support.

That’s why, earlier this month, we were excited to announce our latest legal effort: the expansion of the ProJourn program, managed by the RCFP and with additional support from Microsoft and the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. The program provides pro bono legal services to news organizations, with a specific focus on pre-publication review and public records access. Knight has committed more than $1.3 million over three years to this program.

ProJourn was piloted in Washington state and California in 2020 and 2021. And in a 2021 survey done by RCFP, 62% of respondents agreed that potential legal fees made it difficult for them to move forward with mission-critical journalism. That number is likely to increase in the coming years as more and more smaller publishers enter the market.

That’s why expanding this program is important. ProJourn has provided a structure for consistently delivering legal services to small publishers and will help ensure vital news and information continues to get to the communities they serve and inform. One great example is how Open Vallejo exposed police misconduct in the shooting of a 22-year-old Latino man after ProJourn pro bono volunteer attorneys sued and won access to thousands of pages of records and body cam video.

In addition to founding partner Davis Wright Tremaine, the law firms that will provide legal services to ProJourn are BakerHostetler; Covington & Burling; Gibson Dunn & Crutcher; Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton; and McGuireWoods. The addition of these terrific firms will help grow the nationwide footprint of the program. With this expansion, the ProJourn network of law firms will be able to handle up to 300 legal matters per year with an estimated value of $3.5 million in pro bono services by the end of 2024.

If you are interested in seeking legal support from ProJourn, you can fill out this form.

Other news around the horn…

Awards

🏆And the winners are… Awards season continued at the Online News Association Conference in Los Angeles, with trophies handed out like hotcakes at the Online Journalism Awards (OJAs) and the Nonprofit News Awards (INNys). Some highlights included:

Mission Local, The Trace, LAist and Boston Globe each won OJAs for General Excellence in Online Journalism.
The Knight Award for Public Service at the OJAs went to Nashville Public Radio’s WPLN News and ProPublica for an investigation of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County.
INNy highlights included El Paso Matters nabbing Startup of the Year, Flatwater Free Press getting Nonprofit Newcomer, and Kimberly Griffin of Mississippi Free Press winning Emerging Leader of the Year. Congrats to all the big winners! 🎉

Funding

💰 BIPOC journalism orgs in the money. For too long, journalism funders have underinvested in Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) news leaders and the communities their outlets serve. That is starting to change, as Borealis Philanthropy’s Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund doubled down with $4.9 million in grants to BIPOC newsrooms and field building partners. Not only did they fund 11 new organizations and offer up two new research and learning grants, but the Fund also re-granted all 28 existing grantees. Most interesting is that the REJ Fund has begun to incorporate “community power building and civic participation as key pillars in its work.”

🌭 Chicago and Illinois news orgs get resources to go deep. Speaking of big money to help cover underserved communities, the McCormick Foundation put $7.5 million into grants to Block Club Chicago, Injustice Watch and Capitol News Illinois—along with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. As the foundation’s release notes, the grants will support “more robust investigative reporting on persistent challenges disinvested communities face and the promising efforts many are leading, in Chicago and elsewhere, to create thriving communities.” In particular, Block Club Chicago will get $1.6 million to build a six-person investigative team to cover Chicago’s South and West Sides, while Injustice Watch will get $1.5 million to better cover equity and justice in local courts.

🎙️ How the West was won…for podcasts. Podcasts have become a bigger part of Americans’ daily media lives, but to truly thrive in the journalism world, podcasters need expert support. That’s where PRX comes in with its first cohort in the PRX Journalism Podcast Accelerator, offering 12 weeks of intensive training on content, technical skills and monetization; a network of experts and peers; and $5,000 in cool, hard cash (with funding from Knight Foundation). The first cohort is rooted in the West, with future cohorts in the Central and Eastern U.S. Cohort members include Colorado Public Radio and Denverite, KQED, CapRadio, Hawaii Public Radio, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and palabra, and San Francisco Public Press. We’re literally looking forward to hearing the results.

Impact

🍺 A beer, a sandwich and mission-driven news in Spokane. Many communities have been fighting against corporate chains, but none has been as creative as Spokane, Wash. Its innovative Spokane Workers Cooperative has been buying and building local businesses such as a brewery and bakery and turning them over to worker ownership and control. That includes Range Media, a local news outlet that has found success covering the largest homeless encampment in the state. Plus, the outlet has taken action, dropping off supplies and publicizing needs for unhoused residents, according to a profile in Nieman Lab. Range has had success with a membership model, and has gotten a fifth of its traffic from Reddit. Not only do staffers build community engagement by having tables at events and fairs, but also host “Office Hours” for the public where they set up shop in a Spokane location and anyone can come by and ask questions.

👐🏽 How opening subscriptions boosted San Antonio newsletter. The San Antonio Express-News thought it had a nice perk for subscribers with its afternoon newsletter called the 210 Report. But it found that opening the newsletter to former subscribers and engaged readers led to a larger subscriber base––and fresh engagement. As the Express-News team told Better News: “Slowly over the course of the last two years, as the list has more than doubled in size, click-thru and open rates have crept back up. Now, they’re close to where they were when the newsletter launched…. This tells us that prospects (now the majority of the list) are clicking through to the site at a healthy rate.”