The importance of communications in restoring local news presence
Internal and external communications are key to solving for demand
Having grown up on the road with entrepreneurial parents, newspapers were a big part of my childhood. Whether it was the New York Times, El Paso Times or the paper serving wherever we happened to be, a local beacon of the Fourth Estate arrived at the hotel doorstep each day. I made it a mission to read every article, every word. Those newspapers traveled with me to meetings, town diners, airports and on to the next city.
The loss of local newspapers is often connected to the disappearance of quality information. And that’s true. But the loss of a newspaper is also the loss of our walking billboards. The decline of local news isn't just about information, it's also about presence. However, this time, the goal isn’t just to be seen; the goal is to tie visibility to the bottom line.
Building a strong communications backbone isn’t a luxury for local newsrooms; it’s a necessity. It’s what will take us from surviving to thriving, from sporadic short-term gains to steady long-term growth. The work ahead isn’t about creating businesses that merely sustain themselves—it’s about building best-in-class American businesses, right here in local news.
My goal at the start of my entrepreneurship journey was to democratize top-tier, comprehensive communications. Thirteen years later, I am even more enthusiastic about upcycling the model to contribute to an experience where entrepreneurs can access all the tools and resources seamlessly designed to make it as easy as possible to start and scale a business in the local news field.
More than just external communications
When organizations prioritize external communications, it likely feels and appears productive in the moment. You’ll see impressive spikes in visibility, but without a solid foundation, those peaks quickly give way to valleys, and often the peaks are executed on the most extreme back foot at a pace that isn’t realistically sustainable.
It’s easy to get caught up in the allure, mistaking shallow engagement for real progress. A significant part of this issue is that communications is typically treated as a one-dimensional tool, something external, often reactive. In failing to account for and honor the complexity it involves, we continue to build upon systems that have cracks—sometimes small, sometimes big—but enough to weaken the whole structure.
A strong internal communications backbone changes that. It’s the key to good business. It reduces costs, creates consistency and drives external efforts that can actually retain demand. In addition to mitigating crises and optimizing bottom lines, an integrated framework establishes parameters that promote creativity, benefitting internal and external networks.
Whether it’s solving for entrepreneurial sanity or cultivating perpetual demand, the work ahead involves simultaneously engineering comprehensive communications for our field at both the national level and within local news organizations. But that can only happen at scale if news publishers have access to a sophisticated product that serves across internal and external needs.
Setting a new standard of excellence
I’ve always been drawn to the way Knight Foundation embodies entrepreneurship. It’s an environment that constantly challenges you to think bigger, push harder and grow. One of my favorite things about the Knight journalism team’s approach to infrastructure investments is that any model on the profitability spectrum can benefit.
As Knight Journalism's entrepreneur-in-residence, a part of my role is developing a comprehensive communications tool to interconnect existing and new grantees and partners across marketing, public relations, production, executive advisory and advance, to all corners of a business. Quality external communications is a reflection of smart internal communications. And building a strong, stable business begins with efficiency.
Our road ahead for local news isn’t without its challenges. At times, journalistic instinct will collide with business demands, particularly when navigating partnerships, mergers or acquisitions. But within these challenges lies opportunity—a chance for local news entrepreneurs to set a new standard of excellence in what it means to do good business.
When we solve for perpetual demand, we’re not just keeping local news alive. We’re shaping a future where local journalism is valued as a pillar of strength in our communities, where it’s more than just sustainable—it’s essential.
Other news around the horn…
Investments
🛣️ Press Forward announces Open Call for infrastructure grants. On the heels of Press Forward’s first Open Call for grants to close coverage gaps, with $20 million given to 205 local news outlets, the funding coalition just unveiled its next Open Call on Infrastructure grants, with applications due by January 15. These investments will support ideas that can help make newsrooms more resilient and sustainable by addressing one of four key areas: audience, operations, people or revenue. These ideas should strengthen the shared infrastructure at the local, regional or national levels. All applications must be submitted by nonprofit organizations or by a fiscal sponsor of a group of for-profit organizations. (You can read more about Knight’s infrastructure investing strategy here.) There will be an information session about this Open Call on November 22 at 3 pm ET. Register here, where you can also submit questions to get answered during the session.
🤑 AJP invests $3.6 million in three nonprofits to expand coverage. News deserts continue to be a stubborn problem across America (see State of Local News report, below), with communities not having access to trusted local news sources. There have been efforts to support startup news outlets, but there’s another potential path: expanding nonprofit outlets so they can provide more in-depth coverage of communities. The American Journalism Project (AJP) first started that initiative with the Texas Tribune expansion. Now comes three more investments from AJP in Charlottesville Tomorrow, the Colorado Sun and the Salt Lake Tribune for a total of $3.6 million to help these organizations serve the news deserts in their areas. For example, the Colorado Sun will establish four regional hubs in Northeastern Colorado, Southern Colorado, the Western Slope and the Eastern Plains. “We are proud to support these three newsrooms as they grow, expand their reach and build lasting models that will serve their communities for years to come,” said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of AJP.
💸 NewsMatch secures record $7.5 million for year-end campaign. NewsMatch started as a scrappy program out of Knight Foundation in 2016, and has since morphed into a year-end matching campaign for nearly 400 nonprofit newsrooms around the country. It brought in a record haul of $7.5 million in matching funds from 18 funders (including Knight), adding to the $31 million in matching funds that helped newsrooms bring in nearly $300 million from donors since 2017. What does that mean? Your donation to a participating Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) member will be doubled (or more) if you give today. And we are seeing NewsMatch in the wild outside of the year-end campaign, with a popup matching campaign that helped 47 news organizations raise more than $57,000 for their Democracy Day coverage on September 15. Speaking of Democracy Day, that effort included 241 news organizations from all 50 states and Puerto Rico, producing more than 268 stories covering issues about democracy and threats to democracy. That’s an increase of 47% in participation with 98% more content than last year.
Research
🐪 News deserts grow, but so do digital outlets. It’s the old good news, bad news State of the Local News Report from Medill, and we will start with the bad news. News deserts have increased, with 127 newspapers closing in the past 12 months and more than half of U.S. counties having none or one news source (often a pretty anemic one). Plus, the “watch list” of potential news desert counties rose 22% from last year. But on the bright side, there was a net increase of 81 digital-only local news outlets, with one-third of them being less than five years old. The report also dug deeper into digital news networks such as TAPinto and States Newsrooms, the rise of philanthropic giving and even policy initiatives. The bonus again was the “Bright Spots” feature, highlighting startups and outlets that had built strong business models. That included Cityside, PublicSource and BoiseDev. The report notes: “Whether for-profit or nonprofit, all [Bright Spots newsrooms] are locally owned or controlled. None of the for-profits are publicly traded businesses or owned by large investment funds or hedge funds, so they are not subject to sizable shareholder pressures or profit expectations.”
Artificial Intelligence
🦾 OpenAI, Meta strike deals with publishers. OpenAI has been making deals with publishers recently, including with the American Journalism Project and the Associated Press. The latest to ink a deal is the Lenfest Institute, with a $10 million partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft to provide six independently owned metro newspapers with two-year AI fellows who will work on projects to improve sustainability while implementing AI initiatives in the newsrooms. As with many of these deals, the newsrooms will also get OpenAI and Microsoft Azure credits to help them with their experiments. The program will support an additional three organizations in the second round of grants. Meanwhile, while Meta had been pulling back from news recently, it made a deal with Reuters to provide news content for its AI chatbot, its first deal related to a news service and AI. “While other AI companies have been making deals with news firms, Meta's appetite for news deals for its AI assistant was unclear until now,” wrote Axios’ Sara Fischer.
Elections
📉 Washington Post loses subscribers over endorsement flap. With the re-election of Donald Trump, many publishers are wondering if there will be a Trump Bump 2.0 (see Quote, below), with a rise in subscribers as there was after his election in 2016 and during the pandemic. If there’s one publisher that would need that, it’s the Washington Post. After its owner Jeff Bezos made a last-minute decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, saying it was a “principled decision” albeit with bad timing, the Post lost 250,000 subscribers in the days leading up to the election. After an NPR scoop about the loss, the Post’s own reporters had to snoop on itself, with “documents and two people familiar with the figures” as a source. That figure would represent 10% of the Post’s digital subscribers, though it doesn’t take into account new subscribers or those who may have re-subscribed. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as the Post had finally started to see subscription growth earlier in October after two years of declines.
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Training
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Quote of the Week
“Trump 2.0 will likely be a very different administration than we saw before. That will carry immense consequences and news value. It will energize right-wing media, and it will panic the left… It’s vital that as these channels think about their ratings, they also are thinking profoundly about the public service that they’re supposed to play, even in an intensely competitive, private sector-driven marketplace.”
—Frank Sesno, professor at George Washington University and a former Washington bureau chief of CNN, in a story on the New York Times, “Trump Bump 2.0: Experts Expect Another Audience Surge, with Caveats”
News @ Knight Credits
Written by BA Snyder, with Jim Brady and Mark Glaser
Edited by Jim Brady, Nina Spensley and Kara Pickman
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