Last week, The Shoestring joined fellow member outlets of the Alliance for Nonprofit News Outlets in issuing a letter to Press Forward, the coalition of foundations planning on “reinvigorating local news” with investments of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Our message? Give that money directly to newsrooms.
It may seem obvious. But the nonprofit world has rarely given direct funding to newsrooms. Instead, many foundations have incentivized professional trainings or even tried to sell services to cash-strapped newsrooms in lieu of support.
We know that philanthropy alone cannot reverse the crisis that has decimated local news in recent years: the loss, when converted to dollars, is simply too great. Press Forward could be a step in the right direction — but so far, the lack of transparency, or interest in even speaking with small community-oriented outlets, has led us to fear we are in for more of the same.
I recommend reading our full letter, which can be found on the ANNO blog.
It can be difficult to communicate briefly what trying to sustain a nonprofit local news outlet is like to someone who isn’t steeped in it. One of the best parts about ANNO membership is being surrounded (virtually) by fellow media workers who “get it.”
That said, communicating with our community of readers and supporters about the work we do to keep our independent investigative voice alive in western Mass is important. And, luckily for us, a number of journalists have taken on the task of explaining the state of the industry and grassroots efforts to sustain more news in more communities, and they’ve done a pretty good job of it.
A recent two-part series from Nieman Lab’s Sophie Culpepper dives deep into the state of nonprofit news nationwide. The first article is a profile of ANNO, a coalition that The Shoestring co-founded with over a dozen peer outlets in 2023 and has since grown to be 35 outlets strong and counting. As you’ve probably heard or read me say in some form or another in the past year, our goals are to increase philanthropic funding of news and to get that funding to more outlets — not just the usual suspects. The second article takes a closer look at trends in philanthropy that those of us on the ground have noticed, and asks what change to these trends would look like.
Check out ANNO’s own site and blog, too, and our frequent Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism collaborator Jason Pramas’ opinion piece from 2022 that helped get all of us talking in the first place.
Finally, I’ll point you to Local News Blues, a blog run by The Shoestring advisory board member and founder of East Lansing Info, Alice Dreger. Dreger has been churning out posts and fielding guest posts since launching just over a month ago, including one on ANNO, another on Press Forward, and another on the inequities of relying on local funding, to name a few.
It’s not all doom and gloom in this industry; the bright points are the amazing people running innovative outlets in all corners of the United States, who, more than ever before, are in agreement that the scale of the challenges we face demands we band together to fight for change.
And with all that said, I offer sincere gratitude to everyone who has supported The Shoestring over the years. When it feels like nobody cares about local news, you all are proof that that is simply not true.
Got questions, comments, or ideas? Drop us a line at theshoestringmag [at] gmail [dot] com.
Brian Zayatz is the managing editor of The Shoestring.
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