A Billion-Dollar Bet on Local News
We’re making a $500 million investment. The other half is up to you.
In 2012, I began as the new head of a school in Massachusetts. For many people from outside the region, the town and the school, both named Andover, are synonymous. Although the town had many other important institutions, the school was among its biggest employers and landowners, and has been central to its layout, history, and economy.
When I arrived, the town’s weekly newspaper, The Andover Townsman, was produced in a bustling downtown newsroom. I read every article, got to know a few of the journeyman reporters, and occasionally heard from the editor, who would walk up the hill to sit in my office and chat about what was going on. The paper covered local politics, the school board, and the vibrant Little League program in town with energy. It wasn’t perfect, but it was important.
The paper was occasionally a thorn in our side. On a few occasions, I felt that they treated us unfairly. The school made a big and, to my mind, generous increase in its voluntary payments in lieu of property taxes to support local services, putting us at a level that compared favorably with our peer schools. The paper’s writers, like the town officials, felt that we should have done more—and pummeled us with that point of view. We had a huge endowment and a famous name. They were a pain. It caused a lot of work on my end.
But holding power to account is necessary if democracy in a small town is going to work.
By the time I stepped down from the job in 2019 and prepared to leave, the paper had atrophied. No full-time editor was sitting downtown. Many of the stories that were published each week appeared under a single byline. The young reporter who traipsed up the hill to my office to write a farewell profile asked to meet me—for the first time. I have no complaints about the story she wrote; she did a fine job. But the paper was now a tiny part of a larger chain, with an editor in another city—a very different type of operation than it had been a few years before.
In town after town, city after city, the same story is playing out. Andover, with its active civic culture, was lucky: It still had a local-news provider, even if one that was much less robust. Roughly 20 percent of communities in America have no local coverage at all.
I left Andover to become head of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Listeners of NPR and watchers of PBS may know us by our tagline: “building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world”—repeated as part of our longstanding philanthropic support for the excellent journalism of those outlets. MacArthur has likewise supported other excellent national newsrooms, nonprofit documentary films, civic participation by young people, and racial equity in journalism.
A few years ago, we reviewed our journalism and media program. We were not surprised to learn that the work we were supporting was needed now more than ever. Journalism was growing more diverse; racial and gender gaps were still present, but they were narrowing. New models were emerging to pay for news in a digital age, and new models for making films and narrative change were taking hold. Public media were continuing to evolve and improve. Yes, we could refine our grantmaking in various ways, but the work had traction and required continuous support.
At the same time, a major gap had become obvious. When MacArthur first began supporting journalism and media decades ago, news was still a really good business in many local areas. Great fortunes have been amassed from producing quality local journalism—witness the source of funds for the Annenberg, Knight, and McCormick foundations.
A generation later, that’s no longer the case. Not even close. Local news is a brutally hard business. Almost no one is making money doing it. It is such a terrible business that we are losing an average of two newspapers a week in America. There are fewer jobs for journalists, and the jobs that do exist are much less well paid than they once were, on average—while the debt load of journalism-school graduates has only continued to grow. Fewer people, especially younger people, seem to be willing to pay for local-news production.
At the MacArthur Foundation, we decided to double our bet on journalism and media—to continue our longstanding program focused on national news and to add a time-limited, big bet on local news. But we realized that even with our significant resources, we could not make enough of a difference alone. So we helped create a 22-funder consortium called Press Forward. Together, we have committed more than $500 million to address the local-news crisis over the next five years.
But that $500 million will not be enough, as many have been quick to point out. America is a big country. Divide that amount by 50 states and spread it over five years, and even half a billion dollars starts to look grossly inadequate.
Our goal is to raise the next $500 million at the local level. For local news to be sustainable over the long term, communities will need to stand up and support their local news providers—whoever that may be in any given area. Americans will need to support local news the same way that they invest in arts and culture, hospitals, or alma maters. They will need to add it to their list of philanthropic commitments—or at least to their list of subscriptions, alongside Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix.
The good news is that local journalists are already producing an extraordinary array of good work and innovative ideas. A new generation of local-news entrepreneurs has stepped into the breach to join with longtime journalists in an effort to produce a local-news renaissance.
Democracy in America is in crisis. The dramatic decline of local news is a major part of this crisis, and there are great ideas and organizations to fund, across all 50 states, to address it. These models include public media operations, nonprofit media start-ups, and for-profit companies. They include television, radio, and digital-only outlets as well as intriguing combinations of all three. They are led by a more racially and gender-diverse set of editors, reporters, and businesspeople. They are worthy of our support as they grow, stabilize, and develop sustainable models with a range of revenue streams.
Press Forward will only be successful, though, if it helps increase support in every part of America for local news. It must help raise awareness of the costs of a declining local-news ecosystem and shine a spotlight on the business models and the people who can bring about dramatic, positive change in the field. We can come out the other side of this crisis with a more robust, sustainable, and equitable local-news system than we have ever had in this country. But to get there, we will need to invest broadly, deeply, and intentionally in the most promising work being done by local journalists. As more and more communities lose their local-news coverage, the need for this investment becomes more urgent with every passing day.