With his cries of “fake news” and insistence that journalists are the enemy of the American people, President Trump made his opposition to the traditional press a hallmark of his campaign and his presidency. Trust was low—by most measurements only about a third of the public had a favorable or even tolerable view of the press. But there was one bright spot: local news. Nearly half of Americans said they trust reporting by local news organizations “a great deal” or “quite a lot,” a study from Gallup and the Knight Foundation showed. Yet local news is exactly what was fading, if not dying.
Efforts to help, or at least to think through the worsening problem, have intensified. Foundations poured money into nonprofit news outfits. Advocacy organizations called for legislative changes to help newspapers survive. Even Facebook and Google made efforts, though these were sometimes greeted in the journalism world with tremendous skepticism. A few even suggested direct government subsidies to support journalism. There would be no perfect solution—but now, at least, the problem was front and center.
In late 2019, two of the most respected names in journalism, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, announced that they would join forces, vastly increasing their government-accountability coverage with a new eleven-member investigative unit based in the Tribune’s Austin newsroom. The journalism produced, funded with a large gift from Houston-based Arnold Ventures, would be published on both organizations’ platforms. Pro-Publica, probably the best known and most acclaimed of the digital news sites, was founded in 2007, largely through the philanthropy of San Francisco billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler. Its journalism excelled and was repeatedly recognized at the highest levels. Remarkably, from 2009 to 2019, it won five Pulitzer Prizes. The Texas Tribune, founded in 2009, was the largest and one of the best of the local nonprofit news organizations, one that already had a hefty staff and well-established funding sources. The pairing of these two big players was enough to provide at least some hope. But how can this be reproduced in every community of the nation?
John Thornton is a wealthy investor who could be doing just about anything with his time and money. What he has chosen to do is found something called the American Journalism Project, which seeks “to reinvigorate local news through the power of venture philanthropy.” His partner and co-founder in the effort is Elizabeth Green, who a few years earlier had helped start a successful education-news site, Chalkbeat.
The first step was to raise money—$50 million, “enough to make a difference, to provoke the boldness this moment in history requires, but not so much that we couldn’t invest it responsibly,” Green explained. Then they would invest the money in civic news organizations, defined as “a local news organization distinguished by its public service mission and commitment to meeting the critical information needs of the community—in areas such as government, environment, education, social and criminal justice, or public health.”
Thornton, like Green, had some impressive successes to back up what otherwise might have seemed like a pipe dream. Thornton and his wife, Julie, provided $1 million to get the Texas Tribune started in 2009. The Tribune wasn’t the first of these kinds of local sites: MinnPost and Voice of San Diego had already been established in Minnesota and California. But it quickly became a dominant player. One of Thornton’s two co-founders was Evan Smith, who brought an entrepreneurial spirit and apparently endless energy to the task of finding ways for the Tribune to support itself. On-site advertising was not the answer, but running journalism-related events turned out to be a major factor. The most prominent example was the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, several days in the early fall in which sponsors, media partners, working journalists, students, and celebrities get together to talk, learn, and party.
As I traveled to Austin for the 2019 festival, my flight from New York City carried presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather, and former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson. A quick walk on a downtown Austin street brought glimpses of Obama administration chief strategist David Axelrod and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Later, onstage, Smith interviewed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had just opened the impeachment inquiry into President Trump days before. The event would raise about $1 million for the Tribune’s local watchdog journalism. Within a few years of the Trib’s founding, the festival was attracting thousands of participants and more than a million dollars in revenue.
As Heidi Legg, director of special projects at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, wrote: “Two revenue paths have diverged in local news: donations or digital subscriptions. As a result, we see for-profits like the major dailies and national magazines doubling down on transforming into digital juggernauts that can compete on those platforms in delivery and win back subscribers. We also see upstarts and legacies converting into a nonprofit for public good where donors keep the newsroom afloat.”
For local newspapers, the digital-subscription route has been a difficult path. Big papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times can draw from a national or perhaps even a global audience. The local papers cannot. While subscription revenue must be a major part of the answer, it is not clear that it can be the main savior.
The nonprofit route may be more successful. In most cases, nonprofits are not legacy operations with legacy costs, such as printing presses, fleets of trucks, and salaries for unionized employees that reflect what was possible in more profitable days. They are nimbler, often digital-only, or certainly digital-first, with an occasional or weekly print product.
In Buffalo, there’s Investigative Post, a small but impressive news organization that concentrates on holding public officials accountable. A former Buffalo News investigative reporter, James Heaney, started it from scratch not long after he took a buyout from his longtime newspaper job. At the News, he was a longtime leader of the local chapter of the Newspaper Guild and his dogged reporting had won awards and other recognition.
When Heaney and I worked in the same newsroom, we sometimes disagreed vehemently, despite our mutual respect. His point of view was that “all good work is done in defiance of management.” I was management. Once we no longer shared the fraught atmosphere of the same newsroom, we became better friends, and I’ve watched as he and his small staff have forged a new way of reporting in the Buffalo area. Most notably, Investigative Post reported on New York State’s request for proposals for the construction of projects that were part of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” effort intended to direct a billion dollars to shoring up the region’s troubled post-industrial economy. Heaney’s reporting revealed that the requests were tailored to favor one local developer, a major campaign contributor to Cuomo. Building on the reporting, Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, began an investigation that eventually resulted in the conviction of several state officials and campaign contributors on corruption charges, and a legislative effort to reform the state’s practices for awarding contracts. Investigative Post also reported on improper Buffalo police practices that unfairly targeted minority residents; the unit at the heart of the abuses has since been disbanded.
That’s impressive work for a tiny shop like Investigative Post, a place where Heaney does much of the development work as well as the journalism, and has had some anxious moments about his organization’s finances. Like other local nonprofit newsrooms, Investigative Post has partnerships with more established media organizations, particularly with one of the local television stations, WGRZ-TV, and with WBFO, the local public radio station. On occasion, their work has even appeared in the Buffalo News. As of 2019, Buffalo is still quite fortunate in terms of watchdog journalism, despite being one of the poorest cities in the United States. Investigative journalism is working at the moment in Buffalo, but it’s every bit as tenuous as the entire national media landscape. There’s no guarantee that any of it will be around in five years. The old business model is broken for good; the present and future must be created anew, and on the run.
Nonprofit newsrooms like Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism (known as CPI) published documents in the summer of 2019 that brought down the territory’s governor, Ricardo A. Rossello. The CPI was just a decade or so old, and then only employing ten full-time reporters and editors; it specializes in obtaining otherwise unavailable material, often through lawsuits. The CPI obtained nearly nine hundred pages of chat messages between Rossello and his male cronies, many of them misogynistic, homophobic, and dismissive. The messages, along with CPI’s accompanying investigative stories about corruption, so infuriated the populace that hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets to demand the governor’s ouster. With impeachment looming, he had no choice but to step down. A small nonprofit enterprise had gone far beyond what traditional newspapers in Puerto Rico had produced. Independent, scrappy, and nimble, the CPI was funded mostly by donations, which are not always easy to come by. Unprecedented amounts of financial support flowed to the CPI after their remarkable reporting triumph. It didn’t hurt that even theater superstar Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted to his worldwide audience, urging support.
But funding for nonprofit journalism can be a constant, gnawing problem for those who run them. Richard Tofel, president of ProPublica, said that one of the biggest problems is that no matter how much the nonprofit journalism sector grows, it’s unlikely to replace a thriving newspaper in every good-sized town in America. “Nothing scales like capitalism, and nonprofits don’t naturally replicate themselves,” he told me. Nonprofits “have to be scaled artisanally,” in small batches.
Donors—whether individual philanthropists, foundations, or even news consumers—can be fickle and difficult to please. They may want some kind of editorial control or at least ability to direct the focus of the work. “Donors want to achieve what they want to achieve,” Tofel said. “If you are dealing with people of integrity and goodwill, it’s not a huge problem.” After all, advertisers have been known to express their displeasure with a negative story by withdrawing their advertising dollars. But one angry car dealer was not a big loss when there were dozens of other advertisers available to soften the blow. In a nonprofit that’s dependent on just a few big donors, their unhappiness can really hurt. There are ways to deal with this, like establishing guidelines about editorial independence up front, but, as American Press Institute executive director Tom Rosenstiel pointed out, very few nonprofits have such guidelines. “There is no such thing as revenue that comes without risk,” Rosenstiel said.
Businesses are accustomed to competing with others in their regions, but now it’s become crucially important for journalism outfits to cooperate. In Pennsylvania, a group of journalists and news organizations, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, have come together to form Spotlight PA, which employs eight reporters who focus strictly on state politics. Eight might seem like a small number, but in fact Spotlight PA has the largest newsroom in Pennsylvania dedicated solely to covering state government. A Pew Research study in 2014 found that the number of full-time statehouse reporters around the country had dropped by 35 percent since 2003, and this was before some of the most serious retrenchment.
Nonprofits and other digital-only startups are not the only way forward for local news. Heidi Legg, in her Shorenstein Center research, identifies several other trends that may prove fruitful. One is what she calls “the Billionaire Local Newspaper Club,” in which wealthy investors, usually members of the community, put “massive infusions of capital” into local newspapers so that they “can get up to speed digitally.” Most notably, perhaps, this has happened at the Los Angeles Times. Long one of the nation’s best and most prominent regional news organizations, it fell on hard times in recent years as its parent company, then named Tronc (formerly and currently named Tribune Publishing), insisted on deep staff cuts and sent in one top editor after another to make changes. In early 2018, billionaire biotech investor Patrick Soon-Shiong came forward to buy the paper. Since then, the Times, under editor Norman Pearlstine, has restored its reputation. It is hiring top talent from around the country, and working on its financial stability.
Like the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos several years earlier, this radical turn of events offers to give the Los Angeles Times what Bezos called “runway”—enough time and money to gain momentum, to stabilize, and to figure things out. That has worked extremely well for the Post, which describes itself now as profitable, in part because it redefined its audience as national, even global—no longer as mostly regional. With print advertising so diminished, and digital advertising going mostly to the big-tech platforms, success in garnering large numbers of digital subscriptions is an absolute necessity. Early difficulties in doing so resulted in some dire headlines, but that began to turn around in 2020, even before the pandemic hit and made its journalism even more essential. The Boston Globe has been relatively successful on this front, moving aggressively to incentivize its readers to become digital subscribers. Locally owned papers like the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, have managed to combine quality journalism and economic stability through forging close connections with subscribers.
Not every community has a Soon-Siong or a Bezos. In fact, this model remains a rarity. It is certainly not something that can be counted on to save the day across the country. There’s no law that says every billionaire will make a good owner, or that the very rich have any particular talent for the role. Consider what’s happened in Las Vegas, where casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson has bought the Review-Journal, a paper that previously had a strong reputation for tough reporting, particularly in holding the casino industry to account. Adelson soon started exerting influence on the coverage. A former ranking editor, James Wright, disclosed that, on orders from above, the paper provided “boosterish” coverage of Adelson’s efforts to move the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas. There were “glowing stories” about new restaurants at Adelson’s properties, “lapdog coverage” of federal investigations of his business practices, a “sudden elevation” of reporting on the basketball team at a school supported by the Adelsons, and “hyper-coverage” of the opening of the Sands’s new Macau property, which included flying staff to China. “It’s not like paper owners haven’t done things like this in the past,” Wright said. “But with Adelson, it’s on steroids.”
By contrast, Jeff Bezos has not attempted to influence coverage at the Washington Post. And in my experience over many years, Warren Buffett never called a single editorial shot at the Buffalo News.
Surveying other possible approaches to local news, Heidi Legg identified “mobilizers” and “accelerators.” Mobilizers, like the American Journalism Project, bolster local newsrooms with external support and staff. Another example is Report for America, which funds the addition of young journalists into existing newsrooms, for a limited time. It’s a national service project, an effort that has been compared to the Peace Corps. The first class of Report for America journalists entered newsrooms in 2018, with funding from some familiar names: the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, and Craig Newmark, among others. By 2020, the project had grown significantly, so that hundreds of young reporters were being dispatched throughout the United States.
Accelerators borrow their concepts from the startup model in the tech world, training journalists in growing and using digital tools. Included in this category are the Information Accelerator, the Lenfest Institute, Facebook Accelerator, Google News Initiative, and the Membership Puzzle at NYU.
Not all of these, though, have been entirely well received in the journalism community. Plenty of people think that Facebook’s and Google’s efforts to help local news are disingenuous or, at least, insufficient. After wrecking the business model, to their great financial advantage, they are essentially throwing their sofa change at the problem. In late 2019, Facebook announced that it would start paying publishers for their journalism. Some heralded the “Facebook News Tab” as an important step forward. But for the most part, it helps those publishers who are already on the road to survival: the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed News, and others. A few of the largest metro news organizations, including, for example, the Philadelphia Inquirer, will benefit. But the vast majority of local papers, especially those in heartland America, won’t see a dime. It’s hardly encouraging that Breitbart News, a platform for right-leaning propaganda and white-supremacist views rather than a legitimate news organization, was considered one of Facebook News’s “trusted sources.”
Another Facebook local-journalism effort, the Community Network, was expected to get about $1.5 million in funding in 2019—less than 1 percent of the company’s revenue in a day. Facebook’s broader Journalism Project is expected to receive $300 million in the next few years, about two days’ worth of the company’s revenue.
These efforts do show that the local-news crisis is increasingly getting more attention. The questions, though, are pressing ones: Will it be too late? Are any of them capable of making a major difference? One organization that is fighting a related battle is the News Media Alliance, which represents publishers. It was once known as the Newspaper Association of America; its name change—like that of the once-mighty American Society of Newspaper Editors, now the News Leaders Association—is just one more sign of the flagging influence of newspapers nationwide. In 2019, the News Media Alliance was throwing its weight behind a bill in both houses of Congress, one with bipartisan support, that would allow publishers to negotiate together with Facebook and Google. That would require a temporary anti-trust exemption, a so-called “safe harbor” for a four-year period, while the publishers would try to right their capsizing ships.
Would such an exemption really shore up newspapers’ flagging finances? David Chavern, chief executive of the News Media Alliance, wrote a widely circulated op-ed piece making the case that it would. Google and Facebook have profited immensely from the content supplied by publishers, he wrote, quoting a study that said Google made an estimated $4.7 billion in revenue from news content in 2018. Little of that came to the sources of the content. “While information may want to be free, journalists need to get paid,” Chavern wrote. “This requires finding common rules for a fair and equitable online ecosystem that allows publishers to maintain the quality of their content that readers expect.” A temporary “safe harbor” from anti-trust rules might be an important step in that direction, but as with all such measures involving local news, positive change comes haltingly with uncertain results, while the negative trends—the loss of newsroom jobs and the revenue that sustains them—continue at a breakneck pace.
Nicholas Lemann, dean emeritus of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and director of Columbia Global Reports (the publisher of this book), gives serious consideration to an idea to support public-interest reporting that journalists have traditionally run screaming from: direct government subsidy. “Almost all American journalists react to this idea with a strong visceral recoil, especially now,” Lemann wrote.
But the severity of the situation demands subjecting our automatic assumptions to more careful scrutiny. Government support can be structured in many different ways; great portions of the independent truth-seeking activity in the United States are funded by the government, reasonably successfully, despite enormous built-in potential for political interference. The Federal Reserve employs many more professional research economists than any economics department. Public libraries, almost all the time, are permitted to acquire their books and research materials freely. University research—indeed, universities generally, including private universities—are overwhelmingly supported by the government, including when their work touches on politically controversial subjects.
Lemann argues that “such government funding systems require several layers of built-in protection from the whims of elected officials. Usually these are peer-review mechanisms that determine where funding goes specifically and ensure that it cannot be cut off capriciously without warning.”
It may be an idea, once almost unthinkable, whose time has finally come. It’s not unreasonable, after all, to argue that one kind of government help—an anti-trust exemption for publishers, for example—should be no more troubling to journalistic purists than direct subsidies. I’m not sure that’s true, particularly in a time when the very notion of journalistic truth is under siege from political actors. We don’t want the likes of Donald Trump or disgraced Buffalo-area congressman Chris Collins deciding what constitutes “fake news” because it doesn’t serve their political purposes of the moment.
Certainly such a development would require careful consideration and built-in protections. So would some of the many suggestions that bubbled up in the spring of 2020, as news organizations reeled from the coronavirus meltdown. These included doubling federal funds for public media, and $500 million in spending for public-health ads through local media. In a sweeping Columbia Journalism Review piece, Steve Waldman, president of Report for America, offered a range of other ideas, including legislative and regulatory changes. Among them: adopting anti-trust and tax laws that would limit consolidation and “financialization” of local news; making it easier for commercial news organizations to convert into nonprofit entities, as the Salt Lake Tribune did in 2019; and enforcing the FCC’s “public interest obligation” for local commercial TV stations, with an emphasis on requiring local reporting.
I’m interested in anything reasonable that will help local journalism stay alive. As PEN America’s “Losing the News” study puts it, “a radical rethinking of local journalism as a public good” has become necessary. The report calls for the formation of a new congressional commission to “develop concrete recommendations for how the government can better support a free and independent local press.” I’m not persuaded that direct government subsidies to news organizations are a good idea but I also don’t rule them out. As with so many aspects of the local-journalism crisis, old ideas on this subject—however well founded and well accepted in an earlier era—should be subject to reexamination.