Learning from the Press Forward Infrastructure Proposals: A Conversation with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro

On picking winners, letting things die and the need for consolidation of both newsrooms and intermediaries

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Last summer Press Forward made almost $23 million in grants to 22 organizations aimed at bolstering the infrastructure for local news. The grants were the culmination of a request for proposals process that began accepting applications in November 2024, and elicited 559 proposals.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, with support from Arnold Ventures (disclosure: an occasional consulting client of mine), was given the opportunity to review in depth all of those proposals, and has prepared a provocative and thoughtful report, entitled “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs,” which is beginning to circulate in the industry, and will be published next week by Media Impact Funders. (I’ll add a link here, and revise the wording of the previous sentence when that happens.) She generously agreed to talk with me ahead of the report’s formal publication.

Hansen Shapiro was the co-founder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News (for which I also did some consulting) from 2020 until February of last year. She has had research postings at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and sociology from Harvard Business School. Our conversation, which took place earlier this week, has been edited for length and clarity.

RT: Thank you for doing this. My sense is that you say in your report that people trying to build infrastructure need to distinguish between efforts that promote newsroom-based solutions, often focused on training and otherwise helping people individually, and field-based solutions-- and that they ought to favor field-based solutions. Do I have that right? And if so, why do you feel that way?

EHS: You have that exactly right. I feel like we’re coming to the end of a period where there’s been a lot of philanthropically-funded individual experimentation in newsrooms, lots of new newsrooms, lots of attempts to solve this problem of collapsing local journalism. Some of those solutions have achieved some level of scale. Some have not. I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.

RT: You also conclude that a lot of the funding focus on promoting experimentation and local responsiveness, while generally laudable, actually has inhibited efforts to grow newsrooms to scale. How has that happened and how should it be redressed?

EHS: Philanthropy tends to be very time bound and project based, which lends itself to newsroom by newsroom solutions. That’s how we’ve gotten down this path. But we have not, collectively as a field, then taken the second step of saying, what are the scaled solutions and how can we put the appropriate amount of growth capital into those solutions to get them to scale?

So we find ourselves at a point where there’s been a lot of experimentation. There are a lot of pieces on the field, so to speak, but the scaling capital has not followed on. Some of that, I think, is a check size problem Getting things to be bigger generally requires bigger checks and more sustained checks. But it’s also just difficult for any one institution to truly wrap its head around the breadth of what’s happening in the field, which is why this particular data set, I think, is so interesting.

RT: How do we address that, other than bigger checks?

EHS: Really take stock of what are the solutions that are out there that are working, that are ready to scale, that have a track record or that we have some confidence could grow into next generation field infrastructure, and then we basically pick winners.

This is the other theme of the report, which is hard to pull off in practice. I don’t think all philanthropic institutions are optimized for picking winners, but to solve systemic problems, that’s what needs to happen. Because when you have so many competing solutions, such as on publishing infrastructure, it just ends up being a waste of philanthropic capital.

One more thing on the picking winners: the flip side of that is being willing to let things die. One of the challenges of being in a predominantly nonprofit field is that there aren’t market mechanisms for things that are not working to stop. It’s very rare that things close or end. As a result, there ends up being an installed base of philanthropic need that muddies the waters as to where should bets be placed.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro

RT: You call for a reorientation away from any idea that institutional philanthropy will help indefinitely. Do you mean that at the individual newsroom level-- so no one should expect indefinite funding-- or are you saying we should expect institutional philanthropy to, at some point, move away from the field altogether?

EHS: That’s a really great question, and I think an important refinement of what I stated in the report. It’s from the perspective of individual newsrooms.

I’m calling for an orientation away from the idea that institutional philanthropy will help them indefinitely. That assumption is still very much embedded in the field, and, unfortunately, is propagating the number of family run newspapers, for example, that are now pursuing either philanthropic strategies or nonprofit conversions, There’s a sense that philanthropy is a business model savior. And at the level of individual newsrooms, I think that’s just not the case.

At the level of the system, you’re seeing a collapse in public sector funding for really important areas of social need in the country, and so philanthropies, I think, are having to make some hard choices about program areas and focal points. It’s hard for me to envision that institutional philanthropy would completely abandon quality news and information, because it has such an important nexus to democracy. But it’s not hard to imagine that other priorities will become increasingly salient and competitive for those dollars and that attention.

Limits of business training

RT: You observe that training programs offer only a limited and inadequate response to the paucity of available talent on the business side of newsrooms. Can you walk me through your thinking on that?

EHS: It’s certainly the case that many of these programs are transformative. I teach in one at CUNY, and I have seen my students learn new things and go on to do fabulous work. But at the level of the system, the challenge is that, particularly on the business side, career pathways are so broken and compensation so inadequate, that the field literally can’t attract enough outside talent to make any of this actually sustainable. So my concern is that you train people and they become better business people, they become better strategists, they become better leaders. But ultimately it ends up fueling a game of musical chairs, where people are moving between organizations, and I’m not sure you could argue that there’s a net increase in the sheer volume of talent in the field.

More M&A — for both newsrooms and intermediaries

RT: I read you as making a plea for industry consolidation, including putting more newsrooms under group umbrellas.

EHS: Yes, that’s correct.

RT: How do you see that happening?

EHS: I think that’s another important kind of collective action problem. I think some powerful funders who have credibility and institutional leadership and whose check size is big enough, have an enlightened view of consolidation and will push it where it seems reasonable.

But to really reach the level of consolidation that’s going to be needed, there’s going to have to be a culture shift in the industry, where people start talking about it and thinking of it as a legitimate strategy. And then, collectively, funders are going to have to get together and pool their institutional capital to push it in a new direction.

RT: I think it’s that a polite way of saying funders need to start forcing mergers.

EHS: I think so, but I don’t think any one funder will be able to force it as their own agenda.

RT: You also advocate consolidation among intermediaries. How should that be accomplished, and what role should institutional funders play there?

EHS: I hope that this analysis is happening, and if it’s not, I hope it happens as a result of this study. We really need to assemble a map of the existing set of intermediaries. What are the services that they offer? What are the value added activities? And then what do their constituents have to say?

I know for a lot of the small newsrooms that I’ve worked with, what I have heard is that it’s a real mixed bag in terms of the value that they receive from some intermediaries. There needs to be some sort of intelligent mapping and then to make some difficult choices about where there’s redundancy and where there’s services that might sound good on a program report, or in a funder pitch, but in terms of actual value delivered, don’t actually live up to that promise.

RT: So this, again, means institutional and other funders pushing for consolidation and pruning the field as well?

EHS: Yes. I realize what a tall order this is, because the funders have been the impetus for experimentation, and, you know, a million flowers blooming. The reason why I think this report is so provocative and challenging at the level of philanthropy is that that sort of strategic pruning, strategic allocation of capital at a field level, is much more difficult to pull off. But it is actually, I think, what’s necessary right now.

Listen more to audiences, less to funders

RT: Finally, I read your report to say that you think newsrooms are listening too much to what funders want and not enough to what audiences want. Again, is that correct?

EHS: Yes, I would say that is a fair takeaway.

RT: How do you suggest addressing that?

EHS: Nonprofit news organizations need philanthropy as part of their revenue strategy. I think the challenge comes where philanthropy distracts from a real understanding of product market fit. Audiences—citizens-- have different tastes and orientations than philanthropic individuals and institutions, and it is really hard to serve two masters.

I think there’s two ways to handle it. One is on the philanthropy side— and I think this is starting to happen— to be asking about audience, responsiveness, and not just impact; things like how many people you’re actually reaching, how many people you’re engaging.

And then I think on the newsroom side, leaders need to have sophisticated strategies that distinguish between what’s our content strategy that helps us make the philanthropic case, and what is our content strategy that helps us really build audience and be certain that we’re providing a valuable service to the community.

RT: Is there anything else that you wish I had asked?

EHS: I really do believe, looking at the incredible breadth of both problems framed, but also solutions offered in this data set, that we do have all the pieces that we need from an infrastructure and field perspective to build the next nonprofit, robust, sustainable local news system. So I don’t think we’re in a stage, any longer, of innovation. It really is a challenge of what are the scaling solutions.

There is one very big asterisk: the rise of artificial intelligence is both a strategic enabler for lots of these solutions, but also will be a disrupter in all kinds of ways that we don’t really understand yet.

RT: Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

EHS: You’re welcome. Thank you.