Fascinating and terrifically candid interview. For anyone is interested in the Lenfest Institute operates a pro bono M&A advisory service for local news staffed by the former finance chief of the Wall Street Journal and an experienced media investment banker. Parenthetically we have found over multiple engagements and mergers that these things go much, much better when driven by the entrepreneurs involved and not subject to any sort of shotgun marriage from funders.
Thank you Jim. The Lenfest advisory work is exactly the kind of infrastructure the field needs more of and your point about entrepreneur-driven versus funder-imposed consolidation is an important one the report ties to honor. The argument isn't that funders should mandate mergers; it's that they're currently the only actors positioned to absorb the transaction costs and transitional risk that make voluntary consolidation feasible in the first place. Without that support, even willing parties often can't get there -- as you and I both know firsthand. The incentive structure has to change before the field behavior (and results) truly will.
I want to read the actual report before I engage on all this, but my experience is calling something "infrastructure" and other things core (or "not" insfrastructure or whatever) is an arbitrary, and a very limiting distinction to make about about one business function or another. Much of the creativity one sees in business is taking something that everybody takes for granted and turning that into a competitive advantage. A business is just a bunch of functions and tasks tied together. Forcing an industry structure, limits learning and limits creativity.
My experience is also that real economics of consolidating what people think of as back office operational functions not only doesn't really provide cost savings. It simply shifts costs and creates rigidity and bureaucracy that serves only itself. Look at the share svc/overhead allocation model at any big university.
Thank you for clarifying Elizabeth. We are already received one significant outreach from my comment asking about our pro bono services—very much an entrepreneur-driven outreach in fact. Thank you for the great work you continue to do. Hope to see you soon.
Good interview and interesting comments. For anyone who's interested, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro is in our book, "What Works in Community News," and has been on our podcast (both at whatworks.news). I'm looking forward to reading Elizabeth's full report, and I appreciate Paul Bass' spot-on comments about scale. Paul's in our book and has been on our podcast, too. I also wrote a response to this interview, although I quickly swerved into some thoughts about AI: https://dankennedy.net/2026/03/06/local-doesnt-scale-how-community-publishers-can-survive-and-thrive-in-the-ai-era/
Great interview. I agree with a lot of what Elizabeth is saying. Philanthropy isn’t a business model, and it seems that a lot of local newsrooms backed in large part by foundation dollars have struggled mightily to develop anything resembling a business model. I was part of an interesting debate about why that is on a recent Columbia Journalism Review podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-kicker/id1178127323?i=1000750468010
I would respectfully argue that everything about this analysis is deeply and dangerously misguided, learning all the wrong lessons from the exciting first 20 years of experimentation with local digital -only news. This MBA-driven strategy poses a danger of wasting billions of more dollars trying to replicate a failed strategy of trying to scale up local news and impose top-down generic decisions that are based on a mergers and acquisition philosophy that might continue to produce profits for private equity, but proved disastrous when the 30% Gannett profit model no longer worked. I think that the Gannett model no longer works for local journalism because it is not fundamentally an efficient or productive way of selling goods. It certainly dumbed down and genericized what used to be a thriving and democratic profession. That period of scaling up local news was a blip in American economic history. Thankfully. Donors have already wasted so much money on projects like Houston Landing by investing capital in jobs that have nothing to do with journalism and creating bureaucracies that respond to the ideas and mission of people who are not living day to day in their communities and reporting news in conjunction with the people they live among. This approach seeks to recreate a predatory model of picking local winners in the interest of national scale and corporate investing, devoid of any connection to local communities or local news. The approach discussed here basically invites Alden Capital to destroy the exciting alternative to the legacy media it helped destroy.
I hope Elizabeth will speak for herself, but I do think you may be being unfair in concluding that calls for consolidation amount to an endorsement of a Gannett/Alden model. As I see it (and I have made such calls before myself), consolidation among nonprofits need not, and should not, reduxce the number of front-line staff such as reporters and engagement teams. But they might reduce the number of overhead roles, and also help build bigger audiences, which is key. And consolidation among intermediaries, which I have also advocated, should free up more money for newsrooms themselves.
Hi, Paul, thank you for engaging so seriously with this. I think you and I actually agree on more than this thread suggests. The consolidation argument in the report is aimed primarily at the intermediary layer. Those would be the journalism support organizations, shared service providers, and infrastructure platforms where there is genuine redundancy and where consolidation could free up significant capital for exactly what you're describing: more reporters, more editors, sustained over longer time horizons, in direct service to communities.
On newsrooms themselves, the report is much more cautious, states explicitly that in most places there aren't logical places to "cut," and is focused more on the incredibly robust range of regional collaborations appearing across the industry. The case I lay out for regional collaboratives and shared back-office functions is precisely about preserving local editorial autonomy and decision-making while reducing the operational burden that is crushing small newsrooms. That is the opposite of the Gannett model, not a version of it. I hope the full report, when it's out, makes that distinction clearer than the interview did.
First, I think it would be great if journalism looked at how nonprofits writ large have operated for decades and decades, rather than sometimes re-inventing the wheel.
There are whole types of organizations that have existed almost exclusively on philanthropy in the past and currently, so why not journalism?. Political campaigns (for example) exist solely on “donors” large and small, even though they aren’t 501c3 nonprofits. Churches exist almost exclusively on philanthropy — gifts large and small. While philanthropy is far from their only source of revenue, there is a reason universities, hospitals, health organizations focused on cancer, etc. all have large fundraising departments. There is a whole community of individuals called “Fundraising Professionals” that nonprofit journalism could be tapping into to learn best practices…rather than thinking that we need to train editors and reporters to be fundraisers (sorry, it’s entirely different skill sets).
Lumping all types of donor philanthropy into a single category and saying journalism can’t exist solely or chiefly on philanthropy is also a mistake and suggests a misunderstanding of the various flavors of philanthropy — and organizations that have existed almost exclusively on philanthropy in the past.
Philanthropy consists of major donors, annual fund donors, bequests and planned giving, events, corporate philanthropy and foundation giving. It is a mistake if an organization relies chiefly on foundation philanthropy (foundations tend to give to specific projects and only for a specific period of time) or a single major donor (a single major donor wants an exit strategy eventually). But it is not a mistake if an organization relies chiefly on cultivating a robust mix of annual fund giving, major gifts, foundations, sponsorships from corporations, events that raise money and awareness, and (over time) planned giving and bequests.
The next generation of foundation giving to journalism needs to be focused on building fundraising capacity — giving organizations the money they need to hire trained, talented fundraisers, pay them fairly, and allow them to build fundraising programs at individual nonprofit news organizations (or groups of nonprofit news outlets) that are self-sustaining when the foundation exits. Will this work at every nonprofit news room? Certainly not. But I think it’s the one major “experiment” that simply hasn’t been tried yet.
I'm also interested in the rise of Newspack and its seeming cornering of the market for publishing platforms. We recently signed on with them; happy so far. I wonder if the market might do some of the shaking out of "intermediaries."
Glad to hear you’ve had a good experience Paul. I won’t wade into the entire debate, but if there’s one element of the business that benefits from scale, it’s technology. Small news organizations need many of the same sophisticated tools that larger publications use to drive their business. And the only way to make them affordable is for the cost to be shared. With 330+ publishers on a common platform, Newspack in effect has created that kind of “shared service” – deploying technology that everyone needs to run a news operation while allowing for enough customization to address a variety of business models and editorial needs. (Roughly half our customers are for-profit, half nonprofit).
Philanthropy (principally from Google, Knight and Lenfest) has been critical to our success, giving us the financial runway we need to keep the service affordable while growing to a scale that allows us to operate in the black. The simple truth is that news tech is a hard business – largely because the news business itself is so financially challenged. To wit: Pico, a smart news-focused CRM and paywall solution that debuted in 2016, eventually abandoned its news customers because it couldn’t make enough money to satisfy its venture investors. Chorus, a much lauded CMS that was built by Vox and later marketed to other publishers, stopped licensing its tech in 2022 and eventually moved its own publications to WordPress. Two other lesser known efforts, Lede and The News Project, barely got off the ground.
The bet that our funders made is that the field benefits from having modern, scaled technology solutions that will stand the test of time. It’s not a sure bet. Nothing is. But in return for the confidence they showed in us, we’ve committed to open sourcing the code – which is widely used by other companies – and continuing to operate Newspack after the grants expire.
I do agree with you that there can be shared expenses that could cut costs for overhead. An excellent idea that can help local newsrooms work together to save money. That can work great through organizations like INN and LION. I fear that people might overestimate how much will be saved and underestimate the importance of prioritizing the cost of long-term local reporting and relying on local decision-making versus picking winners and losers from afar based on scale models. This interview was about scaling up. I think that was a fundamental error in the strategy for late 20th local journalism. I would argue the answer lies in scaling down, giving dedicated local people who know what they're doing the money to pay purely for reporters and editors over a longer period of time than current grantmaking allows, and not chasing the perverse dream replicating the self-sustaining bureaucratic advertiser-driven model that was a blip in American journalistic history. Of course I have no idea if the upcoming paper, unlike the interview, deals with the massive waste of money over the past 20 years invested in projects with the very approach described in the interview. If it doesn't, then it fails to learn one of the most important lessons of the period we've just been through.
The paper, as you will see, focuses on the proposed infrastructure grants. It is not a general theory of news philanthropy, and shouldn't be required to be.
I do think having fewer, stronger infrastructure pieces (e.g publishing platforms, legal services providers, membership consultants) probably makes sense. Would you disagree with that?
I used to think infrastructure was very important. But I can vibe code a Ghost/Newspack template to meet my specific needs and I'm able to create my own software agents — an automated fact checker, a research assistant, a copy editor, an infographic generator — after just two months in a MindStudio bootcamp.
We are already funding legal infrastructure for small news organizations — it's important we continue that but we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
The insurance seems overpriced, but that can be addressed.
The bottom line is we have the infrastructure covered at this point. We need to focus on ensuring we realize the full value of our creative contribution.
I used to think that what was needed was for philanthropists to provide money to pay reporters (and not for all the training and other things they like to fund). Then I launched a fact-based publication that only covered local news and was able to observe the behavior of the local news audience in my county — and also of the competitors. While the local publications want to collaborate and solve the business model problem together — the out-of-county publications prefer to rewrite our stories, typically without adding any additional information. That makes it challenging for a membership/subscription model to operate. AI can and probably will solve this, but we need to have a seat at the table so that the solution is healthy for our communities and democracy. One thing to understand is that much of the content distribution is happening on top of the broadband infrastructure that taxpayers built, if not through direct grant programs like the Inflation Reduction Act, then via depreciation write offs. AI is riding on top of this along with all the tiktok videos. And AI middleware layers are already optimizing content for aggregated communities. Local news is very valuable for these communities — the algorithms love Mendo Local's reporting because they can use it to connect to our audience — but it is not in the interest of the most powerful players to ensure that the local news producers are paid. We are small and as yet unorganized, and many producers are just wrapping their heads around how the world has changed in the last few years. I believe this is where we need to put our attention as a community.
Paul, I do think there is a way to create organizational containers for independent journalists that are a cross between collaborations and something else. This is one of the things Mendo Local Public Media is experimenting with. Even in a small, impoverished rural county there is enough money in low-cost ($30/year) memberships and sponsorships/advertising to sustain a newsroom where employees are paid the median income. But we won't get there with six micro-organizations competing with each other. Mendo Local is focused on is not picking a winner — we are looking out how we create value and build trust with other local organizations. We have a common goal — we want to provide our communities with news, and operate as professionals who work full-time, with health care, 401ks, media lawyers who will insure our investigations are bullet proof, and insurance to deter frivolous lawsuits from folks who want to shut us down that way.
THIS. “Scale” is not the answer. There are ways to support economic efficiency without losing newsroom autonomy — like having multiple organizations share the cost of back-end functions without having to cede their entire operational and editorial independence to a corporation. The concept of scale suits major philanthropy’s unwillingness to be part of a long-term solution for local news, allowing them to pick winners and losers on the grounds that “this is what works.” Nothing is THE answer; what works for one community may not fly in another. Does that mean that one of them is doing it wrong?
Anyway, philanthropy doesn’t exactly have the best track record of supporting successful programs — look at the News Startup Fund, which shepherded multiple newsrooms (including mine) through their early growth with general operating support, a tech stack, and a marketing budget implemented by marketing experts in collaboration with the newsroom *at no cost to the newsroom*. Does the Knight Foundation plan to continue this proven model? Nope. They’ve moved on to a different “this is what works.”
Don’t disagree with much of this, but do want to remind us all that a nonprofit merger does NOT create a profit-maximizing corporation. It could create a “multi-local” nonprofit.
Tax status isn’t the issue. For- or nonprofit, a business has to make more money than it spends. The issue is where decisions are made. Experience has shown that the greater the distance between the decision makers and those affected by decisions, the worse the outcomes. A local newsroom must be able to make editorial *and* operational decisions based on its own community, without influence or direction from a central node — regardless of tax status.
That's all true. But the difference between nonprofit and for-profit mergers is that while for-profits may deploy savings from efficiencies to the pockets of owners, nonprofits get to deploy those savings into more work, ideally at the front lines.
Thanks, Richard, for bringing scrutiny to what’s happening across the news business. I wish we had more of that. But few of us want to bite the hand that feeds us.
Still, I can’t help but read this conversation as a signal that philanthropy is preparing to pivot away from local news. In that sense, it echoes Craig Newmark’s recent explanation for why he is pulling back from funding journalism — namely that his investments didn’t produce enough long-term impact and that news outlets didn’t sufficiently prioritize their audiences (https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/craig-newmark-explains-why-hes-pulling-back-on-funding-journalism/). I suppose we should start bracing for the inevitable research paper explaining why Press Forward can’t support local news anymore.
Of course, philanthropy doesn’t “owe” the news industry anything. And it must be incredibly difficult to make good bets at scale. Press Forward itself has made that clear (https://dicktofel.substack.com/p/looking-into-press-forwards-mass). So has AJP (see: Houston Landing).
But I do take issue with the narrative that often follows these conclusions — the suggestion that the core problem is that newsroom leaders are poor business operators or that we simply haven’t paid enough attention to audiences. If philanthropy decides local news is too difficult to fix, that’s its prerogative. But blaming the people trying to rebuild journalism for the collapse of the news business feels like a convenient rewrite of history.
Elizabeth says: “I really do believe … 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.”
Really? I’d genuinely like to hear what those pieces are.
Take the Knight Media Forum this year. A panel on “the resurgence of regional newspapers” featured leaders from the Boston Globe, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Salt Lake Tribune — all papers backed by billionaires. Have they truly cracked the sustainability code? Or are they simply fortunate to have extraordinarily wealthy supporters?
Later we’re told that having many competing solutions — particularly around publishing infrastructure — wastes philanthropic capital.
Is this a reference to Newspack, the philanthropically backed WordPress platform? If that’s the model of field-level infrastructure success, the results so far have been mixed at best.
Or does it mean investing in national outlets that now position themselves as part of the “local news solution” — the New York Times, ProPublica, the AP, Frontline, Grist and others? Is it the Knight Foundation’s $30 million investment in the AP so it can distribute national stories to local outlets (https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2025/ap-fund-for-journalism-secures-over-30-million-to-bring-ap-content-to-local-us-newsrooms/)? Sure, local newsrooms provided glowing testimonials for that pilot — but those were required of participants, and now that the funding is secured, the pilot participants are being cut loose.
Or perhaps the “infrastructure” solution means continued investment in the growing ecosystem of well-funded/propped-up intermediaries — the BlueLenas, Blue Engines, News Revenue Hubs, and LMAs of the world — promising that they’ve cracked the sustainability code through improved “sales funnels.” Or more money for AJP’s one-size-fits-all dogmatic model. Or LION’s AI-generated sustainability audits.
Meanwhile, many of the organizations actually producing local journalism are still struggling to survive.
If philanthropy believes the future lies in infrastructure rather than newsrooms themselves, that’s an argument worth having. But it would be helpful to say that plainly — and to acknowledge the tradeoffs.
Because from where many of us sit, it increasingly feels like the people building the “solutions” ecosystem are doing just fine, while the newsrooms doing the work are still trying to keep the lights on.
Blair, thank you for this. It's the most substantive challenge in this thread and it deserves a real answer.
On "we have all the pieces": I should be more precise than the interview allowed. What I mean is that the field has enough working examples of things like regional collaboratives, shared service models, nascent (but growing) civic data infrastructure, place-based reporting networks - that we're not waiting for someone to invent the solution set for infrastructure. The Granite State News Collaborative, Colorado's statewide networks, the shared back-office models emerging through INN and LION are all proof of concept that valuable infrastructure exists. The constraint isn't imagination. It's coordination and capital allocation at the system level.
On your broader point about who benefits from the "solutions ecosystem" while newsrooms struggle - you're identifying something real, and the report addresses it directly. The intermediary layer has genuine redundancy, and some of that capital would do more good closer to the ground. That's not a comfortable argument for people in that layer, but it's what the data shows.
On Newspack specifically: shared publishing infrastructure is one of the clearer cases where the field benefits from not rebuilding the same thing 300 times. Whether any specific implementation is working well enough is a fair and separate question. and one the field should be asking rigorously. I also speak to this in a section of the report.
The harder question you're raising about whether funders are preparing to pivot away and using infrastructure arguments as cover is one I can't answer for them.
What I can say is that the report argues for more long-term philanthropic commitment to infrastructure, not less. The argument against indefinite org-by-org support is not an argument for abandonment of the field. It's an argument for being systemically thoughtful and rigorous, and restructuring where the capital goes in a time when philanthropic dollars are nowhere near the levels needed to meet demand.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful note, Blair, and for reading.
I don’t think philanthropy as a whole will pull away from local news. Indeed, I think local major gifts and memberships are both likely to increase, as they have been. I see this is the most important focus for local news revenues.
National institutional philanthropy may be a different story. In dollars, we arevery likely much closer to the end of Press Forward than to the beginning, and the track record is quite mixed. Rather than owning that, or indepedently evaluating it, I do think a quiet pivot will come at some point.
I do think the business sides of local nonprofits, in general, are still not as strong as they need to be. There are many exceptions to be sure— many of them supported by AJP— but this is still an issue.
Turning to infrastructure, yours is not the first comment I’ve gotten in the llast couple of days raising questions about Newspack. Can you elaborate? On those aiding membership, it does feel to me like some consolidation might be helpful. I would love to hear from others on this question.
Again, thanks for such an important contribution to the discussion.
Daniel and Kinsey, sorry if I came off as a jerk. I don’t think the BlueLenas, Blue Engines, Rev Hubs or Newspacks are evil. And I am grateful for everyone who is grappling with the big question about how to support and rebuild our news ecosystem. However, there does seem to be a class of organizations that have been picked as winners, such that lil’ news orgs are — if not quite forced — strongly pushed to the chosen-from-on-high tech stack or support services. It’s my understanding (and I could be wrong) that AJP grantees are pushed to fall in line, to access what is eye-poppingly expensive or over-leveraged, and how can they refuse when AJP is dropping cash at their feet, combing through their books and dictating “this is how you win”? We want news orgs to win and thrive based on market factors, but are we demanding the same of these “propped up” intermediaries — the very “infrastructure” that Elizabeth argues we need to prioritize?
Is anyone else concerned that we’re creating an environment where a small group of cool kids and of-the-moment media darlings are all traveling in the same circle, looking successful and prescient, but really just passing the same “infrastructure” dollars between themselves — juiced occasionally with another round of AJP or GNI or Press Forward money to “expand” or create “field-level models” but really just to obscure that it’s all a propped-up house of cards that doesn’t really add up and leaves so, so many behind?
As for Newspack: I just can’t understand how this was designated as the solution. There are better, cheaper, more sustainable, more modernized solutions, to say nothing of the fact that it’s all built on Wordpress, and we could have enabled news outlets to run their site on its tech for a couple hundred dollars a year instead of tens of thousands.
Hi Blair — I’m grateful for your thoughtful responses. I share many of your concerns.
Philanthropy has an important role to play in shaping an ecosystem where news can survive. At the same time, in some areas, well-intentioned efforts have been more harmful than helpful. I’m withholding judgment on the report until I’ve read it in full, but I’m already seeing some folks in the funder space take their own interpretation of the “consolidation is key” message and run with it, which feels premature. Elizabeth writes above, “There needs to be some sort of intelligent mapping,” yet people seem quick to point at perceived “redundancies” with little interrogation, and some are moving fast to capitalize off of that eagerness.
That tendency speaks to what may be my biggest grievance with the current state of philanthropy: when one funder coughs, the entire field catches a cold.
I think philanthropy needs to be far more transparent and conversant about what it’s investing in—and, more importantly, why and how.
I also echo Tracie Powell’s point below: “many funders lack the on-the-ground visibility to assess which models are truly driving impact, so those decisions often end up shaped by existing networks, advisors, and field insiders.” And I share your sense that some of the conference-circuit cool kids are preening atop a house of cards. I know this firsthand because I have the privilege of seeing a lot of audience and revenue data.
At the same time, there are real successes in this mix, many enabled by philanthropy. The problem is that without a clear, public articulation of the why and how behind investment decisions, the long shadow cast by bad bets obscures the good ones and creates false narratives. It becomes impossible to distinguish decisions driven by impact from those driven by networks.
This is somewhat self-serving, but take your characterization above: “We want news orgs to win and thrive based on market factors, but are we demanding the same of these ‘propped up’ intermediaries?”
I can’t speak for every intermediary, but at BlueLena whatever success we’ve had has been grounded in market forces. The limited philanthropic dollars we’ve received (Knight, via Lenfest) were structured to require us to earn them by delivering results—no publisher fees subsidized; modest grants used to build forward-looking capacity.
Even in the case of AJP, your description isn’t quite accurate. Our services are not subsidized by AJP for AJP publishers. We still have to independently sell to those clients based on performance with others, and we serve fewer than half the portfolio today. AJP is not dropping money at publishers’ feet for our services, nor have they required anyone to work with us. Our relationship with AJP is not philanthropic—we’re a vendor with a separate agreement to provide a service they purchased, subject to performance-based renewal.
That said, I completely understand why the perception exists. From the outside, one grant can look the same as another. And there are more than a few intermediary recipients whose track records may be built on relationships and networks rather than performance. In some cases, those investments don’t just waste philanthropic funds—they undermine market forces and create false competition where the market can’t bear it.
Which is why my biggest fear is that people will walk away from this report (regardless of the author’s intent) with a simplistic takeaway: we need to consolidate redundancies in "infrastructure." Without the thoughtful mapping Elizabeth describes—and without clear, public explanations of the why and how behind individual investment decisions—funders can’t be accountable and industry participants can’t be well informed.
My hope is that this doesn’t turn into a scenario where the original bad bets—made because someone knew someone from some job long ago—are simply aggregated into one bigger, badder bet. Because history shows how that can end. The housing market leading into 2008 is a pretty stark reminder.
I appreciate your analysis, Ned, and I am sure you're right about this — that I and others are lumping a bunch of these orgs (yours, Blue Engine, News Rev Hub, LION, et al) together with little true insight on which ones are demonstrating real ROI for their lil' news clients and which ones are not.
I can't deny that, and I know "proving" it to me or others is harder than it should be.
I read so many testimonials and I just don't buy them, knowing the huge incentive for news orgs to thank profusely, to prostrate themselves for a little money/help/publicity today and the hope for more tomorrow, if only we can make the right friends. I don't know, honestly, how to fix this situation so that we all have greater faith that the system is producing just/fair/equitable/righteous results, lifting up not just the best dressed leaders in the room, but those producing the best journalism.
And until we can address that visibility/verification problem, I will continue to advocate for a default argument: Prove it. (No, seriously, prove it — not in a glossy year-end impact report with wonderful data visuals and payola pull-quotes, but with the radical transparency you're describing.)
Addendum: I don't want the above to suggest that it's impossible to identify a bunch of garbage circulating at the consultancy/infrastructure level: LION's AI-slop "sustainability audits" are clearly funder-appeasing efforts with little to no value to newsrooms. And, of course, see previous comments regarding Newspack, and the fact it's deemed an infrastructural win tells us something is way, way off.
BlueLena will turn six next week. We have scaled to support a diverse collection of 300+ independent newsrooms representing membership in LION, INN, AAN, LMA, NNPA, NAHP and the Rural News Network. We are cash flow positive and do not rely on philanthropy directly, although many beneficiaries have chosen BlueLena as a solution provider. We’ve been able to afford one team retreat in our history (2023). I’m now planning to make t shirts for the team that say “Propped Up Intermediary” to celebrate the occasion. Thanks for the inspiration.
I also wonder how many years of City Hall, schools, criminal justice, and community coverage in one news desert could have been paid for with the money spent on studies like this. Then multiply it by how many other similar studies have taken place leading to this kind of conclusion, and how many news deserts could have been replenished instead.
The places most likely to be news deserts are in rural areas and in small communities. We don’t scale; as you pointed out, Gannett et al. tried that and couldn’t squeeze enough profit out of us to make it worth it. We already tried a market-based approach to local news in this country, and it created the crisis we’re trying to solve.
Your report argues that philanthropy needs to make bigger bets and “pick winners” among infrastructure organizations to build field-level capacity. But many funders lack the on-the-ground visibility to assess which models are truly driving impact, so those decisions often end up shaped by existing networks, advisors, and field insiders. How can the process of identifying and scaling “winners” become more rigorous and equitable—and what role might intermediaries with deep relationships across local news ecosystems play in helping funders see beyond the usual circles?
Thanks for the question, Dick. I should be clear that I don’t think this dynamic is unique to journalism philanthropy — it’s a common challenge in many philanthropic fields.
One example is simply visibility bias. Organizations whose leaders are already well connected to national journalism and philanthropic networks tend to surface early in funding conversations. They’re invited to conferences, serve on advisory groups, and appear in landscape scans. That visibility can be helpful, but it can also create a feedback loop where the same organizations keep appearing on funders’ radar while others doing strong work in their communities remain largely invisible. This visibility bias happens across the field but can be particularly harmful for organizations serving rural, suburban, and exurban communities.
Another example is the role of consultants and field advisors in interpreting a very complex ecosystem. Funders understandably rely on them to help make sense of hundreds of organizations and models. But those advisors inevitably bring their own networks and perspectives to the process. When the ecosystem is as fragmented as local news is today, that can unintentionally narrow the range of organizations that get serious consideration.
The challenge Elizabeth’s report raises is real: funders do need ways to identify what’s working and where scaling investments might make sense. My point is simply that if we’re going to make bigger bets, we should also think carefully about how the field develops better visibility into the full range of organizations and models operating across local communities.
That’s where I think intermediaries — particularly those that work closely with local news organizations across different regions and communities — can sometimes help provide a broader view of what’s actually happening on the ground.
Hi Tracie. The visibility bias point is one the report takes seriously and the proposal data show very clearly. The geographic concentration of new nonprofit outlets in metropolitan philanthropic centers clearly drives some of the proposal patterns (I write a whole section about this). The geographic concentration isn't accidental. It reflects rational responses to funding availability. But it produces exactly the structural inversion you're describing: the communities most in need of subsidized infrastructure are least likely to surface in the networks where funding decisions get made. Intermediaries with genuine ground-level relationships across under-resourced geographies are one of the few correctives to that. The report makes a distinction between intermediaries that reduce friction and increase reach vs. those that primarily add overhead. And the former are worth defending and strengthening!
Thanks for this thoughtful response, Elizabeth. I appreciate your point about the geographic concentration of funding shaping what surfaces in proposal pipelines—it’s an important dynamic for the field to understand more clearly. I also find the distinction you make between intermediaries that expand reach versus those that simply add overhead a helpful one. I look forward to reading the full report and digging into the data and analysis behind these patterns.
Your visibility-bias point is an important one and one that I second in my comment above: "Is anyone else concerned that we’re creating an environment where a small group of cool kids and of-the-moment media darlings are all traveling in the same circle, looking successful and prescient, but really just passing the same 'infrastructure' dollars between themselves — juiced occasionally with another round of AJP or GNI or Press Forward money to “expand” or create “field-level models” but really just to obscure that it’s all a propped-up house of cards that doesn’t really add up and leaves so, so many behind?"
Thanks for raising this, Blair. I share your concern about how visibility and network effects can shape which organizations and models gain traction in philanthropic conversations. When funding and attention circulate within relatively small circles, it becomes harder for the field to see the full range of work happening in communities across the country. That’s part of why developing better visibility into what’s happening on the ground — especially in under-resourced geographies — feels so important for the next phase of rebuilding local news.
I advise a local news organization that was funded in the first round of Press Forward grants. In the brief moment of giddy excitement following the PF announcement, it seemed that philanthropy had finally recognized that community specific solutions are needed to address local news issues. You can say all you want about consolidation creating scale that will put more reporters in the field. As long as the editorial and business decisions are being made elsewhere, the community is not being served. Touting consolidation is an admission that either you don't know how to be responsive and adaptable within your community, or you're too lazy to try.
Too bad reporters and editors didn't and still don't have any say where the big money goes. Big money goes to big money (my mother taught me that long time ago) or to friends to help them get big money (I noticed that.) Those of us still reporting unbiased local news should pat ourselves on the back. We are making it in spite of the disaster that has become philanthropy saving us. Of course we are not making the four hundred thousand dollar plus salaries that some of the wicked smart people leading the helper organizations are making. But I sleep good at night, at least when I'm not worried about paying our contract workers or how we can make time to expose corruption, which is happening. What do 606 employees of the National Trust for Local News do to revitalize news. THE NATIONAL TRUST FOR LOCAL NEWS IS DEDICATED TO REVITALIZING COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS, their 990 says. I hope they are reporting some news somewhere because there is a lot of news that simply goes unreported. We should all wonder why philanthropy would want to get involved in this messy news business (that could be dangerous to them) beyond a cocktail party boast. I’m not giving up, but you gotta wonder why we in the news business by this bull. Thanks Dick for shining a light where it is sorely needed. Reminds me of the great scene in the Wizard of Oz: https://youtu.be/R2wGui_NHPA?si=-mfLk_JnMlUlHSTQ
The employees of the National Trust for Local News owns and operates newspapers in three states -- Colorado, Georgia, and Maine. The employees include reporters in all of those newsrooms, but also ad sales, subscription management, printing press operators, and more. You can read more on their website: https://www.nationaltrustforlocalnews.org/maine
Somebody commented to me recently that the problem with philanthropic giving for the arts & journalism is that it's episodic, which I think is extremely true and gets to the heart of the second conclusion Elizabeth lays out in your discussion. I am curious to read how picking winners for long-term support squares with moving newsrooms away from the idea of indefinite support in her report - it seems as though the chosen few will still need what you might think of as indefinite funding. Looking forward to reading her findings.
Hi, Alex. Thanks for your comment. I want to be precise about what I mean. The argument against indefinite funding is directed at individual newsrooms. Specifically the assumption, still very much embedded in the field, that philanthropy is a viable long-term business model substitute. I am arguing that assumption is distorting strategy at the newsroom level and needs to be challenged.
Picking winners, by contrast, is an argument about infrastructure. Which I define as the shared systems, platforms, and services that serve many newsrooms at once. Those do require sustained, patient philanthropic capital, because they are collective goods that no single newsroom or market mechanism will fund adequately. So the logic is - less indefinite support for individual newsrooms, more long-term coordinated investment in the infrastructure layer that makes many newsrooms more viable simultaneously. The full report goes into this in more detail. Hope it's useful when it's out.
"... less indefinite support for individual newsrooms, more long-term coordinated investment in the infrastructure layer that makes many newsrooms more viable simultaneously."
Bingo.
This is the conclusion that I think will prove tragic and deadly for so much of the exciting new emerging local media landscape if it becomes the conventional wisdom among philanthropists. I agree that investing in shared infrastructure will save money and help newsrooms survive. I think the amount of savings is often overstated. And is much more relevant for projects in larger cities, wealthier communities, and statewide projects where there is a large potential base of financial support for long-term sustainability. That said, my experience informally advising and following startups for the last 20 years across the country has convinced me that in news deserts and communities with ghost legacy papers, there's a reason those shared infrastructure approaches did not work for the for-profit media: There is not enough local financial support to ever keep local news viable in any of those communities because of the more efficient and low-cost targeted ways of delivering commercial sales that have supplanted newspapers as viable local advertising vehicles. Or at least at a level to support several full-time reporters and editors with health insurance. Already, so much philanthropic money is being wasted on trying to prop up these models with nonjournalistic positions rather than paying for reporting and editing. A small community can have valuable,needed daily coverage of government, schools, criminal justice, and neighborhoods with three or four reporters and some freelancers. That might not win big awards that look impressive to faraway funders. It makes a game changing difference for people who live in those communities and for accountability of local decision makers. Funding those jobs in a community over 10 years would require a $3 million-$6 million investment total. (I know that from overseeing nonprofit online news projects for the past two decades. ) In the "old days" (pre-21st century, the frame of reference for most of the current philanthropic journalistic discussion), that would raise the question of what happens after 10 years for long-term stability. I would argue that with the pace of technological innovation today, 10 years has become 100 years. We have no idea how people are going to be accessing and sharing information in 10 years. So efforts to game it out, and put lots of money into a model beyond that time, are a waste of time, in my view. If we could convince philanthropists to donate $3 million-$6 million to newsrooms that have shown local commitment and connection and quality to support 10 years of newsgathering and publication, I think we could actually derive more bang for the buck and start reviving democracy at its most important level, local communities. That said, I know one size doesn't fit all. I'm thinking of the vast majority of local communities that fall below the radar of funders focused on wealthier or larger cities or regional projects.
Who paid for Ms. Shapiro’s “opportunity to review in depth all of those proposals”? If a government entity touted a consultant’s report, any journalist worth their salt would ask how much it cost and the impetus behind the report. But it seems like all basic principles of journalism disappear when folks write about journalism — possibly because all these people know and work with each other, so they’re perpetually preaching to their own choir … while those of us who actually work in journalism scream into the void.
Ooops, missed that — my bad. But this just proves my point: Since Arnold is a client of MIF, they get a highly visible platform to share results of a report that reflects their investment management philosophy. It’s not exactly an unbiased view; OF COURSE they’re going to say that scale and consolidation is the answer. When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.
Hi, Corinne. It's worth being precise here: I had the idea for this research last summer when it became clear the volume of proposals to the open call would make it an incredibly rich data set for understanding what's cooking in the field. Arnold Ventures agreed and commissioned me to do the research and brief them on my findings, Press Forward allowed the use of data, and I presented my findings to Arnold in January. Together we decided the analysis was so useful that others should be able to read and learn from it. I sought out MIF to publish it as a funder-facing education organization. Neither Arnold, MIF, nor Press Forward directed the analysis, reviewed findings before completion, or had any role in the conclusions. The report states explicitly that the findings and interpretations are solely mine, and that's not boilerplate. I'm not seeking journalism philanthropy, I'm not inside a funder, and I'm not running a news organization. That independence is frankly rare, and is exactly why Arnold commissioned me to pursue this rather than producing it internally. The full methodology is in the report when it's out Monday. I hope you'll read it and find it useful.
Elizabeth, I read the report. Nice work. Thought provoking. I appreciated your discussion of your methodology — especially the fact that "infrastructure" can be stretched to mean many things. I think you made many valid points, but I do think there's a disconnect between these funding proposals and the actual cost drivers/obstacles that the proposal writers face.
I am not convinced that, even if you share every back-office function perfectly, you can reduce marginal costs of producing local journalism by more than a modest amount. The true cost drivers of journalism are mostly human labor. For many of these small, independent outlets, staff reporters and editors account for 80-90% of their total expenses.
Fascinating and terrifically candid interview. For anyone is interested in the Lenfest Institute operates a pro bono M&A advisory service for local news staffed by the former finance chief of the Wall Street Journal and an experienced media investment banker. Parenthetically we have found over multiple engagements and mergers that these things go much, much better when driven by the entrepreneurs involved and not subject to any sort of shotgun marriage from funders.
Thank you Jim. The Lenfest advisory work is exactly the kind of infrastructure the field needs more of and your point about entrepreneur-driven versus funder-imposed consolidation is an important one the report ties to honor. The argument isn't that funders should mandate mergers; it's that they're currently the only actors positioned to absorb the transaction costs and transitional risk that make voluntary consolidation feasible in the first place. Without that support, even willing parties often can't get there -- as you and I both know firsthand. The incentive structure has to change before the field behavior (and results) truly will.
I want to read the actual report before I engage on all this, but my experience is calling something "infrastructure" and other things core (or "not" insfrastructure or whatever) is an arbitrary, and a very limiting distinction to make about about one business function or another. Much of the creativity one sees in business is taking something that everybody takes for granted and turning that into a competitive advantage. A business is just a bunch of functions and tasks tied together. Forcing an industry structure, limits learning and limits creativity.
My experience is also that real economics of consolidating what people think of as back office operational functions not only doesn't really provide cost savings. It simply shifts costs and creates rigidity and bureaucracy that serves only itself. Look at the share svc/overhead allocation model at any big university.
Looking forward to reading the actual report.
Thank you for clarifying Elizabeth. We are already received one significant outreach from my comment asking about our pro bono services—very much an entrepreneur-driven outreach in fact. Thank you for the great work you continue to do. Hope to see you soon.
This is brilliant.
I am sending it to colleagues at the Jewish publications we have supported. I am not sure if they would otherwise see it, and they need to.
Good interview and interesting comments. For anyone who's interested, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro is in our book, "What Works in Community News," and has been on our podcast (both at whatworks.news). I'm looking forward to reading Elizabeth's full report, and I appreciate Paul Bass' spot-on comments about scale. Paul's in our book and has been on our podcast, too. I also wrote a response to this interview, although I quickly swerved into some thoughts about AI: https://dankennedy.net/2026/03/06/local-doesnt-scale-how-community-publishers-can-survive-and-thrive-in-the-ai-era/
Great interview. I agree with a lot of what Elizabeth is saying. Philanthropy isn’t a business model, and it seems that a lot of local newsrooms backed in large part by foundation dollars have struggled mightily to develop anything resembling a business model. I was part of an interesting debate about why that is on a recent Columbia Journalism Review podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-kicker/id1178127323?i=1000750468010
Sounds like a really valuable report! I look forward to reading it. Lots of insight in the interview, thank you Richard!
I would respectfully argue that everything about this analysis is deeply and dangerously misguided, learning all the wrong lessons from the exciting first 20 years of experimentation with local digital -only news. This MBA-driven strategy poses a danger of wasting billions of more dollars trying to replicate a failed strategy of trying to scale up local news and impose top-down generic decisions that are based on a mergers and acquisition philosophy that might continue to produce profits for private equity, but proved disastrous when the 30% Gannett profit model no longer worked. I think that the Gannett model no longer works for local journalism because it is not fundamentally an efficient or productive way of selling goods. It certainly dumbed down and genericized what used to be a thriving and democratic profession. That period of scaling up local news was a blip in American economic history. Thankfully. Donors have already wasted so much money on projects like Houston Landing by investing capital in jobs that have nothing to do with journalism and creating bureaucracies that respond to the ideas and mission of people who are not living day to day in their communities and reporting news in conjunction with the people they live among. This approach seeks to recreate a predatory model of picking local winners in the interest of national scale and corporate investing, devoid of any connection to local communities or local news. The approach discussed here basically invites Alden Capital to destroy the exciting alternative to the legacy media it helped destroy.
First, thanks for reading.
I hope Elizabeth will speak for herself, but I do think you may be being unfair in concluding that calls for consolidation amount to an endorsement of a Gannett/Alden model. As I see it (and I have made such calls before myself), consolidation among nonprofits need not, and should not, reduxce the number of front-line staff such as reporters and engagement teams. But they might reduce the number of overhead roles, and also help build bigger audiences, which is key. And consolidation among intermediaries, which I have also advocated, should free up more money for newsrooms themselves.
Hi, Paul, thank you for engaging so seriously with this. I think you and I actually agree on more than this thread suggests. The consolidation argument in the report is aimed primarily at the intermediary layer. Those would be the journalism support organizations, shared service providers, and infrastructure platforms where there is genuine redundancy and where consolidation could free up significant capital for exactly what you're describing: more reporters, more editors, sustained over longer time horizons, in direct service to communities.
On newsrooms themselves, the report is much more cautious, states explicitly that in most places there aren't logical places to "cut," and is focused more on the incredibly robust range of regional collaborations appearing across the industry. The case I lay out for regional collaboratives and shared back-office functions is precisely about preserving local editorial autonomy and decision-making while reducing the operational burden that is crushing small newsrooms. That is the opposite of the Gannett model, not a version of it. I hope the full report, when it's out, makes that distinction clearer than the interview did.
First, I think it would be great if journalism looked at how nonprofits writ large have operated for decades and decades, rather than sometimes re-inventing the wheel.
There are whole types of organizations that have existed almost exclusively on philanthropy in the past and currently, so why not journalism?. Political campaigns (for example) exist solely on “donors” large and small, even though they aren’t 501c3 nonprofits. Churches exist almost exclusively on philanthropy — gifts large and small. While philanthropy is far from their only source of revenue, there is a reason universities, hospitals, health organizations focused on cancer, etc. all have large fundraising departments. There is a whole community of individuals called “Fundraising Professionals” that nonprofit journalism could be tapping into to learn best practices…rather than thinking that we need to train editors and reporters to be fundraisers (sorry, it’s entirely different skill sets).
Lumping all types of donor philanthropy into a single category and saying journalism can’t exist solely or chiefly on philanthropy is also a mistake and suggests a misunderstanding of the various flavors of philanthropy — and organizations that have existed almost exclusively on philanthropy in the past.
Philanthropy consists of major donors, annual fund donors, bequests and planned giving, events, corporate philanthropy and foundation giving. It is a mistake if an organization relies chiefly on foundation philanthropy (foundations tend to give to specific projects and only for a specific period of time) or a single major donor (a single major donor wants an exit strategy eventually). But it is not a mistake if an organization relies chiefly on cultivating a robust mix of annual fund giving, major gifts, foundations, sponsorships from corporations, events that raise money and awareness, and (over time) planned giving and bequests.
The next generation of foundation giving to journalism needs to be focused on building fundraising capacity — giving organizations the money they need to hire trained, talented fundraisers, pay them fairly, and allow them to build fundraising programs at individual nonprofit news organizations (or groups of nonprofit news outlets) that are self-sustaining when the foundation exits. Will this work at every nonprofit news room? Certainly not. But I think it’s the one major “experiment” that simply hasn’t been tried yet.
I'm looking forward to reading the full report! Good points all
I'm also interested in the rise of Newspack and its seeming cornering of the market for publishing platforms. We recently signed on with them; happy so far. I wonder if the market might do some of the shaking out of "intermediaries."
Glad to hear you’ve had a good experience Paul. I won’t wade into the entire debate, but if there’s one element of the business that benefits from scale, it’s technology. Small news organizations need many of the same sophisticated tools that larger publications use to drive their business. And the only way to make them affordable is for the cost to be shared. With 330+ publishers on a common platform, Newspack in effect has created that kind of “shared service” – deploying technology that everyone needs to run a news operation while allowing for enough customization to address a variety of business models and editorial needs. (Roughly half our customers are for-profit, half nonprofit).
Philanthropy (principally from Google, Knight and Lenfest) has been critical to our success, giving us the financial runway we need to keep the service affordable while growing to a scale that allows us to operate in the black. The simple truth is that news tech is a hard business – largely because the news business itself is so financially challenged. To wit: Pico, a smart news-focused CRM and paywall solution that debuted in 2016, eventually abandoned its news customers because it couldn’t make enough money to satisfy its venture investors. Chorus, a much lauded CMS that was built by Vox and later marketed to other publishers, stopped licensing its tech in 2022 and eventually moved its own publications to WordPress. Two other lesser known efforts, Lede and The News Project, barely got off the ground.
The bet that our funders made is that the field benefits from having modern, scaled technology solutions that will stand the test of time. It’s not a sure bet. Nothing is. But in return for the confidence they showed in us, we’ve committed to open sourcing the code – which is widely used by other companies – and continuing to operate Newspack after the grants expire.
Perfectly said Kinsey.
I do agree with you that there can be shared expenses that could cut costs for overhead. An excellent idea that can help local newsrooms work together to save money. That can work great through organizations like INN and LION. I fear that people might overestimate how much will be saved and underestimate the importance of prioritizing the cost of long-term local reporting and relying on local decision-making versus picking winners and losers from afar based on scale models. This interview was about scaling up. I think that was a fundamental error in the strategy for late 20th local journalism. I would argue the answer lies in scaling down, giving dedicated local people who know what they're doing the money to pay purely for reporters and editors over a longer period of time than current grantmaking allows, and not chasing the perverse dream replicating the self-sustaining bureaucratic advertiser-driven model that was a blip in American journalistic history. Of course I have no idea if the upcoming paper, unlike the interview, deals with the massive waste of money over the past 20 years invested in projects with the very approach described in the interview. If it doesn't, then it fails to learn one of the most important lessons of the period we've just been through.
The paper, as you will see, focuses on the proposed infrastructure grants. It is not a general theory of news philanthropy, and shouldn't be required to be.
I do think having fewer, stronger infrastructure pieces (e.g publishing platforms, legal services providers, membership consultants) probably makes sense. Would you disagree with that?
I used to think infrastructure was very important. But I can vibe code a Ghost/Newspack template to meet my specific needs and I'm able to create my own software agents — an automated fact checker, a research assistant, a copy editor, an infographic generator — after just two months in a MindStudio bootcamp.
We are already funding legal infrastructure for small news organizations — it's important we continue that but we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
The insurance seems overpriced, but that can be addressed.
The bottom line is we have the infrastructure covered at this point. We need to focus on ensuring we realize the full value of our creative contribution.
I used to think that what was needed was for philanthropists to provide money to pay reporters (and not for all the training and other things they like to fund). Then I launched a fact-based publication that only covered local news and was able to observe the behavior of the local news audience in my county — and also of the competitors. While the local publications want to collaborate and solve the business model problem together — the out-of-county publications prefer to rewrite our stories, typically without adding any additional information. That makes it challenging for a membership/subscription model to operate. AI can and probably will solve this, but we need to have a seat at the table so that the solution is healthy for our communities and democracy. One thing to understand is that much of the content distribution is happening on top of the broadband infrastructure that taxpayers built, if not through direct grant programs like the Inflation Reduction Act, then via depreciation write offs. AI is riding on top of this along with all the tiktok videos. And AI middleware layers are already optimizing content for aggregated communities. Local news is very valuable for these communities — the algorithms love Mendo Local's reporting because they can use it to connect to our audience — but it is not in the interest of the most powerful players to ensure that the local news producers are paid. We are small and as yet unorganized, and many producers are just wrapping their heads around how the world has changed in the last few years. I believe this is where we need to put our attention as a community.
Paul, I do think there is a way to create organizational containers for independent journalists that are a cross between collaborations and something else. This is one of the things Mendo Local Public Media is experimenting with. Even in a small, impoverished rural county there is enough money in low-cost ($30/year) memberships and sponsorships/advertising to sustain a newsroom where employees are paid the median income. But we won't get there with six micro-organizations competing with each other. Mendo Local is focused on is not picking a winner — we are looking out how we create value and build trust with other local organizations. We have a common goal — we want to provide our communities with news, and operate as professionals who work full-time, with health care, 401ks, media lawyers who will insure our investigations are bullet proof, and insurance to deter frivolous lawsuits from folks who want to shut us down that way.
THIS. “Scale” is not the answer. There are ways to support economic efficiency without losing newsroom autonomy — like having multiple organizations share the cost of back-end functions without having to cede their entire operational and editorial independence to a corporation. The concept of scale suits major philanthropy’s unwillingness to be part of a long-term solution for local news, allowing them to pick winners and losers on the grounds that “this is what works.” Nothing is THE answer; what works for one community may not fly in another. Does that mean that one of them is doing it wrong?
Anyway, philanthropy doesn’t exactly have the best track record of supporting successful programs — look at the News Startup Fund, which shepherded multiple newsrooms (including mine) through their early growth with general operating support, a tech stack, and a marketing budget implemented by marketing experts in collaboration with the newsroom *at no cost to the newsroom*. Does the Knight Foundation plan to continue this proven model? Nope. They’ve moved on to a different “this is what works.”
Don’t disagree with much of this, but do want to remind us all that a nonprofit merger does NOT create a profit-maximizing corporation. It could create a “multi-local” nonprofit.
Tax status isn’t the issue. For- or nonprofit, a business has to make more money than it spends. The issue is where decisions are made. Experience has shown that the greater the distance between the decision makers and those affected by decisions, the worse the outcomes. A local newsroom must be able to make editorial *and* operational decisions based on its own community, without influence or direction from a central node — regardless of tax status.
That's all true. But the difference between nonprofit and for-profit mergers is that while for-profits may deploy savings from efficiencies to the pockets of owners, nonprofits get to deploy those savings into more work, ideally at the front lines.
I have just updated this piece with a link to Elizabeth's report.
Link is broken, Dick! :)
Thanks, Ned. Should be working now
Thanks, Richard, for bringing scrutiny to what’s happening across the news business. I wish we had more of that. But few of us want to bite the hand that feeds us.
Still, I can’t help but read this conversation as a signal that philanthropy is preparing to pivot away from local news. In that sense, it echoes Craig Newmark’s recent explanation for why he is pulling back from funding journalism — namely that his investments didn’t produce enough long-term impact and that news outlets didn’t sufficiently prioritize their audiences (https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/craig-newmark-explains-why-hes-pulling-back-on-funding-journalism/). I suppose we should start bracing for the inevitable research paper explaining why Press Forward can’t support local news anymore.
Of course, philanthropy doesn’t “owe” the news industry anything. And it must be incredibly difficult to make good bets at scale. Press Forward itself has made that clear (https://dicktofel.substack.com/p/looking-into-press-forwards-mass). So has AJP (see: Houston Landing).
But I do take issue with the narrative that often follows these conclusions — the suggestion that the core problem is that newsroom leaders are poor business operators or that we simply haven’t paid enough attention to audiences. If philanthropy decides local news is too difficult to fix, that’s its prerogative. But blaming the people trying to rebuild journalism for the collapse of the news business feels like a convenient rewrite of history.
Elizabeth says: “I really do believe … 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.”
Really? I’d genuinely like to hear what those pieces are.
Take the Knight Media Forum this year. A panel on “the resurgence of regional newspapers” featured leaders from the Boston Globe, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Salt Lake Tribune — all papers backed by billionaires. Have they truly cracked the sustainability code? Or are they simply fortunate to have extraordinarily wealthy supporters?
Later we’re told that having many competing solutions — particularly around publishing infrastructure — wastes philanthropic capital.
Is this a reference to Newspack, the philanthropically backed WordPress platform? If that’s the model of field-level infrastructure success, the results so far have been mixed at best.
Or does it mean investing in national outlets that now position themselves as part of the “local news solution” — the New York Times, ProPublica, the AP, Frontline, Grist and others? Is it the Knight Foundation’s $30 million investment in the AP so it can distribute national stories to local outlets (https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2025/ap-fund-for-journalism-secures-over-30-million-to-bring-ap-content-to-local-us-newsrooms/)? Sure, local newsrooms provided glowing testimonials for that pilot — but those were required of participants, and now that the funding is secured, the pilot participants are being cut loose.
Or perhaps the “infrastructure” solution means continued investment in the growing ecosystem of well-funded/propped-up intermediaries — the BlueLenas, Blue Engines, News Revenue Hubs, and LMAs of the world — promising that they’ve cracked the sustainability code through improved “sales funnels.” Or more money for AJP’s one-size-fits-all dogmatic model. Or LION’s AI-generated sustainability audits.
Meanwhile, many of the organizations actually producing local journalism are still struggling to survive.
If philanthropy believes the future lies in infrastructure rather than newsrooms themselves, that’s an argument worth having. But it would be helpful to say that plainly — and to acknowledge the tradeoffs.
Because from where many of us sit, it increasingly feels like the people building the “solutions” ecosystem are doing just fine, while the newsrooms doing the work are still trying to keep the lights on.
Blair, thank you for this. It's the most substantive challenge in this thread and it deserves a real answer.
On "we have all the pieces": I should be more precise than the interview allowed. What I mean is that the field has enough working examples of things like regional collaboratives, shared service models, nascent (but growing) civic data infrastructure, place-based reporting networks - that we're not waiting for someone to invent the solution set for infrastructure. The Granite State News Collaborative, Colorado's statewide networks, the shared back-office models emerging through INN and LION are all proof of concept that valuable infrastructure exists. The constraint isn't imagination. It's coordination and capital allocation at the system level.
On your broader point about who benefits from the "solutions ecosystem" while newsrooms struggle - you're identifying something real, and the report addresses it directly. The intermediary layer has genuine redundancy, and some of that capital would do more good closer to the ground. That's not a comfortable argument for people in that layer, but it's what the data shows.
On Newspack specifically: shared publishing infrastructure is one of the clearer cases where the field benefits from not rebuilding the same thing 300 times. Whether any specific implementation is working well enough is a fair and separate question. and one the field should be asking rigorously. I also speak to this in a section of the report.
The harder question you're raising about whether funders are preparing to pivot away and using infrastructure arguments as cover is one I can't answer for them.
What I can say is that the report argues for more long-term philanthropic commitment to infrastructure, not less. The argument against indefinite org-by-org support is not an argument for abandonment of the field. It's an argument for being systemically thoughtful and rigorous, and restructuring where the capital goes in a time when philanthropic dollars are nowhere near the levels needed to meet demand.
Elizabeth, your willingness to engage/argue/defend publicly is really admirable.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful note, Blair, and for reading.
I don’t think philanthropy as a whole will pull away from local news. Indeed, I think local major gifts and memberships are both likely to increase, as they have been. I see this is the most important focus for local news revenues.
National institutional philanthropy may be a different story. In dollars, we arevery likely much closer to the end of Press Forward than to the beginning, and the track record is quite mixed. Rather than owning that, or indepedently evaluating it, I do think a quiet pivot will come at some point.
I do think the business sides of local nonprofits, in general, are still not as strong as they need to be. There are many exceptions to be sure— many of them supported by AJP— but this is still an issue.
Turning to infrastructure, yours is not the first comment I’ve gotten in the llast couple of days raising questions about Newspack. Can you elaborate? On those aiding membership, it does feel to me like some consolidation might be helpful. I would love to hear from others on this question.
Again, thanks for such an important contribution to the discussion.
Daniel and Kinsey, sorry if I came off as a jerk. I don’t think the BlueLenas, Blue Engines, Rev Hubs or Newspacks are evil. And I am grateful for everyone who is grappling with the big question about how to support and rebuild our news ecosystem. However, there does seem to be a class of organizations that have been picked as winners, such that lil’ news orgs are — if not quite forced — strongly pushed to the chosen-from-on-high tech stack or support services. It’s my understanding (and I could be wrong) that AJP grantees are pushed to fall in line, to access what is eye-poppingly expensive or over-leveraged, and how can they refuse when AJP is dropping cash at their feet, combing through their books and dictating “this is how you win”? We want news orgs to win and thrive based on market factors, but are we demanding the same of these “propped up” intermediaries — the very “infrastructure” that Elizabeth argues we need to prioritize?
Is anyone else concerned that we’re creating an environment where a small group of cool kids and of-the-moment media darlings are all traveling in the same circle, looking successful and prescient, but really just passing the same “infrastructure” dollars between themselves — juiced occasionally with another round of AJP or GNI or Press Forward money to “expand” or create “field-level models” but really just to obscure that it’s all a propped-up house of cards that doesn’t really add up and leaves so, so many behind?
As for Newspack: I just can’t understand how this was designated as the solution. There are better, cheaper, more sustainable, more modernized solutions, to say nothing of the fact that it’s all built on Wordpress, and we could have enabled news outlets to run their site on its tech for a couple hundred dollars a year instead of tens of thousands.
Hi Blair — I’m grateful for your thoughtful responses. I share many of your concerns.
Philanthropy has an important role to play in shaping an ecosystem where news can survive. At the same time, in some areas, well-intentioned efforts have been more harmful than helpful. I’m withholding judgment on the report until I’ve read it in full, but I’m already seeing some folks in the funder space take their own interpretation of the “consolidation is key” message and run with it, which feels premature. Elizabeth writes above, “There needs to be some sort of intelligent mapping,” yet people seem quick to point at perceived “redundancies” with little interrogation, and some are moving fast to capitalize off of that eagerness.
That tendency speaks to what may be my biggest grievance with the current state of philanthropy: when one funder coughs, the entire field catches a cold.
I think philanthropy needs to be far more transparent and conversant about what it’s investing in—and, more importantly, why and how.
I also echo Tracie Powell’s point below: “many funders lack the on-the-ground visibility to assess which models are truly driving impact, so those decisions often end up shaped by existing networks, advisors, and field insiders.” And I share your sense that some of the conference-circuit cool kids are preening atop a house of cards. I know this firsthand because I have the privilege of seeing a lot of audience and revenue data.
At the same time, there are real successes in this mix, many enabled by philanthropy. The problem is that without a clear, public articulation of the why and how behind investment decisions, the long shadow cast by bad bets obscures the good ones and creates false narratives. It becomes impossible to distinguish decisions driven by impact from those driven by networks.
This is somewhat self-serving, but take your characterization above: “We want news orgs to win and thrive based on market factors, but are we demanding the same of these ‘propped up’ intermediaries?”
I can’t speak for every intermediary, but at BlueLena whatever success we’ve had has been grounded in market forces. The limited philanthropic dollars we’ve received (Knight, via Lenfest) were structured to require us to earn them by delivering results—no publisher fees subsidized; modest grants used to build forward-looking capacity.
Even in the case of AJP, your description isn’t quite accurate. Our services are not subsidized by AJP for AJP publishers. We still have to independently sell to those clients based on performance with others, and we serve fewer than half the portfolio today. AJP is not dropping money at publishers’ feet for our services, nor have they required anyone to work with us. Our relationship with AJP is not philanthropic—we’re a vendor with a separate agreement to provide a service they purchased, subject to performance-based renewal.
That said, I completely understand why the perception exists. From the outside, one grant can look the same as another. And there are more than a few intermediary recipients whose track records may be built on relationships and networks rather than performance. In some cases, those investments don’t just waste philanthropic funds—they undermine market forces and create false competition where the market can’t bear it.
Which is why my biggest fear is that people will walk away from this report (regardless of the author’s intent) with a simplistic takeaway: we need to consolidate redundancies in "infrastructure." Without the thoughtful mapping Elizabeth describes—and without clear, public explanations of the why and how behind individual investment decisions—funders can’t be accountable and industry participants can’t be well informed.
My hope is that this doesn’t turn into a scenario where the original bad bets—made because someone knew someone from some job long ago—are simply aggregated into one bigger, badder bet. Because history shows how that can end. The housing market leading into 2008 is a pretty stark reminder.
I appreciate your analysis, Ned, and I am sure you're right about this — that I and others are lumping a bunch of these orgs (yours, Blue Engine, News Rev Hub, LION, et al) together with little true insight on which ones are demonstrating real ROI for their lil' news clients and which ones are not.
I can't deny that, and I know "proving" it to me or others is harder than it should be.
I read so many testimonials and I just don't buy them, knowing the huge incentive for news orgs to thank profusely, to prostrate themselves for a little money/help/publicity today and the hope for more tomorrow, if only we can make the right friends. I don't know, honestly, how to fix this situation so that we all have greater faith that the system is producing just/fair/equitable/righteous results, lifting up not just the best dressed leaders in the room, but those producing the best journalism.
And until we can address that visibility/verification problem, I will continue to advocate for a default argument: Prove it. (No, seriously, prove it — not in a glossy year-end impact report with wonderful data visuals and payola pull-quotes, but with the radical transparency you're describing.)
Addendum: I don't want the above to suggest that it's impossible to identify a bunch of garbage circulating at the consultancy/infrastructure level: LION's AI-slop "sustainability audits" are clearly funder-appeasing efforts with little to no value to newsrooms. And, of course, see previous comments regarding Newspack, and the fact it's deemed an infrastructural win tells us something is way, way off.
One thing about this industry that is not in short supply are uninformed critics with opinions.
Well, that’s one way to engage with criticism.
BlueLena will turn six next week. We have scaled to support a diverse collection of 300+ independent newsrooms representing membership in LION, INN, AAN, LMA, NNPA, NAHP and the Rural News Network. We are cash flow positive and do not rely on philanthropy directly, although many beneficiaries have chosen BlueLena as a solution provider. We’ve been able to afford one team retreat in our history (2023). I’m now planning to make t shirts for the team that say “Propped Up Intermediary” to celebrate the occasion. Thanks for the inspiration.
Here's an important and thoughtful piece Daniel has out today that takes this further:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/need-growth-capital-journalism-infrastructure-daniel-williams-vkzie/
I also wonder how many years of City Hall, schools, criminal justice, and community coverage in one news desert could have been paid for with the money spent on studies like this. Then multiply it by how many other similar studies have taken place leading to this kind of conclusion, and how many news deserts could have been replenished instead.
The places most likely to be news deserts are in rural areas and in small communities. We don’t scale; as you pointed out, Gannett et al. tried that and couldn’t squeeze enough profit out of us to make it worth it. We already tried a market-based approach to local news in this country, and it created the crisis we’re trying to solve.
And many many more studies to come.
Your report argues that philanthropy needs to make bigger bets and “pick winners” among infrastructure organizations to build field-level capacity. But many funders lack the on-the-ground visibility to assess which models are truly driving impact, so those decisions often end up shaped by existing networks, advisors, and field insiders. How can the process of identifying and scaling “winners” become more rigorous and equitable—and what role might intermediaries with deep relationships across local news ecosystems play in helping funders see beyond the usual circles?
Thanks for reading, and for this interesting and potentially very important point. Can you give an example to two you’ve seen of this phenomenon?
Thanks for the question, Dick. I should be clear that I don’t think this dynamic is unique to journalism philanthropy — it’s a common challenge in many philanthropic fields.
One example is simply visibility bias. Organizations whose leaders are already well connected to national journalism and philanthropic networks tend to surface early in funding conversations. They’re invited to conferences, serve on advisory groups, and appear in landscape scans. That visibility can be helpful, but it can also create a feedback loop where the same organizations keep appearing on funders’ radar while others doing strong work in their communities remain largely invisible. This visibility bias happens across the field but can be particularly harmful for organizations serving rural, suburban, and exurban communities.
Another example is the role of consultants and field advisors in interpreting a very complex ecosystem. Funders understandably rely on them to help make sense of hundreds of organizations and models. But those advisors inevitably bring their own networks and perspectives to the process. When the ecosystem is as fragmented as local news is today, that can unintentionally narrow the range of organizations that get serious consideration.
The challenge Elizabeth’s report raises is real: funders do need ways to identify what’s working and where scaling investments might make sense. My point is simply that if we’re going to make bigger bets, we should also think carefully about how the field develops better visibility into the full range of organizations and models operating across local communities.
That’s where I think intermediaries — particularly those that work closely with local news organizations across different regions and communities — can sometimes help provide a broader view of what’s actually happening on the ground.
Hi Tracie. The visibility bias point is one the report takes seriously and the proposal data show very clearly. The geographic concentration of new nonprofit outlets in metropolitan philanthropic centers clearly drives some of the proposal patterns (I write a whole section about this). The geographic concentration isn't accidental. It reflects rational responses to funding availability. But it produces exactly the structural inversion you're describing: the communities most in need of subsidized infrastructure are least likely to surface in the networks where funding decisions get made. Intermediaries with genuine ground-level relationships across under-resourced geographies are one of the few correctives to that. The report makes a distinction between intermediaries that reduce friction and increase reach vs. those that primarily add overhead. And the former are worth defending and strengthening!
Thanks for this thoughtful response, Elizabeth. I appreciate your point about the geographic concentration of funding shaping what surfaces in proposal pipelines—it’s an important dynamic for the field to understand more clearly. I also find the distinction you make between intermediaries that expand reach versus those that simply add overhead a helpful one. I look forward to reading the full report and digging into the data and analysis behind these patterns.
Your visibility-bias point is an important one and one that I second in my comment above: "Is anyone else concerned that we’re creating an environment where a small group of cool kids and of-the-moment media darlings are all traveling in the same circle, looking successful and prescient, but really just passing the same 'infrastructure' dollars between themselves — juiced occasionally with another round of AJP or GNI or Press Forward money to “expand” or create “field-level models” but really just to obscure that it’s all a propped-up house of cards that doesn’t really add up and leaves so, so many behind?"
Thanks for raising this, Blair. I share your concern about how visibility and network effects can shape which organizations and models gain traction in philanthropic conversations. When funding and attention circulate within relatively small circles, it becomes harder for the field to see the full range of work happening in communities across the country. That’s part of why developing better visibility into what’s happening on the ground — especially in under-resourced geographies — feels so important for the next phase of rebuilding local news.
I advise a local news organization that was funded in the first round of Press Forward grants. In the brief moment of giddy excitement following the PF announcement, it seemed that philanthropy had finally recognized that community specific solutions are needed to address local news issues. You can say all you want about consolidation creating scale that will put more reporters in the field. As long as the editorial and business decisions are being made elsewhere, the community is not being served. Touting consolidation is an admission that either you don't know how to be responsive and adaptable within your community, or you're too lazy to try.
Too bad reporters and editors didn't and still don't have any say where the big money goes. Big money goes to big money (my mother taught me that long time ago) or to friends to help them get big money (I noticed that.) Those of us still reporting unbiased local news should pat ourselves on the back. We are making it in spite of the disaster that has become philanthropy saving us. Of course we are not making the four hundred thousand dollar plus salaries that some of the wicked smart people leading the helper organizations are making. But I sleep good at night, at least when I'm not worried about paying our contract workers or how we can make time to expose corruption, which is happening. What do 606 employees of the National Trust for Local News do to revitalize news. THE NATIONAL TRUST FOR LOCAL NEWS IS DEDICATED TO REVITALIZING COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS, their 990 says. I hope they are reporting some news somewhere because there is a lot of news that simply goes unreported. We should all wonder why philanthropy would want to get involved in this messy news business (that could be dangerous to them) beyond a cocktail party boast. I’m not giving up, but you gotta wonder why we in the news business by this bull. Thanks Dick for shining a light where it is sorely needed. Reminds me of the great scene in the Wizard of Oz: https://youtu.be/R2wGui_NHPA?si=-mfLk_JnMlUlHSTQ
The employees of the National Trust for Local News owns and operates newspapers in three states -- Colorado, Georgia, and Maine. The employees include reporters in all of those newsrooms, but also ad sales, subscription management, printing press operators, and more. You can read more on their website: https://www.nationaltrustforlocalnews.org/maine
Somebody commented to me recently that the problem with philanthropic giving for the arts & journalism is that it's episodic, which I think is extremely true and gets to the heart of the second conclusion Elizabeth lays out in your discussion. I am curious to read how picking winners for long-term support squares with moving newsrooms away from the idea of indefinite support in her report - it seems as though the chosen few will still need what you might think of as indefinite funding. Looking forward to reading her findings.
Hi, Alex. Thanks for your comment. I want to be precise about what I mean. The argument against indefinite funding is directed at individual newsrooms. Specifically the assumption, still very much embedded in the field, that philanthropy is a viable long-term business model substitute. I am arguing that assumption is distorting strategy at the newsroom level and needs to be challenged.
Picking winners, by contrast, is an argument about infrastructure. Which I define as the shared systems, platforms, and services that serve many newsrooms at once. Those do require sustained, patient philanthropic capital, because they are collective goods that no single newsroom or market mechanism will fund adequately. So the logic is - less indefinite support for individual newsrooms, more long-term coordinated investment in the infrastructure layer that makes many newsrooms more viable simultaneously. The full report goes into this in more detail. Hope it's useful when it's out.
"... less indefinite support for individual newsrooms, more long-term coordinated investment in the infrastructure layer that makes many newsrooms more viable simultaneously."
Bingo.
This is the conclusion that I think will prove tragic and deadly for so much of the exciting new emerging local media landscape if it becomes the conventional wisdom among philanthropists. I agree that investing in shared infrastructure will save money and help newsrooms survive. I think the amount of savings is often overstated. And is much more relevant for projects in larger cities, wealthier communities, and statewide projects where there is a large potential base of financial support for long-term sustainability. That said, my experience informally advising and following startups for the last 20 years across the country has convinced me that in news deserts and communities with ghost legacy papers, there's a reason those shared infrastructure approaches did not work for the for-profit media: There is not enough local financial support to ever keep local news viable in any of those communities because of the more efficient and low-cost targeted ways of delivering commercial sales that have supplanted newspapers as viable local advertising vehicles. Or at least at a level to support several full-time reporters and editors with health insurance. Already, so much philanthropic money is being wasted on trying to prop up these models with nonjournalistic positions rather than paying for reporting and editing. A small community can have valuable,needed daily coverage of government, schools, criminal justice, and neighborhoods with three or four reporters and some freelancers. That might not win big awards that look impressive to faraway funders. It makes a game changing difference for people who live in those communities and for accountability of local decision makers. Funding those jobs in a community over 10 years would require a $3 million-$6 million investment total. (I know that from overseeing nonprofit online news projects for the past two decades. ) In the "old days" (pre-21st century, the frame of reference for most of the current philanthropic journalistic discussion), that would raise the question of what happens after 10 years for long-term stability. I would argue that with the pace of technological innovation today, 10 years has become 100 years. We have no idea how people are going to be accessing and sharing information in 10 years. So efforts to game it out, and put lots of money into a model beyond that time, are a waste of time, in my view. If we could convince philanthropists to donate $3 million-$6 million to newsrooms that have shown local commitment and connection and quality to support 10 years of newsgathering and publication, I think we could actually derive more bang for the buck and start reviving democracy at its most important level, local communities. That said, I know one size doesn't fit all. I'm thinking of the vast majority of local communities that fall below the radar of funders focused on wealthier or larger cities or regional projects.
It makes strategic sense to teach someone to fish beside a clean, flowing river. Not so useful in a desert.
Who paid for Ms. Shapiro’s “opportunity to review in depth all of those proposals”? If a government entity touted a consultant’s report, any journalist worth their salt would ask how much it cost and the impetus behind the report. But it seems like all basic principles of journalism disappear when folks write about journalism — possibly because all these people know and work with each other, so they’re perpetually preaching to their own choir … while those of us who actually work in journalism scream into the void.
As I said in the introduction, her work on this was supported by Arnold, and is being published my Media Impact Funders.
Ooops, missed that — my bad. But this just proves my point: Since Arnold is a client of MIF, they get a highly visible platform to share results of a report that reflects their investment management philosophy. It’s not exactly an unbiased view; OF COURSE they’re going to say that scale and consolidation is the answer. When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.
Hi, Corinne. It's worth being precise here: I had the idea for this research last summer when it became clear the volume of proposals to the open call would make it an incredibly rich data set for understanding what's cooking in the field. Arnold Ventures agreed and commissioned me to do the research and brief them on my findings, Press Forward allowed the use of data, and I presented my findings to Arnold in January. Together we decided the analysis was so useful that others should be able to read and learn from it. I sought out MIF to publish it as a funder-facing education organization. Neither Arnold, MIF, nor Press Forward directed the analysis, reviewed findings before completion, or had any role in the conclusions. The report states explicitly that the findings and interpretations are solely mine, and that's not boilerplate. I'm not seeking journalism philanthropy, I'm not inside a funder, and I'm not running a news organization. That independence is frankly rare, and is exactly why Arnold commissioned me to pursue this rather than producing it internally. The full methodology is in the report when it's out Monday. I hope you'll read it and find it useful.
Having now read the report in its entirety, it’s a real gift and thank you Elizabeth for the detail, care and fairness in producing it.
Elizabeth, I read the report. Nice work. Thought provoking. I appreciated your discussion of your methodology — especially the fact that "infrastructure" can be stretched to mean many things. I think you made many valid points, but I do think there's a disconnect between these funding proposals and the actual cost drivers/obstacles that the proposal writers face.
I am not convinced that, even if you share every back-office function perfectly, you can reduce marginal costs of producing local journalism by more than a modest amount. The true cost drivers of journalism are mostly human labor. For many of these small, independent outlets, staff reporters and editors account for 80-90% of their total expenses.