Major U.S. Philanthropic Groups Pledge $500 Million to Revive Local News, Bolster Democracy

EVANSTON, Ill - In one of the largest efforts to support America’s struggling local newsrooms, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation and 21 other U.S. philanthropic organizations have pledged $500 million over the next five years to try to revitalize local news.

The goal of the national initiative, called “Press Forward,” is to strengthen communities and democracy by bolstering local news and information outlets with financial support and grants aimed at countering the devastating impacts of technological disruption, news deserts, misinformation, deepening mistrust of the media and increasingly bitter partisan divisions.

“Press Forward will enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice,” the coalition of national, regional, local and issue-specific partners announced this month.

The initiative recognizes that the crisis in local news has emerged from the loss of more than a quarter of U.S. newspapers—some 2,500 of them--since 2005. The nation is expected to lose a third in all by 2025, according to Medill School of Journalism’s Local News Initiative (LNI) at Northwestern University.

The surviving news outlets, mostly dailies, have had to cut staff and lost circulation rapidly due to declining revenues and profits since the rise of the Internet, leaving one-fifth of all Americans living in news deserts. The 2022 Medill LNI report, “The State of Local News,” said that most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement and that the country has 6,380 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,150 weeklies. 

While there was an understandably sharp rise in audience and subscriptions for local news during the COVID-19 pandemic at home and abroad, the overall decline in local news is a global crisis hitting newsrooms from Mexico to the UK, and across Europe, the Mideast and Asia. The impact raises concerns not only about key local stories going uncovered but actual damage being done to communities if local journalists are not there to hold governments accountable.

The initiative by MacArthur is designed to counter that trend in the U.S., but it won’t be able to reverse it, not without more help. One of the coalition members of Press Forward, the Knight Foundation, for example, has already invested $632 million in local news initiatives since 2005. 

Moreover, the coalition aims to raise and invest $1 billion in the coming years to continue to support local news, and it has recommendations for how to catalyze a wider set of priorities and solutions to help the industry. MacArthur alone is investing $150 million in the project and plans to give even more.

In addition to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, the initial Press Forward partners include the Archewell Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Joyce Foundation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lumina Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others.

“We have a moment to support the reimagination, revitalization, and rapid development of local news. We are prepared to support the strongest ideas and seed new ones; build powerful networks; and invest in people, organizations, and networks with substantial resources,” said John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, in announcing the initiative on Sept. 7. 

“The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.”

The impact of the decline in America’s local news organizations has been especially detrimental to the nation’s communities and democracy, just as it has become a crisis in other nations around the world living in an era of increasing threats to press freedom, attacks on the news media and the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation online and in social media.

“This is a nation increasingly divided journalistically, between those who live and work in communities where there is an abundance of local news and those who don’t,” according to the Medill School report. “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital news organizations. 

“The loss of local journalism has been accompanied by the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens,” the report said. “In communities without a credible source of local news, voter participation declines, corruption in both government and business increases, and local residents end up paying more in taxes and at checkout.”

The Press Forward initiative is designed to accomplish four key goals:

• Strengthen local newsrooms that have the trust of their local communities, especially to support and expand the growing movement of community-focused journalism.

• Accelerate the enabling environment for news production and dissemination by expanding the infrastructure needed to support a thriving independent news sector.

• Close longstanding inequalities in journalism coverage and practice by moving resources to newsrooms and organization that are improving diversity of experience and thought, while helping expand them in historically underserved communities and news deserts.

• Advance public policies that expand access to local news and civic information, creating frameworks and ideas that increase access to news and information, strengthening the First Amendment and protecting the editorial independence of local journalists.

“While philanthropic support for journalism has grown over the past decade, overall giving to local news falls short of what is needed,” according to the MacArthur Foundation announcement about coalition initiative. “Press Forward funders are ready to move from individual grantmaking strategies to a shared vision and coordinated action that ensures individuals are informed and engaged on issues that affect their everyday lives.”

Building on years of non-profit and philanthropic investment in local news organizations, which still have not stemmed the decline of local news, the coalition is hoping to seek broader and deeper solutions to the problem. Press Forward is aimed squarely at trying to repair the critical threats to democracy, the public good and a well-informed electorate that are fueled by the decline in local news.

“As local newsrooms have disappeared across America, communities have witnessed fading civic engagement, eroding social bonds, surging misinformation, and dwindling governmental accountability,” observed a statement on the homepage of the Press Forward initiative.

Press Forward is independent of ideology, according to the MacArthur Foundation announcement, and plans to work with More Perfect, a bipartisan initiative that is advancing five interrelated democracy goals, one of which is Access to Trusted News and Information.

“Press Forward is an audacious effort to fortify a key pillar of American democracy, a healthy and independent free press,” declared John Bridgeland, CEO of More Perfect. “Local news provides critical information, knits communities together, and keeps public officials accountable, all of which are essential to a thriving democracy.”

While some of the 22 members of the coalition will be making aligned grants later this year, the main grantmaking part of the program will begin in 2024, and the pooled funding of the coalition will be overseen by the Miami Foundation as the fiscal sponsor of the project and coordinator of grants and aligned grants.

Organizations interested in learning more can sign up for updates about Press Forward and applying for grants, and the coalition welcomes and continues to invite additional funders.