News

It’s time for local news funders to pick winners, scale up, and force mergers, a new report argues

Nieman Lab · Richard Tofel · last updated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen more to audiences, less to funders

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

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

Tofel: How do you suggest addressing that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hansen Shapiro: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Richard Tofel was founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica, and was its president from 2013 until September 2021. This post originally appeared on Second Rough Draft, his newsletter about journalism — subscribe here.

View full article

here today, more tomorrow

We’re launching briefing.center with a focus on the press and media.

And we’re adding Citizen Cartwright, a daily quick-read news summary by veteran Washington journalist Linda Cartwright. (Sign-up for a dedicated morning email is available at Citizencartwright.com.)

We’re readying our first policy briefing.center, on energy and climate. We’d love to hear from you in what our other policy priorities should be.

You can use briefing.center as the center of your information management, or just one of your tools. We’re happy to discuss your connectivity needs.

Sign up