Rebuild Local News’ Matt Pearce is trying to help journalists and lawmakers speak the same language
For a growing number of local journalists and supporters of local journalism, the relevant question in 2026 is no longer, “Should public policy to support local news exist?” but “What should public policy to support local news look like here?”
At least 21 states and territories have proposed legislation intended to financially support local news — including government advertising set-asides, employment tax credits, newsroom fellowships, and small business advertising tax credits, among other models. Newsrooms are starting to see the money some enacted policies have unlocked. Organizations like Press Forward, INN, and LION are all dedicating more funding and resources toward the public policy frontier. And the nonprofit Rebuild Local News is hiring coordinators to coalition-build and advance policies in states with lots of activity like Pennsylvania and California.
All of this means many people who care about local journalism have inched, or swung, from considering lobbying antithetical to the duties of reporting to realizing they have a role to play in advocating for policies that could bring local newsrooms the dollars they need to survive.
“In the local journalism world, we are not super-duper experts at the political process,” Rebuild’s director of policy Matt Pearce told me. “The political arena is a different world from the one that we share with each other at conferences, in our trade publications.”
Pearce, who joined Rebuild last year after many years as a reporter and labor organizer at the Los Angeles Times, has experienced the steep learning curve of the political arena firsthand. Suspecting some busy Nieman Lab readers might value a crash course, I called Pearce in June to get his 10,000-foot view on some of the most important recent developments in local news policy and what he’s learned from his work with Rebuild. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.
They have [also] seen that other states, like New Jersey and Illinois, have made early efforts to do positive interventions in local news. [That makes legislators feel like] they’re not doing something super exotic or controversial. I think that’s part of what you’re seeing in this snowballing of political interest to do something. There are [now] proofs of concept out there that help make the case for them conceptually.
I think that’s very important, just raising expectations for what’s possible politically for the local news world — because our expectations are really very low after many decades of inertia. The sector broadly was so profitable for so long that the nature of the crisis was different in previous eras.
We got some really interesting data points in the early data back from Illinois and its Journalist Employment Tax Credit: [More than] half the dollars went downstate, outside of Chicago, and [the funding] was sent out with very little administrative overhead. It’s a very “efficient” public policy to have a big broad geographic distribution, compared to something like philanthropy, [which] sometimes can be more urban focused.
The other data point in that distribution was that most of the benefiting newsrooms were small. Two-thirds of them had six or fewer local journalists. So effectively it was a very efficient way to shoot dollars to a lot of different types of local news outlets, and to achieve a kind of minimum viable political coalition of all the diverse interests that can gain from this type of policy.
That said, we’ve made some improvements off of the first versions of the journalist employment subsidy. We now recommend, based on what we learned out of Illinois, that benefits be supercharged for the first five journalists employed at a local news outlet, which will end up shifting even more resources toward smaller publications. We also think it’s really important to include a new hire incentive.
I think those [changes to the journalist employment subsidy] signal something that policymakers find attractive when they’re trying to balance interests, because they are hearing from every direction, and all these different media stakeholders, about how well or not well policy works for them. The biggest friction point for this type of policy is that a lot of the very smallest micro producers — like a sole proprietor who uses a lot of freelance — are not fully covered.
It’ll take a whole suite of different interventions to try to cover the different corners of this space and create a balanced portfolio of public support….[At Rebuild], in developing our next round of model policies, we’re talking internally about [ways to] provide some targeted support for the very, very smallest micro publishers to balance out these other types of policies that are getting some political traction, but may be harder to access for [that group].
We don’t have a policy framework right now in the field as an active bill that directly addresses AI scraping across the gamut. There are conversations about [ideas like] organizing into licensing groups, collective rights management kind of like the music industry, copyright…So that is all very rich territory for a public policy conversation. The AI scraping conversation is very much an international conversation, too.
When I was first starting to do this type of work in 2022, there was way more resistance from the news community around me about concerns about government interference and [retaining independence]. [But] I think the writing is on the wall for a lot of folks: The economic crisis in the local news sector is so urgent that the balance of concerns have tipped toward some kind of intervention. And I think some of the early experiences, like in Illinois, have assuaged me [and show] that it is actually possible to create these policies in a way that respects press freedom and doesn’t create surface area for the executive branch to come in and reward or punish the press based on their journalism or expression. A lot of policies we’re working on are explicitly designed to avoid creating opportunities for coercion or capture or retaliation. There’s still philosophical conversations about what kind of government support is appropriate or inappropriate, and I think they’re extremely important, but that’s been something that I think has been reassuring.
The more that I do this stuff, the more that I am humbled by the complexity of interests and the need to just keep making marginal improvements every time we go to the plate. We can’t rest on our laurels and say, “We had a good idea. It’s the only idea that’s possible, the only framework that’s good.” [We have to remain] very sensitive to what we’re learning from the local news space, what we learn from the data, what we learn from the political process, and just continue to adapt. I think a lot of those little marginal improvements are going to quickly add up to a lot.
That’s not very sexy. A lot of what I’m doing is not sexy — in fact, a lot of the most important stuff I’m doing is completely out of public sight, [like] explaining to a legislative staffer where the fault lines are and the challenges they may run into. But it’s going to matter a lot.
The thing is, it doesn’t actually take all that much money to make a pretty significant difference for the beneficiaries. That’s encouraging — though it reflects, to some extent, how much the sector has shrunk. It doesn’t take that massive of an investment to make a big difference.