Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Press Forward, the philanthropic coalition with a mission to inject at least $500 million into local news over five years, announced $20 million in grants to 205 small local newsrooms across the United States on Wednesday.
The grantees are the first to receive funding from an open call by Press Forward, though funders have already invested more than $80 million in separate “aligned grantmaking,” director Dale Anglin told me. (Press Forward, first announced 13 months ago, now includes more than 60 funders, and counts 30 local chapters across the country. It is still on track to invest more than $100 million in the field by the end of 2024, Anglin added.)
When they announced the open call on closing local coverage gaps in April, the months-old Press Forward team, led by Anglin, expected to award $10 million to 100 newsrooms. They ended up doubling both the funds and number of grantees due to staggering interest, Anglin said, and the high quality of applications. In total, 931 local news outlets applied for funding.
The Press Forward grants provide unrestricted general operating support — a much sought-after category of funding that gives newsrooms flexibility to use funds as they see fit. The overwhelming majority of newsrooms will receive $100,000 over two years; eight small newsrooms are receiving $50,000, Press Forward spokesperson Marika Lynch said. Grantees told me they plan to use this funding for everything from salaries, to enhancing tech stacks and developing apps, to public records requests.
Grantees are diverse in geography, business model, medium, language, and age.
That range represents the diversity in models needed for the future of sustainable local news, Anglin said. “No one of them is the only model that’s going to save us.”
Anglin and her team wanted this open call to be accessible to the smallest, most cash and time-strapped newsrooms. “We didn’t just want the usual suspects,” Anglin told me, “and I think we did a good job at that.” They sought to make the application process streamlined and manageable, provided free coaches to work with newsrooms on their applications, and publicized the rubric used to evaluate newsrooms (though some applicants said they were unaware the rubric was public; Press Forward addressed those complaints).
Anglin was concerned that the smallest news organizations, with annual budgets under $250,000, still might not have time to fill out the grant application — but those outlets were represented in the application pool and grantees, she said.
The rubric includes sections on addressing gaps in coverage, community-centered, collaboration, sustainability, and leadership. Anglin told me she thought because investigative journalism is sometimes more visible, and valued more highly, than bread-and-butter community reporting, it was especially important to acknowledge and reward community-centered reporting in this open call.
“We want the field — other outlets and foundations — to understand, in our mind, those two are equal,” she said. “You need both investigative and community building, and no one is better than the other.”
Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, was a signatory of an open letter that made the rounds last fall calling for Press Forward to distribute its funding equitably. He was also, in this open call, an application reviewer and an organization he co-founded (Oakland Voices) received funding, though he was not involved in that application.
As a signatory of that letter, “it is exciting to see how 40% of grantees are BIPOC-led organizations, particularly since only 30% of applicants were BIPOC,” Reynolds told me. He wonders why more BIPOC-led outlets didn’t apply, he added, and hopes Press Forward will explore any potential barriers that limit newsrooms from applying. (Anglin emphasized the work Press Forward did to get in front of as many communities and get the word out in as many ways as possible for this open call.)
Reynolds appreciated that the application rubric explicitly named “communities of color” under the addressing gaps in coverage criterion, but would have liked to see race mentioned more explicitly in other sections of the rubric, including the leadership section.
While Reynolds saw Press Forward’s grantmaking in this open call as consistent with some demands of the open letter, in his view, it did not address one ask of “break[ing] the cycle of disinvestment and the disproportionate investment in white leaders and organizations with under-representation of people of color.”
By providing all organizations with the same $100,000, Press Forward “offered equality in its grant making, not equity,” he said. “Even as Press Forward is doing good, it is perpetuating existing disparities by not infusing reparative giving practices into its strategy.” He hopes to see Press Forward infuse those practices into future rounds of grantmaking.
Corinne Colbert, co-founder and editor-in-chief of grantee the Athens County Independent, “sat staring at my computer open-mouthed” when she got the email announcing the Indy would receive this grant. She works out of her living room, but “if the whole gang were in the same space when that news came through you would have been able to hear us screaming from space,” she said.
This application was especially consequential for her newsroom, Colbert said, because significantly more money was at stake compared to other grants she’s applied for. The Indy team relied on support from a fundraising consultant funded by Invest Appalachia to work on the application; Colbert compared this to “getting a good score on the SATs because you were able to get a tutor and test prep.”
Even though the grant application process was designed to be as painless as possible for small newsrooms, Colbert said crafting a narrative that would attract funding was still a tall order for a tiny newsroom. “The [Press Forward] application coaches were great, but it was still down to the individual outlets to devise and support a compelling narrative,” she said. “It’s a lot.”
“I don’t know if we’d have been able to make a compelling case if we had to write that grant entirely on our own,” she elaborated, “while also producing three newsletters a week, organizing events, securing sponsorships and advertising, etc.”
Sophia Qureshi, founder and editor-in-chief of 285 South, a publication serving immigrant and refugee communities in and around Atlanta, had a similar observation about how applying for this grant took her away from other operations within her newsroom.
Though the application was “relatively straightforward…the time I spent working on the application was time away from writing, editing, and reporting, and so that work doesn’t get done while I’m working on a grant, because 285 South is a micro newsroom,” she explained. “To ‘scale up,’ you sometimes have to slow down.”
Both Qureshi and Colbert highlighted salaries, and paying freelancers, as top priorities for using the funding. Colbert said the team is still in conversation about the best use of the funding, but is treating it “like venture capital…an investment in our growth.”
Colbert feels that $20 million, in the context of the $500 million Press Forward touts, is a drop in the bucket — especially when some aligned funders have given millions to single organizations that are not newsrooms (like Automattic, which received $5 million “to onboard and support hundreds of small and mid-sized news publishers” on Newspack.)
“We’re incredibly grateful to have been selected,” she emphasized, “but we’re also painfully aware that we could just as easily have been among the [700+] organizations that weren’t and need this funding just as badly as we do.”
Isaiah Buse is the owner and editor of Missouri’s Houston Herald, a nearly 150-year old legacy print publication serving Texas County, which has a population of about 24,000 (Houston, his hometown, has a population of 2,000). He purchased the publication last spring at age 20, fresh out of college.
Buse has been thinking about how to modernize the publication, and is considering using the funding to develop an app, but first plans to “go buy a pizza and…get 10 more community members in a room” to start a conversation about other ideas for how best to use the funding.
“It has to be spent well to have a return,” he said. “I don’t want to spend it on an app, and it turns out nobody wanted an app…I want to make sure I get it right with the chance I have here.”
The Independent Florida Alligator, the University of Florida’s independent student newspaper, was one of eight college publications to receive funding from Press Forward for this open call. The Alligator has applied for grants before, editor-in-chief Siena Duncan told me, but this was the first grant they’d applied for with a person on staff “specifically looking for grants,” she explained (that would be Caleb Wiegandt, the Alligator’s part-time philanthropy and development consultant).
Student newspapers are not immune from the financial pressures causing contractions in newsrooms across the country; the Alligator has “had to routinely cut down payment for stories, photos, and editing,” Duncan said, as well as consolidating positions across the newsroom. The grant will help alleviate some of the financial barriers to student journalism, she said — like paying for Ubers and Lyfts to reach assignments for students who don’t have cars, and providing cameras for photographers rather than expecting them to have their own.
Duncan told me the Alligator has the largest staff of any news publication in Gainesville today — and it balances coverage of student life with serving the surrounding community (Anglin told me Press Forward only selected college newspaper grantees that also served the community beyond their campus). The Alligator’s broader focus is evident in its coverage of both recent hurricanes.
Press Forward’s next open call will be announced after the election in November, Anglin said, and will focus on infrastructure — another of the four stated pillars of Press Forward. She expects the coalition to distribute “bigger, fewer grants” from that open call, and it will not have the same limit to budgets under $1 million.
As part of this application, all newsrooms had to create a profile in JustFund. That profile lives beyond this open call, and could connect applicants who didn’t receive this grant to other funding opportunities; it’s part of Press Forward’s plan to create a centralized database of vetted potential grantees that’s accessible to all other funders involved in the coalition, including community foundations rooted in the local chapters and other aligned funders.
“The promise of Press Forward is 1+1=3,” Anglin said.
Within this open call, Anglin told me that there were 100 to 200 newsrooms that were “close to making the cut.” She hopes the strategic thinking and work that organizations put into this application can be a “stepping stone” that makes applying to other grants, or approaching other funders, easier. To the majority of newsrooms that didn’t receive funding, she said, “I just don’t want people to feel like this is one and done.”
