“We’re Making Rapid Progress.” A Journalism Funding Leader Reflects on the State of Local News
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Sarabeth berman. Photo courtesy of the American Journalism Project.
The nonprofit Mississippi Today was founded in 2016 to provide free, nonpartisan coverage on an array of issues affecting the state’s residents. Three years later, the American Journalism Project (AJP), a venture philanthropy committed to strengthening local news, made a multi-year, $1 million investment in the organization.
Mississippi Today went on to double its annual revenue, launched two related organizations called Deep South Today and the New Orleans-based Verite, and earlier this year, won a Pulitzer Prize for what AJP CEO Sarabeth Berman called its “mind-boggling coverage” of the misuse of welfare funds in the state.
For Berman, the outlet’s growth, driven by a community-focused mindset and targeted philanthropic support, is a compelling and replicable roadmap for restoring local news across the country. “This organization didn’t exist until 2016,” she told me. “And now, just several years later, its journalism is receiving the highest accolades and they are looking to expand across the Deep South.”
Last month, the AJP announced its latest tranche of grants totaling $5.4 million to four nonprofits, including $1.1 million to Deep South Today, which will use the funds to build out a business infrastructure for its subsidiary outlets. With its latest announcement taken into account, the AJP has committed $55.3 million to 44 grantee partners in 33 states since its inception in 2019.
But the AJP does more than cut checks. It works with grantees to build capacity, develop business models comprising earned income and donations, and conducts “ecosystem assessments” to gauge a region’s demand for local news. It had been a year since I last chatted with Berman, and I was eager to get her take on the AJP’s latest round of funding, for-profit media’s compounding existential crisis, and how the nonprofit local news ecosystem is evolving.
“If there was a silver bullet, we would have solved this problem by now,” she said. “It takes time to shift mindsets and build capabilities of a new sector, but it’s happening, and we’re making rapid progress across the country.”
An expanding portfolio
A closer look at the other grantees in the AJP’s latest round of funding underscores how it supports outlets throughout their development. It gave $1 million to launch Spotlight Delaware, which focuses on education, land use issues and state politics. “We believe in their leadership,” Berman said. “They’ve pulled together a great board and they’ve raised local funding.” Spotlight Delaware sent out its inaugural newsletter last week.
The two remaining grantees are a bit more established. The AJP awarded $1.5 million to New York Focus, which was launched in 2020 to keep tabs on Albany’s political machinations. The outlet will use the funding to expand its newsroom, increase coverage around issue-specific beats, and place additional reporters across the state for regional reporting.
Lastly, Grist was launched in 1999 and focuses on exploring equitable solutions to climate change. The AJP awarded the outlet $925,000 to increase the volume of climate journalism in local communities by embedding reporters within local news organizations. “We think this is a smart strategy,” Berman said. “Climate change plays out at the local level, and Grist has the editorial know-how to serve communities. But communities also have access to all the federal funding pouring in related to climate, and that money needs to be followed.”
The investment in Grist is a part of the AJP’s portfolio focused on topic-specific newsrooms. Other grantees and their corresponding topics include Open Campus (higher ed), Chalkbeat (education) and the Marshall Project-Cleveland (criminal justice).
A tale of two sectors
The for-profit media sector has been hemorrhaging jobs for over 20 years, but recent developments have been abnormally grim by any objective measurement. Hundreds of reporters and editors have been laid off since the start of 2024 alone, and while talking to Berman, I couldn’t help but juxtapose the for-profit sector’s woes with so many promising developments on the nonprofit front.
For Berman, the two worlds are inextricably linked. As for-profit media contracts, civic-minded funders who are finding themselves navigating news deserts are giving the nonprofit model a second look. “Stories about the ‘media apocalypse’ are missing the shift that is underway,” she said, “which is this emergence of a new model for financing local news that moves away from looking at how the market can solve the problem and instead conceiving these outlets as civic goods.”
Berman cited the aggregate expansion of the nonprofit sector, the growing number of new funders entering the field, and the launch of Press Forward, a multifunder initiative to cultivate local news, as further evidence of this shift.
But there’s a lot of interplay between the for-profit and nonprofit journalism worlds, and a growing ecosystem could lead to new tensions. Writing in Local News Blues in January, Washington Media Institute Director Amos Gelg argued that when Paul Huntsman converted the Salt Lake Tribune to a nonprofit in 2019, beleaguered for-profits realized that by going the nonprofit route, they could access a new revenue stream and retain control of operations without having to answer to shareholders.
And so, as more nonprofits come online, competition for what is theoretically finite philanthropic dollars should intensify, effectively squeezing newsrooms in less-affluent regions that lack a deep bench of affluent place-based funders. “Is the increasing number of nonprofits actually good for us?” Gelg asks. “Are there too many deer in the forest to be sustainable?”
“Capital and great talent”
While there are a lot of unanswered questions, Berman referenced a handful of points that will become more resonant as outlets solicit support in an expanding field. For starters, simply saying local nonprofit news is a civic good isn’t going to cut it.
“Organizations need to not just do great journalism,” she said, “but be in constant conversation with their communities so that the community supports it and takes action.”
Funders will be inclined to support outlets that galvanize tangible civic participation — to a point. Referencing AJP’s venture philanthropy model providing outlets with what is akin to start-up capital, Berman noted that private dollars will always have a role in supporting nonprofit news, “but not the role.”
This put the onus on newsrooms to develop a revenue model consisting of both donations and earned revenue so they’re not disproportionately reliant on a single funder. To do so, leaders need to simultaneously excel at a broad set of competencies including identifying prospects, generating income through events and subscriptions, and “growing their audience in an environment in which the social media ecosystem is dramatically changing,” Berman said.
The key word there is “simultaneously.” Folks who’ve run a successful fundraising campaign may be less familiar with building out the newsroom’s brand on TikTok. Individuals who made the transition from the for-profit world can build a solid base of subscribers, but they’ve probably never made an in-person pitch to a wealthy local philanthropist. Asking outlets operating on a shoestring to do it all — and do it well — is a tall order, and Berman believes the best way to move the needle is through practice, experimentation and rigorous capacity-building.
Success breeds success, and as the sector grows, AJP will become better positioned to share operational guidance with its grantees and the sector. “The field is increasingly clear on what the potential revenue streams are,” Berman said. “At this point, it’s a matter of execution, and that takes capital and great talent.”
To this latter point, last December, the AJP launched its Product & AI Studio, a new program to help grantees strategically leverage emerging technologies. The program, which was made possible with support from OpenAI and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, awarded one- to two-year pilot grants ranging from $25,000 to $200,000 to 13 of AJP’s portfolio organizations. “As we build a new sector for nonprofit local news,” Berman said, “we need to be future-forward in terms of making sure that these organizations are adapting to new technology.”
The AJP will continue to make grants through the new program and add more organizations to its portfolio against the backdrop of a “media apocalypse” that shows no signs of waning. “We have the privilege of getting to work in this small part of the media industry that is growing and adding jobs,” Berman said. “So we’ll have plenty to talk about in six months or a year from now.”
