Once a mainstay of American culture and society, local news has been on the decline over the past two decades. According to the Medill Local News Initiative’s State of Local News Project 2025 report, almost 40% of all local newspapers in the U.S. have vanished since 2005. A total of 212 counties have no local news sources whatsoever, and another 1,525 counties have only one news source remaining. In total, 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news.
Rural areas have been especially impacted. The report found that almost 80% of all news deserts are in counties the USDA has classified as rural. Furthermore, in many rural or underserved regions, public media is often the only source of local news. That means that Congress’ decision last year to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity responsible for administering federal funding for public media, hit those in rural and tribal areas particularly hard.
“It’s been a big conversation for us, regionally, how many rural communities rely on their local public media stations for emergency reporting and how critical that was to communities when Hurricane Helene struck… In rural places, when we don’t have access to public media, it can literally be a life-and-death situation,” said Stephanie Hyre, chief program officer at the Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation and co-chair of the steering committee for Press Forward Central Appalachia’s Rural News Fund.
The good news is that the philanthropic sector has not only increased its support for journalism overall in recent years — it’s focused particularly on backing local news. However, as the State of Local News report noted, “Philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.”
However, a wide range of funders of all stripes, including powerhouse institutional funders like the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, funder collaboratives, billionaire donors like Connie Ballmer, and smaller place-based funders, are supporting rural news.
Below, we take a look at a few examples of this work and why it’s critical for funders to continue — or even increase — their support.
Press Forward Central Appalachia and the Rural News Fund
One important funding initiative that’s bolstering journalism in rural America is Press Forward, the national, philanthropy-backed network working to strengthen local news across the country. Launched in 2023 with the support of 22 funders, Press Forward had the goal of mobilizing $500 million over a period of five years. After only two years, Press Forward had already moved $400 million and is now supported by more than 100 funders.
There are currently 44 Press Forward Locals, regional chapters that coordinate and mobilize commitments from place-based funders, provide access to training and capacity-building to help local newsrooms grow, advocate for local news and foster collaboration across regions.
Last year, Press Forward Central Appalachia launched as a partnership between Appalachia Funders Network (AFN), Invest Appalachia, and Media Growth Partners. Press Forward Central Appalachia is housing the research and learning portion of the work while Invest Appalachia manages the Rural News Fund, a funding mechanism to support local news in the region.
“Press Forward Central Appalachia was really a response to a convergence of challenges that we are facing here in Central Appalachia,” said Ryan M. Eller, executive director of AFN and co-chair of the coordinating committee of the Rural News Fund.
These challenges include the major economic transition Appalachia is experiencing as it moves away from an economy based on coal and other extractive practices to a more sustainable one, and the loss of public media funding that has disproportionately affected rural and historically marginalized communities. Like other largely rural areas, Appalachia is also underfunded by philanthropy. According to AFN, Central Appalachia “contains the highest concentration of news deserts in the country.”
According to Hyre, Press Forward Central Appalachia has partnered with the Poynter Institute to help regional and national funders better understand the news business in the region and to educate funders about both the importance of funding similar work and improving outcomes and best practices.
In February, Rural News Fund announced its inaugural multi-year cohort. Members represent all six states in the Central Appalachian region. “Something we’re really proud of is the diversity among those cohort members. We have some legacy media organizations, more startups and community news… About half of the cohort are public media,” Hyre said. “We have a good blend of lifting up underrepresented voices throughout the region, throughout the nation, really.”
For instance, there’s Black by God, a community-led news organization that centers the Black Appalachian experience, and Enlace Latino NC, which primarily serves a Spanish-speaking audience.
Like other local news funding initiatives, Press Forward Central Appalachia recognizes the importance of sustainable funding. “The data has suggested that, particularly in rural and in places like Central Appalachia, not only are there not enough philanthropic resources to really sustain an entire news industry; all we would be doing is largely setting newsrooms up for failure because they would then be competing with the rest of civil society for those limited grant dollars,” Eller said.
The Rural News Fund will provide a wide variety of support, including technical assistance funding, preparing cohort members to accept different forms of capital, a peer learning space, and “navigators,” coaches to help cohort members with grant reporting.
“Our hope and our belief is that whatever works in Central Appalachia can, in some ways, be, in a positive way, like a canary in the coal mine for the rest of rural America,” Eller said. “If it works here, we can hopefully build upon and replicate these models.”
LOR Foundation’s news funding in Montana and the Mountain West
The LOR Foundation, which was founded by Amy Wyss and Ed Jaramillo, works in several rural communities across the Mountain West. Although LOR’s funding isn’t primarily focused on journalism, it still provides support for rural media, though the specifics vary by year. In addition to supporting local outlets in the communities it serves through advertising, it has also funded the Daily Yonder — the only national news organization for rural people and places — the American Press Institute and Solutions Journalism Network, among others.
LOR also provides project-specific grants to local outlets. For instance, it awarded funding to Questa Del Rio News, a nonprofit monthly newspaper serving Northern Taos County and the Enchanted Circle, to help develop its online presence and create a digital archive of its print editions. LOR also directed funding to Cortez’s local radio station, KSJD, so it could hire a local reporter after a local news outlet shut down.
On the research side, LOR published a special report on Montana’s media landscape, which found that although there were 230 news outlets in the state — 218 being local outlets — more than half of the state’s counties had either zero or only one outlet reporting original local news for their communities. This research had a significant impact as it provided impetus to create the Montana Press Forward chapter.
“As an organization dedicated to helping local people improve quality of life across all kinds of issues, LOR regularly sees the critical role local news outlets play in rural communities. Not only do these outlets keep rural residents informed about important topics like wildfires and local schools, but they also serve as points of community connection, often highlighting local people or providing local businesses with a place to advertise,” said Gary Wilmot, executive director of the LOR Foundation and a past IP guest contributor. “Supporting them means ensuring the people who live in rural places… have access to the essential information they need and deserve.”
Helmsley Charitable Trust’s support for rural health news
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, which counts rural healthcare as one of its main areas of focus, is the funder behind the Rural Health Desk at KFF Health News, a national nonprofit newsroom from KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation). In 2022, Helmsley awarded an initial $3.9 million grant to establish the Rural Health Desk, which produces explanatory, enterprise and investigative rural health reporting. Helmsley awarded a second grant of $5.2 million at the end of 2024, bringing its total contributions to $9.1 million.
Some of the topics that the Rural News Desk has covered include how federal cuts are impacting healthcare, the opioid epidemic, mental health, hospital closures, abortion access, rising healthcare costs, advancements in healthcare-related technology, and health policy.
Helmsley’s only requirement for the news desk is that it informs people of what’s going on in their region when it comes to health and wellness. “We don’t tell them what to write. We make sure that they have their independence. We don’t give any suggestions,” said Walter Panzirer, trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust and the grandson of the trust’s co-founder Leona M. Helmsley.
To date, the Rural Health Desk has produced more than 400 articles, videos and podcasts in English and Spanish. These stories have been distributed free of charge through more than 800 outlets across the nation.
“This is an avenue to help the public get well-informed [on] policies [and] different things that might affect them… It’s the media that helps educate the public, and it’s so important because it gives rural people a voice,” Panzirer said. “It allows a voice to be at the table. It allows awareness, so if there’s something that doesn’t seem right, it gives the opportunity for rural people to step up and bring it to light and say their concerns about it.”
While the Rural Health Desk was founded to focus on the states Helmsley serves through its rural healthcare program — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana and Nevada — its work has had an impact in other areas in the country. For instance, a series about bad medical-debt-collecting practices led to a new law in Colorado that bars hospitals from suing patients under the names of debt collectors.
Helmsley’s support for the Rural Health Desk is an example of the cross-pollination effect of local media support: A funder that doesn’t typically fund journalism has found it useful to back local news as a way to make a difference on an issue that they serve — in this case, rural healthcare.
“If you’re not educating people of the issues, of all those areas, those areas are going to be challenged,” Panzirer said. “We care deeply about health. That’s our passion. That’s our focus. But what I hope is [that] other philanthropists and organizations see what we’re doing and then harness the power of journalism for their passions as well to help educate people and educate the policymakers of the situation in rural America.”
Public Media Bridge Fund steps in after cuts
Shortly after Congress rescinded the $1.1 billion that had been allocated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a group of funders came together to launch the Public Media Bridge Fund. The pooled fund, which launched with $26.5 million and is being operated by Public Media Company, is dedicated to helping local public media through the crisis and to a more sustainable future.
Earlier research from Public Media Company highlighted which stations would be most at risk for closure if CPB was defunded, the majority of which were located in rural, tribal and underserved communities. In its initial phase, the Bridge Fund moved $26 million to 74 organizations operating 186 public radio and television stations.
“We have not yet seen stations collapse. We were able to keep those at-risk stations on the air,” said Erik Langner, executive director of the Public Media Bridge Fund. “You’re certainly seeing across the broader network a lot of layoffs, a lot of cuts to service as stations are trying to grapple with the loss of $550 million on an annualized basis. It’s a really big hit for the industry, so we are seeing contractions, but we aren’t seeing stations collapsing and going dark because we were able to step in when we did with the massive support of philanthropy.”
Langner said that part of the reason that funders were so willing to support the Bridge Fund was a shared love of public media. Another reason: Journalism, in particular local news, is essential to a functioning democracy.
“We live in a moment when commercial media has largely become predatory. And when you have most people receiving media through algorithms that are run by trillion-dollar companies who are incented to divide and to create conflict and mistrust, it’s important to look at rural public media organizations for what they are, which is really the last ones standing looking out for how a community can understand itself,” Langner said.
He added that these organizations provide information that is “human-centric, that has integrity, that’s fact-based and that’s culturally sensitive to the dynamics of that particular place.”
Now in its second phase, the Bridge Fund is looking beyond helping stations survive the initial loss of funding and is instead focusing on helping public stations become sustainable. To date, it has raised $73 million and is being supported by more than 100 funders.
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The importance of local news in rural America and beyond
Although trust in journalism has plummeted in recent years, trust in local journalism remains strong. Given the prevalence of misinformation online, growing division across the nation, and continued attacks on democracy, local news is all the more important.
AFN’s Eller noted that communities suffer civically, culturally and economically when local news disappears. Whether it’s information about new health policies and how they will impact people, reporting on emergencies and disasters, covering school board meetings, or even writing about a children’s baseball game, local news is essential for community wellbeing. It is also a way for communities to be able to tell their own stories and write their own futures, rather than having others speak for them.
A common refrain among funders is that having access to local, reliable, fact-based information not only keeps communities informed of things that are impacting their lives — it encourages civic engagement and empowers them to be able to take action.
“One of the big lessons that this demonstrates is the importance of making sure all your constituents and everybody, no matter where you are — rural America, urban America — are well-informed,” Panzirer of the Helmsley Charitable Trust said.
