This just in: a fresh boost for local news.
A partnership between the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Village Media, announced last week, will launch local newsrooms in 15 U.S. communities in three states.
Village Media is a local news and community information company based in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; it operates a growing network of digital news sites across Canada. The new partnership with the Knight Foundation will bring Village Media across the border for the first time, with initial plans to launch sites in 15 communities in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
With its $5 million investment in Village Media’s expansion, the Knight Foundation builds on its long commitment to journalism, the largest of its four program areas along with Arts, Information & Society, and Community Impact. Since 2005, Knight Foundation has invested more than $927 million toward journalism efforts.
That’s appropriate, considering journalism is woven into the foundation’s DNA and helped generate its over $2 billion in assets. Charles L. Knight published the Akron Beacon Journal, and his sons, John S. and James L. Knight, later oversaw a media empire that included the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Initially named after Charles L. Knight, the foundation was incorporated as the Knight Foundation (later the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation) in 1950. Both John and James Knight are now deceased.
The foundation’s backing for initiatives designed to strengthen journalism — particularly local journalism — includes national efforts like Press Forward, which is moving hundreds of millions from over 100 funders to local news organizations across the country, as well as place-based concerns like Documented, a New York news nonprofit specialized in serving immigrant communities.
Knight’s funding is one of philanthropy’s key efforts to reverse a long-term trend: It is no secret that local news is floundering. A 2025 report by Northwestern University’s The State of Local News Project traced the steep decline in local newspapers over the last two decades (Knight was one of the report’s funders). “Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news. This trend continues to impact the media industry and audiences nationwide,” the report found.
Amid the bad news, the report did identify one bright spot. “At the same time, digital-only local news sources are growing, providing pathways for new journalism entrepreneurs and giving consumers even more information choices.” The downside to this trend? “Those digital news sites don’t come close to replacing the number of newspapers and journalism jobs being lost,” according to the report. “And the digital news providers are almost entirely concentrated in metro areas, leaving vast swaths of the country with little to no access to local news.”
Village Media’s digital-only news sites, which will be located in mid-size markets, won’t solve the country’s local news problem, but they represent a welcome addition in a difficult landscape, and seek not just to strengthen local journalism, but to strengthen communities, as well.
Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, points out that local news outlets are often the center of gravity for communities. “That is what we see in areas where there is still access to reliable information,” she said in a recent interview. “You see a community that’s better informed, better equipped to engage in their civic life. Neighbors are better connected to one another. There’s more trust at the local level, including in other local institutions. We believe that rebuilding local news across the country is central to strengthening community and to keeping our democracy strong.”
Village Media’s strategy and Knight’s support
Village Media first launched in Canada over a decade ago, currently serving 27 distinct geographic communities and 4 million unique visitors across its sites. It also runs The Trillium, a political news publication in Ontario.
Village Media operates primarily in mid-size markets, in regions with populations of between 25,000 and 50,000. It employs what it calls a cluster approach: launching newsrooms in clusters of neighboring communities to build local capacity “while also sharing operational support, sales infrastructure and editorial expertise across each regional network,” according to the announcement.
In the communities where it works, Village Media puts down roots by not only reporting the news, but by offering an array of other services, as well. It provides digital community spaces and sponsors local events, gives back to local communities through its Village Media Cares and Good Words programs, offers local residents a voice through community conversations, polls and insight tools, and works with local and national businesses through advertising and marketing services.
Village Media intends to follow the same model in the U.S. “This is not just an expansion strategy,” Jeff Elgie, Village Media’s CEO, said when the initiative was announced. “It is a community strategy. Our goal is to build local organizations that earn trust, strengthen connections, support local businesses and help communities solve problems together.”
Village Media’s emphasis on community was one of the factors that attracted Knight to its model; the foundation has also been impressed by its success. “We had been watching closely the work and success that Village Media has had in Canada and we quickly saw that [Elgie] has a model that is unique, but also driving results,” she said. “I knew he was interested in entering the U.S. market and seeing if, indeed, the model is applicable here, so that really solidified the idea of us partnering to make it happen.”
Pérez Wadsworth also pointed to Village Media’s technology platform, what it calls its Community Operating System. “They have the tech — it’s really end to end in terms of content management and being able to serve up newsletters and everything else,” she said. “Not being dependent on third-party tech is an advantage in terms of both cost and control.”
Note that this isn’t a nonprofit grant: With its $5 million investment, the Knight Foundation will have a 50% ownership stake in Village Media’s U.S. operations, while Village Media will be responsible for development and day-to-day operations (Knight will have no editorial responsibility or oversight). “We hope that the new sites enjoy the same kind of success that other Village Media markets have, and are ultimately profitable in a sustained way,” Pérez Wadsworth said. “Our hope is to sell our 50% stake back into local ownership. We think that’s important: the sense of local investment.”
In 2023, the Knight Foundation’s former president, Alberto Ibargüen, told IP’s Mike Scutari that the foundation was in the business of “social investing.” “It’s all about outcome, not output,” he said. Unlike charity, where “you give to an organization and hope for the best, social investors stick around and require a return on investment that improves society. I want those of us in philanthropy to be investors. I want us to be actively engaged in making those grants successful, while realizing that’s not always going to be possible.”
That holds true today, according to a foundation spokesperson, who said the foundation’s role is “to back promising ideas, support strong leaders and stay engaged in ways that can help create better outcomes for their businesses and communities, whether by betting early on an idea or helping scale a model that is showing real results. Our investment in Village Media is a good example of the latter.”
For Knight, supporting Village Media’s expansion also provides an opportunity to learn more about the landscape of local news. “We’re big fans of Village Media and the team, and we want the opportunity to really learn alongside them as to what’s working and how we continue to evolve, because it’ll help inform our other grantees,” said Pérez Wadsworth. “The sharing of the learning is very important to us.”
“Move philanthropy at the speed of news”
IP has described Knight as “arguably the most important U.S. foundation in journalism, particularly local news and digital journalism.”
Knight lived up to that designation last year when it helped lead a philanthropic effort to seed the Public Media Bridge Fund, supporting local public media outlets after the Republican-led Congress stripped more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The funding cuts posed a particular threat to small communities all over the country, where in some cases, public media stations provide the only source of local news and vital information — a valuable resource that can be critical during disasters and other crises.
Knight immediately committed $10 million to the Bridge Fund, and Pérez Wadsworth, along with MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey and Darren Walker, then president of the Ford Foundation, reached out to other funders to urge them to support the fund. Perez called for funders to “move philanthropy at the speed of news.” An impressive array pitched in along with Knight, Ford and MacArthur, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Pivotal, the Schmidt Family Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and others.
“We raised more than $36 million within a matter of a few weeks to create stabilization for very vulnerable stations that were facing a financial cliff last fall,” Pérez Wadsworth said. The Public Media Bridge Fund has raised $85 million from more than 1,500 donors and helped 186 stations continue their operations. Now the Bridge Fund is helping stations diversify revenue, streamline operations, build toward long term-sustainability, and evolve with the needs of their local communities.
This comes amid a climate over the past several years in which philanthropy appears to be recognizing the value of journalism and the role it plays in a functioning democracy — though there’s always much more that can be done. A number of funders, like Knight, are supporting Press Forward and Documented; others are backing the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. Some local funders are stepping up for their hometown papers, and still others fund the American Journalism Project. And some (though not enough) are supporting programs like Press Pass NYC, which seeds and supports school newspapers and helps train the journalists of the future.
For Pérez Wadsworth, this is all good news. “I am gratified to see that there is a greater understanding of what’s at stake when people lose access to reliable information,” she said. “No matter what issue you care about philanthropically — environment, healthcare or education — the next-most important thing you should think to fund is news. Making sure that people have access to the facts about those issues is critically important.”
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