Some legislatures are including funding to support community-based news
By Megan Rogers-Granite State News Collaborative
Legislatures in several states across the country are considering public policy solutions, or have already taken action, to address the decline in the number of local news outlets.
In New Jersey, lawmakers in 2018 approved a public grantmaking consortium that has since provided $10 million in grant funding to 65 organizations to support community-based news and information sources across the state.
But when the most recent state budget proposal was released, funding for the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium was cut to zero, although — thanks to successful lobbying efforts — the budget that became law included $2.5 million for the consortium.
Since the consortium was founded, proposals to create similar public grantmaking bodies for local news and civic information have been introduced or discussed in several other states, mostly recently in Pennsylvania.
“Over the past few years in particular, we’ve seen an explosion of interest from lawmakers who want to support local news,” says Alex Frandsen, journalism program manager at Free Press Action, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that helped organize the initial push to create the New Jersey consortium and advocates for public policy that provides communities with access to civic information.
Across the country, public policy proposals have ranged from publicly funded grants and fellowship programs to employment-based tax credits for newsrooms and mandates for some government advertising spending to go to local news outlets.
In California, a Civic Media Fund to support community news has been announced, but details about how the fund will work are still not hammered out, says Frandsen. The state also has a publicly funded local news fellowship program.
In Illinois, state lawmakers have passed a number of laws aimed at supporting local journalism in recent years, including laws requiring annual reporting on government advertising spending, an employment tax credit to help local news outlets hire and retain journalists, and a requirement for a 120-day notice before a news organization can be sold to any out-of-state company.
“I do believe that there ought to be public funding of local news across the country because until we have a replacement model for the advertising model that was lost, we need to think of it as a public good, just like transportation and housing and water and electricity, because while communities can be successful, they are much more successful when they have local news and when there’s transparency in government decision-making,” says Chris Daggett, interim executive director and board chair of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium.
In New Mexico, legislators approved $500,000 to support local news initiatives through the state Department of Workforce Solutions. Those initiatives include a fellowship program, a high school journalism training program and a program to foster journalism projects at community colleges.
“The mission of the fellowship really resonated with legislators,” says Rashad Mahmood, executive director of the New Mexico Local News Fund. “The idea of helping young people, helping getting their careers started and job training had a lot of appeal.”
The fellowship has existed for several years, and the New Mexico Local News Fund, in partnership with the University of New Mexico, has placed 63 emerging journalists in 35 newsrooms.
The fellowships provide opportunities for early career journalists, give newsrooms additional reporting capacity and ensure that the state’s newsrooms reflect its diversity by providing a path into journalism for people who might not have had a clear on-ramp, says Mahmood. The current class includes eight fellows and 11 interns — its largest and most geographically diverse class, he says.
The additional state funding will enable the New Mexico Local News Fund to work with partners like the University of New Mexico on initiatives to strengthen the pipeline of future journalists by hosting a summer program for high school journalists. State funding will also be used for projects at four colleges that are designed to build strong, more inclusive local information ecosystems.
Proponents of the programs in New Jersey and New Mexico say they will seek more state support in upcoming budget cycles.
“Being able to support these organizations and projects that are vastly different from one another but have seen so much massive support from the ground level no matter where they’re at has been really encouraging,” says Ayinde Merill, program officer at the New Jersey consortium.
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This story is part of Know Your News — a Granite State News Collaborative and NENPA PresTs Freedom Committee initiative on why the First Amendment, press freedom, and local news matter. Don’t just read this. Share it with one person who doesn’t usually follow local news — that’s how we make an impact.