More states directly fund local news reporting

New Jersey, New Mexico, California, and Washington are now among state governments providing financial support to weakened news organizations struggling to cover local news — and they won’t be the last.

In the year ahead, more legislators will introduce efforts to support local news, having realized that the economic plight of news companies, particularly dailies and weeklies, is fraying the fabric of democracy.

As manager of the Murrow News Fellowship program at Washington State University, I have witnessed this firsthand. Washington is the first state to receive legislative funds to fully employ journalists, for a two-year reporting assignment at an Evergreen State newsroom. The similar California Local News Fellowship program operated by the University of California at Berkeley (and summarized in director Christa Scharfenberg’s prediction) expects its 40 participating host newsrooms to contribute up to half of the fellows’ salaries, depending on staff size.

Journalists have long insisted on a distinct line between advertising and editorial, and rightly so. But being protective of tradition and slow to respond to so much change — economics, technology, usage, demographics — has been a factor in the decline of legitimate news sources.

While editorial safeguards, ethical guardrails, and shifting methods of news consumption must be front of mind when any government funding of the Fourth Estate is involved, it’s time to test approaches to ensuring the survival of legitimate local news providers.

Washington is doing that, thanks to the two-year, $2.4 million budget measure championed by State Sen. Karen Keiser, herself a Berkeley journalism grad. “A strong press is fundamental to a thriving democracy,” said Keiser, a veteran of newsrooms in Oregon, Colorado, and Washington. “Yet Washington has lost 20% of its newspapers over the past two decades. That means in many communities, school board meetings aren’t being covered, court proceedings aren’t being scrutinized, and local government actions aren’t being questioned.”

Read through the submissions of the 40 news organizations hoping to host a fellow in Washington and you can sense the eagerness, frustration, determination, and hope. One publisher in a veritable news desert longs for a bright talent who can take over and let them retire; another wants a resident reporter knowledgeable about the community to supplement local news production largely outsourced to the Philippines.

The selection team will agonize in deciding on which of the many worthy news organization will receive a fellow. Too many of America’s smaller newsrooms are valiantly struggling to provide legitimate news to their communities. In mid-June, eight more news organizations will be selected for a second cohort — but adding 16 reporters in a state only 600 square miles smaller than the entirety of New England won’t solve the local news or democracy problem.

In the year ahead, novel solutions must continue to address the complex media ecology issues outlined in Nieman Lab predictions since December 2010. The pain points are expansive: monopolies, revenue, product development, burnout, inequities and imbalances, evolution, AI, training…the list is exhaustive, and exhausting.

What can help, beyond greater coordination among industry leaders — from Press Forward to think tanks to universities to associations — are open minds and growing bipartisan acknowledgment from policymakers than journalism is essential to democracy.

The existence of a credible, working press that explains democratic principles through explanatory journalism, regardless of funding, is of critical importance to a better-informed republic. We’ll need more of that in 2024 and beyond, starting in states willing to be bold.