Confronting the Future of Local News

Confronting the Future of Local News

Table of contents

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From Battinto Batts

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Newspapers

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Startup local and state nonprofit digital news media

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Specialized nonprofit local news sites

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Local news funders and journalism support organizations

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University student-produced local news

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Public media local news

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Local television news

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Local news collaboration

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Government support for local news media

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Independent local digital journalists

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Artificial intelligence and local news media

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Shaping the future of local news

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From Battinto Batts Dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

As we prepare to launch the Knight Center for the Future of News at the Cronkite School, we recognized the importance of understanding the rapidly evolving local news landscape. To help us assess the challenges and opportunities ahead, we turned to one of the most accomplished journalists of our time, Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post. The Post won 25 Pulitzer Prizes during his 17 years as editor. Downie is now the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Cronkite School.

In this report, Downie offers a comprehensive overview of the state of local journalism in the United States today. His research highlights the ongoing crisis—and emerging promise—of local news.

This foundational analysis will inform our work at the Knight Center to accelerate transformation.

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Leonard Downie Jr. Weil Family Professor, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University The local news crisis in the United States is at a turning point.

Local newspapers are continuing to disappear.

The newsrooms of too many others are shrinking to the point that they cover very little about their communities. Many local television stations have relatively few reporters who cover little more than crime, calamity, consumer affairs, weather and sports. Very few commercial radio stations cover any local news at all. Many public stations struggle to do so with relatively few reporters and overstretched financial support. That is the discouraging bad news.

There is also much promising good news.

New owners and new forms of ownership and financing are strengthening some newspapers and their local news coverage. Some network-owned television stations are expanding reporting about their local communities. Some public radio and television stations are collaborating on local and regional news coverage. Students at a growing number of university journalism schools across the country are covering state and local news in the 4

absence of professional newspaper and television reporters. A scattering of independent journalists is covering varying kinds of local news in a variety of digital ways on the internet.

Perhaps most importantly, hundreds of nonprofit local news websites have sprouted across the country in the last two decades to cover local and state news, nurtured by growing national and local philanthropy. In addition, specialized local nonprofit news sites have been created in various places to cover education, health and legal affairs.

Many of these new news sites also do ambitious investigative reporting. They often collaborate and share their stories with both for-profit and nonprofit news media in their communities and states.

National and local journalism support organizations have grown to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, leadership, training, technology, networking and other support for these new news organizations.

Ironically, the internet, which played a big role in the decimation of the business and audience models of the old news media, is now the primary platform for both old and new local news media. It enables them to reach audiences online in digital print, audio, video and newsletters. A growing number of newspapers are reducing the number of days when they print newspapers, sending readers to their digital news sites. Among them are award-winning newspapers in Alabama and New Jersey, owned

by Advance, which ceased print publication entirely and made their extensive local news coverage available online at AL.com and NJ.com.

All this amounts to an accelerating transformation of local news coverage in the United States. It is far from complete, and its outcomes are still quite uncertain.

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I’m generally encouraged, but there is a lot of road left to travel ahead,” — Jim Brady Knight Foundation’s former vice president of journalism

“I’m generally encouraged, but there is a lot of road left to travel ahead,” Jim Brady, Knight Foundation’s former vice president of journalism, said in an interview. Knight is a major funder of initiatives to increase local news coverage by both nonprofit and for-profit news media throughout the country.

“There are a lot of promising things out there,” Brady told me. “I still think there is a future for local news.”

“

It took a generation for the decline in local news coverage, it will take a generation to improve it.”

— Sarabeth Berman CEO of the American Journalism Project

Saving and improving local news is one of the purposes of the Knight Center for the Future of News at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, for which I researched and wrote this report. The Knight Center will use wide-ranging research, experimentation, information sharing and training to strengthen all American journalism, rebuild its credibility, expand its audience and ensure its longterm sustainability.

As a veteran news media leader who has been studying local news for several years, I see this as an important moment. Much has been happening, and much needs to be done.

“I’m a whole lot more optimistic than I was five years ago,” said David Boardman, chair of the nonprofit Lenfest Institute in Philadelphia, a journalism support organization that “funds a whole range of projects” supporting nonprofit local and state news coverage in Pennsylvania and around the country.

It is one of several dozen local chapters of Press Forward, a major philanthropic funder of local and state nonprofit journalism launched in 2023 by 22 foundations, including Knight, with an initial $500 million in donor commitments.

“It took a generation for the decline in local news coverage,” observed Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, a journalism support organization that has helped launch and support 50 startup local news sites throughout the U.S. “It will take a generation to improve it.”

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Newspapers

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Until a decade or two ago, most local news coverage in the United States was provided by newspapers. They had been profitably supported by advertising and subscriptions until the internet wrecked their economic model. Since 2005, more than 3,200 local newspapers have disappeared in the U. S, according to the 2024 annual State of Local News Report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The report estimated that fewer than 5,600 newspapers remained, 80% of which were weeklies. It also estimated that employment in the remaining newspaper newsrooms fell to just under 30,000 journalists in 2023 – compared to 75,000 in 2005.

The 2024 Medill report identified 206 U. S. counties without a single source of local news, while 1,561

Watch List

Desert

counties had only one documented news source, usually a small weekly newspaper, leaving much of their populations living in news deserts. “Altogether, this means that almost 55 million people in the United States have limited to no access to local news,” according to the report.

Many more Americans live in cities and towns where the local newspapers are owned in multi-newspaper chains by rapacious national private equity firms, such as Alden Global Capital, and publicly traded companies like Gannett and Lee Enterprises. They have emptied their newspapers’ newsrooms of journalists and sold off their printing presses and buildings to maximize profits until they offload or close the papers.

2024 Watch List Counties There are over 250 counties with only one news outlet and a high poverty rate, putting them at elevated risk of losing their news.

Map: Medill Local News InitiativeSource: Local News Initiative DatabaseCreated with Datawrapper

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5%

23%

2001

2019

Percentage of newspapers owned by private equity How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy

“Nationwide, the percentage of newspapers owned by private equity rose from 5% in 2001 to 23% in 2019,” American University assistant professor Margot Susca wrote in her book Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy. “Some papers have been reduced to zombie versions of their former selves as new owners have shaved them down to minimize costs, depriving readers of the comprehensive coverage they enjoyed in the golden age of newspapers.”

“I’m still pessimistic about chain ownership that strips newsrooms for profits,” said Boardman, dean of the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, former newspaper editor and journalism support organizations’ leader. “My greatest frustration has been the decimation of so many newspapers.”

In addition, in many small towns and rural areas, weekly newspapers have been bought by regional chain owners who then fill their websites with ads and very little news produced by just one or two journalists. At the same time, many big city suburbs have lost all the vibrant weekly newspapers that had supplemented the local news coverage of nearby metropolitan daily newspapers.

“Once stand-alone iconic weeklies have merged with larger dailies and gradually disappeared,” Penny Muse Abernathy, a retired professor and

local news media researcher at Northwestern’s Medill School, has written. “Metro, regional and state papers have dramatically scaled back their coverage of city neighborhoods, the suburbs and rural areas, dealing a double blow to communities that have also lost a local weekly.”

Ownership is a key to the survival of newspapers and their local news coverage. A few large metropolitan papers have been bought by billionaires, who have enabled them to expand their local coverage significantly. Some other papers have been converted into tax-exempt nonprofits to accomplish the same goal. Still others have become financial hybrids whose journalism is partially supported by philanthropy and public fundraising.

The Boston Globe, owned by billionaire investor John Henry, who also owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team, has extensively expanded its local and state news coverage, including news bureaus and websites in neighboring Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, owned by graphic communications billionaire Glen Taylor, who previously owned the city’s men’s and women’s professional basketball teams, has greatly expanded its local and state news coverage and changed its name to The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Both the Globe and Star Tribune are still publishing daily in print and have expanded their digital audiences.

Wealthy investor Paul Huntsman bought Utah’s then-struggling largest newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, from Alden Global Capital in 2016, and transitioned it into a charitable nonprofit in 2019.

It was the first such conversion, freeing the paper from a chain owner. The Tribune has expanded its newsroom staff and local news coverage. It continues to sell subscriptions and advertising for its news website and Sunday print editions.

As a charitable nonprofit, the Tribune also solicits and receives a sizeable amount of tax-deductible donations to help finance its news coverage.

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In Philadelphia, the late cable television billionaire H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and donated it in 2016 to what became the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, to which he also gave millions of dollars. The Lenfest Institute now owns the Inquirer as a private forprofit public benefit corporation. Any profit it makes is re-invested in the newspaper to retain its taxexempt status.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, privately owned by the billionaire Cox family, has recently expanded its news staff and increased its coverage of Atlanta and other parts of Georgia after previously downsizing its newsroom. It added reporters in the city and around the state, including those in new bureaus opened in Savannah, Athens and Macon.

It is also increasing its multimedia staff to attract more traffic and subscribers on the internet.

In Louisiana, John Georges, a food distribution billionaire, has expanded local and state news coverage there with a combination of centrally managed and edited newspapers in four population centers around the state. He first bought The Advocate in the state capital of Baton Rouge, which was the state’s largest circulation paper, in 2013. In 2019, he added the struggling Times-Picayune in New Orleans to form The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, along with its Nola.com website.

More recently came The Acadiana Advocate in Lafayette and then The Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate. All four of the Advocate papers have daily print and online editions.

“They all have increased local news and shared content,” including from Advocate reporters in the state capital and Washington, Advocate editor Rene Sanchez told me. They publish collaborative stories on subjects like public health, education and the environment, he said, “taking advantage of our multiple newsrooms.”

“We also are doing traditional watchdog work and bearing down on accountability with our 10

“

We also are doing traditional watchdog work and bearing down on accountability with our constellation of newsrooms,” — Rene Sanchez Advocate editor

constellation of newsrooms,” Sanchez said. He cited as an example a six-part series about “a debilitating insurance crisis” in Louisiana affecting all Advocate localities.

Four-person teams covering education and the environment and doing investigative reporting are among two dozen journalists at the Advocate newsrooms, who are funded by several national philanthropic foundations. Funders have made donations to the Advocates’ Louisiana Journalism Fund through the tax-exempt Greater New Orleans Foundation. The Seattle Times, Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Post and Courier in South Carolina are among other locally owned for-profit newspapers that similarly receive donations for news coverage through local charitable foundations to help finance investigative and other local journalism.

Meltdown at the LA Times: Billionaire Owner Denies Presidential Endorsement, Top Editor Resigns Billionaires are not always the answer to expanding local news coverage, however. Medical entrepreneur and investor Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought Los Angeles Times in 2018, made questionable business and journalistic decisions and significantly reduced its newsroom staff as the paper lost large amounts of money. Under

the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013, that newspaper has reduced its local news staff and coverage while focusing on national and international news and audiences. There also are not that many billionaires to go around.

At the other end of the economic spectrum are retired and former legacy news media journalists who have started or revived local news sites in the communities where they now live, including some places where chain-owned newspapers have been decimated or closed.

chain-owned newspapers are cratering. The first, Lookout Santa Cruz, covers that California city with a news staff significantly larger than the shrunken newsroom of the Alden Global Capital-owned Santa Cruz Sentinel. Lookout Santa Cruz is supported by subscriptions, advertising and philanthropy. The website won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for its coverage of the impact on the community of the 2022-2023 California floods. In 2025, Doctor launched Lookout Eugene-Springfield in southwestern Oregon, with a larger news staff than that of the hollowed-out Gannett-owned Eugene Register-Guard.

In 2020, a volunteer, unpaid group of retired journalists and news executives who live in western North Carolina launched the free, nonprofit Ashville Watchdog. In coastal Massachusetts, retired journalists started the free, nonprofit New Bedford Light, Plymouth Independent, and Marblehead Current to cover those communities. On Puget Sound in Washington state, former staff members of a closed Gannett-owned paper started the free, nonprofit Gig Harbor Now. All are community digital news sites with small budgets, dependent on donations and at least some volunteer staff work.

The nonprofit National Trust for Local News started down a unique path for what it calls “conserving” for-profit local newspapers. Founded in 2021, the Trust raised $38 million from philanthropic foundations and bought 65 local daily and weekly newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia. The papers were organized into mini chains supervised by a Trust for Local News in each of the three states. The papers were expected to survive and prosper with earned revenue from advertising and subscriptions and only minimal investments from philanthropy through the three state trusts.

Former Washington Post publisher Boisfeuillet “Bo” Jones Jr. and Pulitzer Prize-winning Post former journalist Dana Priest are part of a group that created the Piedmont Journalism Foundation in northern Virginia. It bought two struggling weekly newspapers, the Fauquier Times and the Prince William Times in two large exurban counties west of Washington, D.C. The foundation

But it has not worked out that way so far. A detailed March 2025 report by Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab said “multiple once profitable papers” owned by the trust “are now in the red.”

Some have “gone through multiple rounds of layoffs.” Two of the Colorado Trust’s newspapers were closed. Many of those in Maine have reduced the frequency of their print publication, and “several

transitioned the two weeklies into nonprofits, strengthened their news staffs, and increased their local news coverage, supported by subscriptions, memberships and fundraising.

News media analyst and former newspaper company executive Ken Doctor founded a public benefit, for-profit corporation, Lookout Local, in 2020, with national and local foundation grants, to create digital local news sites in places where

respected and long-tenured editors” have departed from them, according to the Nieman Lab report.

On May 13, 2025, The National Trust announced that it was selling all but seven of its Colorado community newspapers to the Arizona-based Times Media Group, which has a reputation for hollowing out the news staffs of its small papers while continuing to operate them. The National Trust’s announcement said it will focus on saving 11

the papers furthest from the Denver area because their communities “have fewer alternative sources of local news.”

The National Trust now has a new strategic plan “to close the gap between our vision and our operations,” Will Nelligan, its chief growth officer, said in an interview. “We have been raising money,” Nelligan told me, to invest in its newspapers’ reporting staffs and in shared back-office services for the remaining newspapers in each of the three states. He added that the Trust’s newspapers in larger, wealthier communities will have to help subsidize those in smaller, lower-income communities.

Several universities are trying still another new way of reviving local community newspapers.

In 2021, the then 147-year-old Oglethorpe Echo in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, was donated to a charitable nonprofit associated with the nearby Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia in Athens. Staffed by 20 Grady College students each semester, the weekly is still being published in print and online. It has won awards for its journalism while significantly increasing its subscriptions and advertising.

In 2024, The Daily Iowan, an independent nonprofit student newspaper affiliated with the University of Iowa School of Journalism, bought two weekly Iowa community newspapers, the Solon Economist and the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun. Iowa journalism students help operate the two profitable papers, along with each of their small professional staffs.

Most ambitiously, in 2024, former USA Today editorin-chief Nicole Carroll launched NEWSWELL with a $5 million Knight Foundation grant. NEWSWELL is a nonprofit, based at Arizona State University, that seeks to build a national group of sustainable nonprofit local digital news sites. Already, three news sites in three California cities – Stocktonia in Stockton, Times of San Diego, and the formerly bankrupt Santa Barbara News-Press – have been 12

donated to NEWSWELL. Carroll intends to draw on ASU expertise to help the organizations with their needed back-end support, such as accounting, personnel development, technology and audience and revenue growth. Students at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication intern at the news sites.

The bottom line: Many local newspapers have disappeared. Many others are shrinking and dying.

Still others are being revived and transformed in the digital age. However, increasingly, they are only one part of the future of local news.

NEWSWELL leaders meets with Santa Barbara community leaders

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Startup local and state nonprofit digital news media

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In just the last 20 years, several hundred local and state nonprofit, tax-exempt digital news organizations have been started throughout the country. They are supported by varying combinations of reader memberships, local business advertising and sponsorships, grants from local and national charitable foundations, and other philanthropy. Many of them supplement their websites with newsletters, podcasts, videocasts and social media posts.

Many share their news stories with other local and state news media and collaborate with them on some reporting, increasing their audiences and the impact of their work. Some sites have been able to

including those for the Twin Cities, the state and Washington government news, in addition to sports and the arts.

MinnPost was followed in 2009 by three other statewide nonprofit digital news organizations: The Texas Tribune, VTDigger in Vermont, and WyoFile in Wyoming. They all cover state government and significant local news around the three states.

They all contribute stories to local newspapers and websites around their states.

More than three dozen similar statewide news sites of varying sizes came along later, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippi Today,

grow their news staffs, while others have remained the same or cut back. Many were founded and initially staffed by local journalists who focus on previously under-covered issues and diverse local communities.

CalMatters in California, Arizona Luminaria, the Nevada Independent, Colorado Sun, Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia, Spotlight PA in Pennsylvania, Spotlight Delaware, CT Mirror in Connecticut, and Maine Monitor.

Voice of San Diego, founded by local journalists to report on the southern California city in 2005, is generally considered the pioneer. It focused its coverage on what its editors thought were the most important issues in the city, especially those that they felt the local newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, did not cover adequately.

As the Union-Tribune shrunk its news staff while going through a series of owners, still another local nonprofit, inewsource, was started in 2009 by former Union-Tribune journalist Lorie Hearn to focus on investigative reporting. Both San Diego nonprofits are supported by reader memberships and contributions, in addition to local and national philanthropy.

The Texas Tribune, which has grown to dominate coverage of that state’s government and politics, is now expanding to cover local news in the state’s cities. With a staff of more than 50 journalists, it has reporters in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Brownsville, Odessa, Lufkin and Lubbock, covering news in those cities of statewide interest for the Tribune.

In 2007, another pioneering nonprofit news site, MinnPost, was started by former Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper executive Joel Kramer and his wife, Laurie, to cover city and state politics, health, the environment, and the arts in MinneapolisSt. Paul and the state. Supported by reader memberships and local and national philanthropy, it has a newsroom staff of about 12 journalists. It also publishes seven newsletters for its members, 16

In the spring of 2025, The Texas Tribune was starting its first local news website, the Waco Bridge. The Tribune’s editor-in-chief, Matthew Watkins, said it plans to start more of them. Watkins told me that three local foundations in Waco are helping to support that site, which will start with a five-person staff. In May, Watkins announced that the Tribune had acquired the Austin Monitor, an eight-year-old nonprofit local online news site in the state capital. As in Waco, he said, the Tribune will seek community feedback to identify its information needs and plan that site’s future.

Watkins added that many local news media around Texas regularly publish Tribune stories, including six that put Tribune stories on their front pages on

the day that I interviewed Watkins. The Tribune has an internet audience of 3 million people throughout Texas, Watkins said.

The Tribune is supported by more than 10,000 paying reader members, in addition to local and national journalism support organizations and foundations. It also earns revenue from a 15-yearold annual money-raising, three-day festival, Tribfest, which features interviews with authors, subject experts, and political leaders, plus music.

MinnPost has had a similar fundraising festival for the past five years.

issues with a staff of more than 50 journalists for its own website with an average of 1.3 million page views each month. It publishes several digital newsletters with more than 400,000 subscribers and tens of thousands of followers on social media. It also distributes its stories to more than 250 media partners throughout the state. It is supported by memberships, major gifts, foundation grants and corporate sponsorships.

The nonprofit VTDigger is the largest news organization in Vermont, with a staff of more than 20 journalists. With more than 600,000 daily readers online and more than 40,000 digital newsletter subscribers, VTDigger covers the state and all 14 of its counties. It also provides its news stories to more than a dozen small local news outlets around the state that they can publish online and in print.

Former NBC News Group chairman Andy Lack returned to his family roots in Mississippi and started the nonprofit digital news site Mississippi Today in 2016 to cover that state’s government and politics. With a newsroom of 20 journalists, it has expanded its coverage to beats including education, public health, justice, environment and communities of color. It won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of welfare money fraud involving a former governor and retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre.

CalMatters, founded in 2015, covers California state government, politics and major statewide

Nevada journalist and talk show host Jon Ralston launched the statewide nonprofit 17

digital news site The Nevada Independent in 2017.

Its newsroom staff of about 20 editors, reporters, a Washington correspondent, photographers and contributing columnists cover the state for its website, social media, and six newsletters about subjects including the environment, gambling and the state capital. Many local news outlets around the state republish its content in both English and Spanish.

Like many news nonprofits, The Nevada Independent also has a business staff led by a chief revenue officer. It supports the news site with revenue from membership donations, philanthropists, corporate donors, foundations and ticket sales and sponsorships for events, including an annual IndyFest in Las Vegas and many IndyTalk events with state officials, community leaders, and other public figures throughout Nevada.

The nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, started the digital news site Spotlight PA in 2019 to cover Pennsylvania state government and statewide issues. It has a staff of 25 journalists and shares its content with 100 news outlets, including television stations, throughout the state. In 2022, Spotlight PA opened its first regional bureau in State College, where Penn State is located, to cover other regions of the state.

The Lenfest Institute, Spotlight PA and the RevLab at The Texas Tribune have created a Statewide News Collective of 37 nonprofit state news sites around the country so that they can share information about reporting initiatives, staffing, technology and revenue development.

One of those nonprofit state news sites is the Flatwater Free Press, started by the newly formed Nebraska Journalism Trust in 2021 by former journalists of the shrinking Omaha World Herald newspaper. The startup’s eight journalists and more than a dozen freelancers across Nebraska “do investigative and feature stories that bind the state together,” Flatwater Free Press managing editor Ryan Hoffman said in an interview. He 18

cited investigative stories that revealed serious environmental and governmental problems in Nebraska. Its stories are republished by other news media throughout the state.

These and other nonprofit state news organizations are also playing an increasingly important role in covering state governments after many newspapers had cut costs by withdrawing reporters from state capitals. The Pew Research Center found that 80 nonprofit news outlets had statehouse reporters in 2022. They include the States Newsroom network of 39 nonprofit state capital sites, plus 11 States Newsroom nonprofit partners in other states, including The Texas Tribune, CalMatters, VTDigger in Vermont, West Virginia Watch, and WyoFile in Wyoming.

At Maryland Matters, the States Newsroom nonprofit affiliate in the state capital of Annapolis, its editor-in-chief, Steve Crane, told me that “we cover state government, legislation, policy and politics, state courts, and some county governments.” Its news staff has four reporters and an editor, “the most in Annapolis regularly,” he said.

Their stories are posted daily on its website and newsletter and shared with news media throughout Maryland, as well as with the States Newsroom network.

States Newsroom “does a lot of the overhead,” Crane said. “They have a big national fundraiser, and locals like us do local fundraising.”

In addition to these and various other state news sites, scores of local nonprofit digital news sites have been started in cities and towns across the country where newspapers have been shrinking or closed.

The largest local startup is the Baltimore Banner, launched in 2022 by a nonprofit organization founded by Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr. He had first tried unsuccessfully to buy and revive the shrinking 188-year-old Baltimore Sun from then owner Alden Global Capital. Bainum then pledged $50 million to help finance the launch

and first four years of the Baltimore Banner’s existence with a newsroom staff of 85 journalists, much larger than that of the Sun. Unusual for local digital startups, the Banner is behind a paywall online and depends on digital subscription revenue from nearly 65,000 subscribers, in addition to advertising, events and philanthropy. More than most nonprofit startups, the Banner resembles a traditional newspaper’s website, complete with sports coverage.

In just the third year of its existence, the Banner won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for stories that exposed Baltimore as the deadliest large city in the U.S. for fentanyl drug overdoses, particularly among older Black men. Banner editor Kimi Yoshino said that she heard about the problem from local public health experts while she spent time talking to people in Baltimore about issues before the Banner launched.

Some nonprofit local news sites have been started to serve communities that had been under-covered in large cities.

Block Club Chicago focuses its diverse staff of more than 30 journalists on coverage of that city’s many neighborhoods, in addition to citywide breaking news and coverage of health, education,

“

We’ve flipped the traditional beat structure on its head, instead of beats like cops and courts, we cover what is most important in the neighborhoods, day to day. We want to convey to our readers that we want to serve them block by block.”

— Stephanie Lulay Block Club Chicago executive editor

politics and the arts. Many of its reporters live in or were raised in the neighborhoods they cover. Half of its key coverage areas are majority Black or Latino.

In addition to its website, the nonprofit produces 12 online neighborhood newsletters.

“We’ve flipped the traditional beat structure on its head,” co-executive editor Stephanie Lulay said in an interview. “Instead of beats like cops and courts, we cover what is most important in the neighborhoods, day to day. We want to convey to our readers that we want to serve them block by block.”

Founding Baltimore Banner editor Kimi Yoshino

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Block Club Chicago was launched in 2018 with eight editors and reporters and $183,000 raised from Chicago residents through Kickstarter. The American Journalism Project later contributed a three-year grant of $1.5 million that “allowed us to build a revenue team that is now seven people,” Lulay said. In 2023, it received a $1.6 million, 3-year grant from the McCormick Family Foundation for an investigative reporting team. The nonprofit’s website averages 1.5 million unique visitors each month. More than 17,000 readers each pay $59 a year to subscribe and gain access to specialized content in addition to the news on the website.

Lulay said paid advertising is growing, especially in the neighborhood newsletters. The site also raises money through philanthropic grants, individual donations and events.

“We’re a sustainable organization,’ Lulay told me.

In Minneapolis, even as Star Tribune expands its local and state coverage, the 6-year-old nonprofit startup Sahan Journal has thrived covering the communities of color and immigrants that make up a quarter of that city’s population. With philanthropic funding that included million-dollarplus grants from the national American Journalism Project and the local GHR Foundation, among other donors, its $2.5 million annual budget supports a diverse newsroom of 14 journalists and a nineperson leadership and support staff. It produces digital videos, newsletters and social media posts for its own young, diverse audience and shares its stories with other Minnesota news media, including Star Tribune.

“Sahan Journal is a special newsroom that I founded at a pivotal time in Minnesota’s history,” its journalist founder, Mukhtar Ibrahim, wrote earlier this year. “In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented challenges wrought by Covid, Sahan has stood at the forefront of national efforts to provide exceptional news coverage dedicated to communities of color.”

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“

Sahan Journal is a special newsroom that I founded at a pivotal time in Minnesota’s history, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented challenges wrought by Covid, Sahan has stood at the forefront of national efforts to provide exceptional news coverage dedicated to communities of color. ” — Mukhtar Ibrahim Sahan Journal founding editor

One of the most geographically ambitious, yet community-oriented, local nonprofit news organizations is Signal Ohio, headquartered in Cleveland. It has started city news sites there and in Akron and Cincinnati, in addition to putting a correspondent in Columbus, the state capital.

Signal Cleveland, launched at the end of 2022, has a news staff of 15 to cover local government, economy, education, health and neighborhoods.

Since the downsized Cleveland.com, formerly the Plain Dealer newspaper, “is still the paper of record,” Signal Cleveland editor-in-chief Lila Mills said, “the biggest challenge for us is, what are we bringing to this ecosystem that is unique?”

One of Signal Cleveland’s advantages, Mills told me, is its use of “documenters,” hundreds of ordinary local people who are specially trained and paid $18 an hour to attend official meetings, take notes and write summaries. If a story is indicated, it is further researched, if necessary, factchecked, written and edited by Signal Cleveland journalists. It is one of 23 such documenter programs, originated by the nonprofit City Bureau in Chicago, at local news nonprofits around the country that have become important reporting multipliers.

“Anybody can do it,” Mills said. “We have people from teens to an 87-year-old woman. We want their reports to be factual and accurate, with quotes and attribution, without asking questions in the meetings themselves.”

“

Anybody can do it. We have people from teens to an 87-yearold woman .”

— Lila Mills Signal Cleveland editor-in-chief

Signal Ohio started with $7.5 million in seed money from the national American Journalism Project, the Cleveland Foundation and others. Mills said that the American Journalism Project, which advises and supports 50 local news nonprofits throughout the country, has been “incredibly involved” in Signal Ohio’s startup and its centralized operations team for its local news sites. “They are very involved in the first year, and then they shift to making sure the business operation is running as it should be,” MiIlls explained. “It is so, so important that there is some long-term support. We need time to figure it out.”

Signal Akron was started in late 2023 and has eight reporters and editors, plus three “community columnists.” The Knight Foundation is investing $5 million over five years in Signal Akron, leading a coalition of local financial supporters. Akron is where brothers John and James Knight started what became a nationwide newspaper company that later produced the foundation’s money.

Signal Cincinnati was being prepared for launch in 2025 with the start of its own documenters program.

Cityside in California’s San Francisco Bay Area is another American Journalism Project-supported

multi-city local news nonprofit. Its first news site, Berkeleyside, was started in 2009 and has a seven-person news staff. It averaged more than a million page views and nearly 400,000 unique visitors a month in 2024. Oaklandside, started in 2020, has a 10-person news staff and averaged 550,00 page views and 280,000 unique visitors in 2024. Richmondside was launched in 2024 with an initial staff of two, plus freelance reporters and photographers, in a city that has not had a newspaper for years. Cityside also has a central business operations group that works on audience and revenue development, and other business matters for all its news sites.

Capital B, incubated and supported by the American Journalism Project, is a relatively new nonprofit that has started local news websites for communities in Atlanta, Georgia and Gary, Indiana, in addition to a national news site. Founded in 2021, Capital B has an all-Black news and central operations staff of two dozen people, financed by foundation grants, individual and corporate donors, and memberships.

“We want to go into markets where we see a real opportunity and a real need for us to reach Black audiences with the Capital B mission of serving folks who are under-served with high-quality news and information,” co-founder Lauren Williams told the Nieman Journalism Lab. The American Journalism Project also has played a key role in starting the Tulsa Local News Initiative (TNI) in Oklahoma. It is a unique new nonprofit that is saving a historic weekly newspaper serving Black readers in Tulsa while also starting a digital daily local news site for Tulsa, the second most populous city in Oklahoma. The American Journalism Project and a coalition of Tulsa philanthropic and media organizations formed TNI to buy the century-old The Oklahoma Eagle and turn it into a nonprofit that publishes in print and online. At the same time, TNI is developing a local news website, scheduled to launch in August 2025, to compete with the daily, chain-owned, down-sized Tulsa World.

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As it has done elsewhere, the American Journalism Project first initiated a local survey and community listening process that produced recommendations for meeting local news needs, including accountability, investigative and service reporting for a general audience. American Journalism Project CEO Sarabeth Berman said in an interview that the process includes “a team to raise local money to seed and launch the project, and philanthropic grants for its ongoing operation.

Market research and planning are very important.

You need research to find out what the community wants in local news.”

“

The Black press has its own vibe and culture, and I want to keep that and grow it. The challenge will be staying up to date for all these audiences.”

— Gary Lee Tulsa-born reporting veteran of The Washington Post and Time

Gary Lee, a Tulsa-born reporting veteran of The Washington Post and Time, went home in 2021 to become managing editor and chief reporter of The Oklahoma Eagle. In 2023, Lee, a fifth-generation Oklahoman of Creek Freedmen descent, became the first Black winner of the state’s top journalism award. Now, with $14 million in startup local and national funding, Lee is leading TNI’s expansion of the Eagle and the development of the still unnamed digital local news site for all of Tulsa. TNI will also add new positions to and collaborate with four other local media: the investigative site The Frontier; the bilingual Spanish-English news site La Semana; the Oklahoma State University-based public radio

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station KOSU, and the radio program Focus: Black Oklahoma.

The TNI news site and The Oklahoma Eagle “will be one newsroom with two parts, with 20 to 22 journalists,” Lee, who will be executive editor of both, said in an interview. “The Black press has its own vibe and culture, and I want to keep that and grow it. The challenge will be staying up to date for all these audiences.”

In New Orleans, two African American veterans of Nola.com/The Times-Picayune, former top editor Terry Baquet and former publisher David Francis, founded the Verite News local nonprofit digital news site in 2022 to focus on Black residents who make up two-thirds of that city’s population.

“Verite will elevate voices from communities that have been historically dismissed or ignored to create thoughtful, solution-based coverage on crucial topics – such as education, housing, health care, criminal justice, the environment and government accountability – and uplift a region that has been left behind compared to similar national metropolitan areas,” the site states. Verite News, which has a newsroom of a dozen journalists, is, with Mississippi Today, part of the Deep South Today news nonprofit.

Other veteran journalists have started nonprofit local news sites where they live. Nashville journalist Steve Cavendish, with the backing of the American Journalism Project, started the Nashville Banner nonprofit local news site. It has a newsroom staff of 11 journalists, including some who produce a weekly video podcast.

Emily Sachar, former prize-winning education journalist, editor and website manager at Newsday, founded the Daily Catch digital local site for the Hudson Valley towns of Red Hook and Rhinebeck and environs in New York. It also has won awards for news, feature and investigative reporting in the state.

Boston Globe reporter and editor Walter Robinson, celebrated for his Spotlight team’s ground-breaking investigation of child abuse by Catholic priests, has helped to start two local nonprofit digital news sites in seaside Massachusetts, where he now lives in Plymouth. Seeing that the local Gannett-owned newspapers had been hollowed out, he first helped launch the New Bedford Light website in 2021.

Robinson is active on its board, and he helps raise money to support its 11-person newsroom staff.

He plays the same role for the online nonprofit Plymouth Independent, which he helped start in 2022.

“

If you’re looking for sunshine in a cloudy sky, it’s local nonprofit news.”

— Walter Robinson Boston Globe reporter and editor

“If you’re looking for sunshine in a cloudy sky, it’s local nonprofit news,” Robinson said in an interview.

“Rebuilding news should start from local news on up. People depend on local news for information that affects their lives, like local government and education. They now have a sense of what’s going on in their communities.”

Robinson added about both news sites, however, that “sustainability is our most important issue.”

Sustainability is indeed a key issue for most nonprofit news sites. Initial startup philanthropic grants must be replaced by continuous fundraising, supplemented by supporter memberships, advertising or corporate sponsorships, and fundraising events. Spending must be carefully

“

It’s hard to operate a newsroom without worrying about when the money is coming. ” — Kathryn Stearns VTDigger Board Member

monitored. All this is why nonprofit news sites must have effective business operations.

“It’s hard to operate a newsroom without worrying about when the money is coming,” Kathryn Stearns, a member of the VTDigger board in Vermont, said in an interview. “The chase for money is never-ending.”

“Some nonprofit sites are not successful because of leadership challenges – if they do not have a clear vision or are not diversifying revenue,” American Journalism Project’s Berman said, referring to leaders of both newsroom and business operations, as well as nonprofit board members.

“You have to have the right kind of leadership.”

That proved to be the downfall of the Houston Landing, which was launched in 2023 with $20 million in initial national and local philanthropic funding. It hired too many journalists too soon, spent too much money, and failed to build a large audience. It also was plagued by continuous disagreements among newsroom leaders and its board members over its mission, what kind of journalism it should produce, and what its website should look like.

Houston Landing’s CEO, veteran newspaper editor Peter Bhatia, fired both its editor-in-chief and star

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investigative reporter because, he said, “we’re basically putting a newspaper on the web. And that’s not a recipe for success for us in the long term, nor is it a recipe for sustainability.”

With the website’s initial funding drying up, too little new money coming in, and newsroom costs rising, Bhatia announced in April 2025 that Houston Landing would shut down in May, and its 43 newsroom and business employees would be laid off. “We were not able to build the additional revenue streams needed to sustain ongoing operational needs,” Bhatia said at the time.

Just since 2019, 258 nonprofit digital local news sites have been started in the U.S., according to the Northwestern Medill State of Local News Project.

Most of the surviving news sites have established strong ties with their communities, which gradually increase local membership and other revenue streams to attract further national and local philanthropic support. And they carefully manage their expenses.

“What is the economic base of nonprofit news sites?” University of Maryland journalism professor of practice Tom Rosenstiel asked a basic question in an interview. “You have to know, what do people want from local news media?”

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“

What is the economic base of nonprofit news sites? You have to know, what do people want from local news media?”

— Tom Rosenstiel University of Maryland journalism professor of practice

Letter from Peter Bhatia, CEO, Houston Landing To our readers: It is with great sadness that I am writing to you today.

Our Board of Directors have voted to shut down Houston Landing. Houston Landing anticipates it will cease publishing by mid-May of this year.

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Specialized nonprofit local news sites In addition to the growing number of local general interest nonprofit news sites around the country, some national nonprofits also provide local news coverage on websites for local audiences of specialized subjects such as education, climate and health. For example, nonprofit sites participating in a local digital news network of the national nonprofit The 19th republish its stories of importance to women and LGBTQ+ people.

ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom, has 40 reporters in regional reporting hubs in 20 states in the South, Midwest, Northwest and Southwest.

And it has partnered with dozens of both nonprofit and for-profit local news outlets on investigative reporting projects through its Local Reporting Network.

Inside Climate News is a national nonprofit specializing in reporting about the climate and the environment, including prize-winning investigative reporting about environmental problems. But it also has 13 state and six regional bureaus that produce state and local climate news. They all produce free online newsletters that reach 350,000 local

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subscribers across the country, in addition to the audience of the nonprofit’s national website.

“There’s a climate story raging in every state,” Inside Climate News executive editor Vernon Loeb told me. “What we do really works well at the state level.”

Inside Climate News also encourages both nonprofit and for-profit local news media to republish its content. “A lot of what we do is republished,” Loeb said. And it often collaborates with local news media on other stories.

“We don’t see other media as competitors, but as partners, and we work together on investigative climate stories,” Loeb said, “The best thing about nonprofit journalism is partnering. When we work together, we can do great things.”

Inside Climate News is 80% funded by more than 40 national, state and local foundations that want to support climate journalism. The other 20% comes from voluntary contributions from readers, Loeb said, “which is really growing this year because of concern about the climate.”

“

People are often very focused on particular subjects in their lives, and because we’re focusing, too, we do better work with more knowledgeable reporters and editors. People really like it.”

— Elizabeth Green Founder and CEO of Civic News

The Civic News Company is a growing national nonprofit news organization with local online news sites in 15 states and cities, each of which specializes in covering only local education or voting or public health.

Chalkbeat, launched in 2013, covers local education with websites in Chicago, Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, Newark, New York, Philadelphia and Tennessee.

Votebeat, started in 2020, covers local voting issues with websites in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin.

Healthbeat, just launched in 2024, covers local public health in New York and Atlanta so far.

Each of the three special subject sites also produces a national website that includes news from their local and national newsrooms.

Green said that all the sites combined have about 1.5 million viewers of their stories, plus 1 million monthly openings of the sites’ online newsletters.

The sites have a total of 52 journalists and 28

business support people. Chalkbeat itself is funded 20% by newsletter advertising and 80% by national and local philanthropy.

“A lot of advertisers and philanthropists have a special interest in education and health in their communities,” Green told me. “I think we have a particularly durable business model. We keep evolving and changing, and we’ve made it through.

Our unique model is part of that.”

Healthbeat also partners with KFF Health News, a large national nonprofit health news organization, which has Washington and a dozen regional news bureaus that collaborate with local and national news media throughout the country. It is funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation and regional foundations that support KFF bureaus and health reporting in their states and regions. KFF Health News makes its stories, podcasts and videocasts available daily to hundreds of newspapers, websites and local NPR and television stations.

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Local news funders and journalism support organizations

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In recent years, scores of national and local philanthropic foundations have begun funding both nonprofit and qualifying for-profit local news sites throughout the country. Some news sites receive much of this assistance, essential to building their audience and business development infrastructures, through so-called journalism support organizations funded by foundations. Many of the local news sites also belong to one or more local news trade associations that provide a variety of smaller-scale support for their members.

small local news media build financial sustainability through local fundraising, audience contributions and advertising.

“We’re already learning a lot from these smaller newsrooms,” Press Forward director Dale Anglin wrote in its 2025 Impact Report, “about what sustainability looks like on a modest budget, how to reach audiences where they are and what it takes to build trust in historically underserved communities.”

The Knight Foundation is one of the biggest and most active contributors to the Press Forward movement. By early 2025, it had already invested $150 million in nonprofit and for-profit local news

Press Forward, launched in late 2023, is a coalition of nearly 100 national and local foundations that together have become the biggest philanthropic funders of both nonprofit and smaller for-profit local news media. As of early 2025, its funders ranged from major national foundations – including MacArthur, Knight, Ford, Gates Family, Robert Wood Johnson, and Scripps Howard – to dozens of community and family foundations, in addition to 36 local Press Forward chapters. Press Forward set an initial goal of raising and contributing $500 million to local news media. It and member foundations had already invested $200 million in local news media throughout the country by early 2025.

More than 200 grants were made from Press Forward’s own pooled fund to mostly small local for-profit and nonprofit news media, 40% of which are led by people of color and 25% of which serve rural communities of color. National funders of Press Forward also made their own contributions to other local news media. And Press Forward local chapters began working with local funders to make contributions to news media in their communities.

Much of Press Forward’s emphasis is on helping 30

media in a variety of ways, which amounts to half of its 5-year $300 million commitment to Press Forward. Knight made numerous investments through many journalism support organizations to help build what it called “a robust ecosystem of local news infrastructure to provide services, tools, expertise and technology” for the business and operations needs of both nonprofit and for-profit local news media. Many of the nonprofits were started by journalists who had no business, revenue, personnel, legal or technological experience.

“Journalists doing startups knew how to produce good stories, but they didn’t know how to do all the business stuff,” Jim Brady, Knight’s former vice president for journalism, told me. “There is so much to do now.”

The Knight Foundation is funding, and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism is managing, a Knight Communities Network of local Press Forward chapter funders to share startup, infrastructure and fundraising knowledge for local news media in the eight cities where Knight newspapers had once been located, from Philadelphia and Miami to Gary, Indiana and Wichita, Kansas.

The nonprofit Lenfest Institute in Philadelphia is the largest local chapter of Press Forward. In addition to its ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer and support of the Spotlight PA nonprofit state news

site, it makes grants to nonprofit and for-profit community and special-interest news organizations in the Philadelphia area.

American Journalism Project (AJP) is the largest of the national so-called journalism support organizations that raise money to incubate and nourish new nonprofit local news organizations.

It was started in 2019 by the late John Thornton, the founder of The Texas Tribune, and Elizabeth Green, who started Chalkbeat. By early this year, AJP had raised $225 million from national and local funders for its work with local news initiatives. The Knight Foundation invested $20 million in 2019 and another $25 million this year.

AJP has helped launch and support 50 local and state nonprofit news organizations in 36 states, including many described in this report.

Two of AJP’s grantees – Mississippi Today and City Bureau in Chicago – have won Pulitzer Prizes for local reporting. AJP CEO Sarabeth Berman cites Mississippi Today, Spotlight PA, Signal Ohio, Sahan Journal, Block Club Chicago, City Bureau in Chicago, and Cityside Journalism Initiative in California as among the most successful of its grantees because of their journalism quality and financial sustainability, including local fundraising.

AJP has reported that the first 22 local news organizations to work with it have doubled in size, with increased local revenue, and added 200 journalists to their newsrooms.

AJP prepares for each decision to support a news site, Berman told me, with “market research to find out what a community wants in local news and what the gaps are.” It continues with “teams of people” to help build the site’s business and operations side, audience and revenue growth, and even legal help. “We make investments in new and existing nonprofits entirely on the business side,” she said.

She pointed out that there has been a steady increase in national and local philanthropy supporting AJP, other journalism support organizations and nonprofit local news sites.

“It’s more than just a few green shoots across the country,” she said. “This is a meaningful movement.”

AJP’s role has sometimes been described as “venture philanthropy” because it uses some of the concepts of venture capital finance to achieve philanthropic goals – in this case, saving local news.

For example, the nonprofit Report for America has placed and helped pay the salaries of hundreds of young journalists, many of them journalists of color, in nonprofit and for-profit local newsrooms.

It also helps the newsrooms raise money within their communities to help pay those salaries and increase the news organizations’ sustainability.

The Borealis Foundation’s Racial Equity in Journalism Fund invests in mostly small nonprofit and for-profit local news media led by people of color. Press Forward has invested $20 million in 205 smaller newsrooms – 40% of which are led by people of color – “to close persistent coverage gaps” in journalistically underserved communities.

This is also part of the missions of many Press Forward local chapters.

The Associated Press has started an AP Fund for Journalism that intends to supply text, video and photo content, plus access to editorial tools and training, to a number of local nonprofit and for-profit news organizations, including many of those in this report.

Some other journalism support organizations are trade organizations that help their dues-paying news media members share information and raise money. The largest are the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and the Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION). INN’s NewsMatch helps its nonprofit news media members raise money from local foundations and businesses, plus giving them matching money from INN itself. LION Sustainability Audits and their recommendations help its members improve their sustainability.

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University studentproduced local news

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Student journalists at more than 170 colleges and universities around the country help cover their local communities or state governments with thousands of stories published free by local news media. Some university journalism schools, like Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, act as “teaching hospitals” for their students, who produce local digital and video journalism for the public as part of their classes.

“Nearly 3,000 student reporters in university-led programs published more than 11,000 stories in local news outlets” in 2024, according to a report by the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, which coordinates and raises money for the nationwide effort. Its director, Richard Watts, who founded CCN in 2019, told me that universities, with and without journalism schools, have found a variety of ways for student journalists under faculty supervision to do the reporting offered to local news media. CCN received a $5 million Knight Foundation grant in 2024, plus $2 million to match other donations to help finance its seeding and mentoring of student reporting programs, including those covering state governments.

The University of Missouri School of Journalism is pioneering. Its students and faculty staff the Columbia Missourian newspaper, which was founded by the university in 1908 and is now the dominant local news source in Columbia. It has 10 faculty editors plus other support staff, with about 90 student editors, reporters and photographers rotating through the newsroom every four months.

That’s also roughly the rotation for students at other colleges and universities who produce news supplied to local news media.

Citing examples nationwide, CCN director Watts pointed out that student-produced journalism has been particularly valuable for nonprofit local news sites. “It’s easier to partner with them,” he said, “because the stories are free.”

According to CCN, there are now 34 state government news bureaus staffed by students under experienced faculty supervision in 30 states.

Some were recently started with CCN’s assistance.

Others have been in place in many states for years as newspaper statehouse reporters decreased or disappeared. ASU’s Cronkite School and the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, for example, have long had studentstaffed news bureaus in both their state capitals and Washington, D.C. The student-staffed, facultysupervised Cronkite News Washington bureau is the only one providing government and political coverage in Washington for all the news media in Arizona. Cronkite and Maryland also have Howard Centers for Investigative Reporting, in which students work on local, state and national investigative projects.

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Public media local news “Largely overlooked in the effort to save local news are the nation’s local public radio stations,” Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote in 2023, after conducting a survey of NPR’s 253 member stations. However, he concluded, “local public radio has a staffing problem.” And, increasingly, a money problem.

“We had great hope for public media coverage of local news,” Jim Brady told me while he was at the Knight Foundation. “But they really need more people.”

After its pre-pandemic years of growth, “there has been a retrenchment of the expansion of public radio news,” former NPR senior executive Christopher Turpin told me. “There have been 10 and 20% cuts in (public radio) newsrooms. And the funders of nonprofit local news come from print backgrounds with feelings that the rather affluent public media audience is not in need of their money.”

Patterson found that 60% of local public radio stations now have 10 or fewer people on their news staff, which include non-journalist on-air hosts and support people. “Some stations are so short of staff that they do not do any original reporting, relying entirely on other outlets, such as the local newspaper, for stories they air,” he wrote in his summary. And, he added, “the staffing problem is most acute in communities that have lost their newspaper or where local newsgathering has been sharply cut back.”

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There are still some notably large public radio local news operations in large urban areas, several of which have acquired startup local news websites.

Startup site LAist joined Southern California Public Media to supply local news throughout the Los Angeles region. New York Public Radio’s WNYC acquired the startup Gothamist local news site.

WHYY in Philadelphia bought the Billy Penn daily digital local newsletter. Colorado Public Radio acquired Denverite local news site. All four of those public media news operations had 60-person newsrooms, including their radio and support staff.

Chicago Public Media went further, buying the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, which then became a nonprofit.

However, in time, these news operations, supported by listeners and philanthropy, have been forced to downsize. Chicago Public Media laid off 14 employees in 2024 and bought out 30 more in 2025. New York Public Radio announced in 2025 that it would lay off 21 people, about 7% of its staff.

WAMU, the NPR member station in Washington, dealt with a worse crisis in 2024. It shut down the DCist startup local news site that it had acquired and reduced the public station’s total news staff from 14 to just four reporters.

At the beginning of May 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that instructed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to prohibit federal funding to NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), even though Congress had already fully funded CPB for two more fiscal years.

Asserting its statutory independence, CPB initially refused and went to court to fight Trump’s effort to replace three of its board members and cut off public media money. Congress voted to cut all funding to NPR, PBS and CPB in July.

NPR stations have received an average of 10% of their funding from CPB, some much more. For example, Juneau, Alaska’s KTOO Public Media, an important source of local news for the southern portion of that state, received 30% of its budget from CPB. This has created an emergency for public media, with fundraising pleas and layoffs.

Programs and stations may need to close.

Cutting off funding from CPB, which has always operated independently of political influence, also will jeopardize support by it and collaborating philanthropists of regional newsrooms of NPRmember stations that collaborate on news reporting and training. NPR has regional newsrooms in California, Texas, the Midwest, the Gulf States, Appalachia and the Mid-South, and New England.

These collaborations have been increasing the number of NPR local news reporters in these regions. CPB also has made grants to more than a dozen NPR stations around the country to increase their reporting on state governments. And CPB has funded a small NPR Station Investigations Team that works with and trains local public radio reporters on investigative reporting.

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Local television news More people still tune into local television stations for local news than any other single source.

However, that audience is steadily shrinking and growing older, while an increasing number of people are turning to internet sites and social media for community and other local news. Stations have responded by belatedly putting more news on their own websites and by digitally streaming video news in various ways on a variety of platforms.

“Local news is moving aggressively toward digital distribution,” said former CBS News president Andrew Heyward,1 who now advises some local television station groups. “They have to find new ways to reach audiences.”

Local television stations must follow their audience by “delivering stories instantly across multi-platform rather than relying on what we know as traditional appointment viewing,” Kelly Frank, president and general manager of CBS-owned KYW television in Philadelphia, told the Poynter Institute for a report on 2025 trends in local television news.

As with newspapers, ownership of local television stations has been increasingly concentrated in large groups. A Stanford Graduate School of Business study found that “the three largest owners control 40% of all local news stations and are present in over 80% of media markets.” Gray Media, which owns TV stations in 113 stations, has a reputation for award-winning local news, while Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns TV stations in 89 markets, has reduced local news coverage on its

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1

stations in favor of partisan conservative national news.

The content of local television news in many parts of the country is still dominated by weather, sports, crime, consumer, accident and disaster news, although some stations are trying to increase the amount of reporting that reflects the rest of life in their communities. The average amount of time stations devote to local news programming on weekdays is 6.6 hours, according to the Pew Research Center. Much of that time, however, is devoted to commercials and anchor chatter, in addition to weather, sports and light features. The relatively few freshly reported local news stories are sometimes repeated in various forms throughout the day.

An average of 47.5 people work in a “typical” local television station newsroom, with somewhat more at the biggest stations and considerably fewer at the smallest stations, according to a 2024 survey

by Radio, Television, Digital News Association (RTDNA) and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. An average of only seven of those people in local television station newsrooms are reporters or so-called multi-media journalists who report, edit, produce and shoot videos for their stories. The rest are supervisors, editors, producers, news and sports anchors, weathercasters, photographers, and, now, digital staff.

Many of them feel very overworked and stressed, the study reported, to the extent that they do not

Andrew Heyward was research professor at the Cronkite School.

all stay in their jobs. “Staff burnout continues to be a growing problem,” according to the RTDNA/ Newhouse survey, which called it a local television “newsroom crisis.”

“People are being asked to do more with less, and salaries are not keeping up,” Heyward told me. “The best and the brightest are not attracted as much. Stations are taking younger and less experienced people. This puts particular pressure on small and medium stations.”

At the same time, Heyward said, “local TV news is getting better, even though there is still a lot of crime and weather. Everybody, to one degree or another, is trying to get better. They’re trying to move to being essential, and they can’t be essential if the coverage is not connected to the viewers’ lives.”

For some local stations owned by CBS and ABC, for example, that means embedding young journalists in neighborhoods in their cities. “Audiences seek connection and stories that uplift and unite their communities,” KYW’s Frank told Poynter.

“Journalists in the community will matter because they share the best of their communities. At CBS, we see and understand that value and have already placed an emphasis on community journalism.”

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Local news collaboration

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One of the most important developments in recent years has been the considerable increase in collaborations among local, state and national news media on stories and projects that could not have been done by a single organization. No fewer than seven of these collaborations were recognized in the 2024 and 2025 Pulitzer Prize awards.

The nonprofit Baltimore Banner, launched in 2022, won the 2025 Pulitzer for local reporting for stories about the disproportionate deaths of Black men in Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis, on which it was assisted

by The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship. One of the three Banner reporters, Alissa Zhu, worked on the investigation during her year on the fellowship. Big Local News, a Stanford University nonprofit that collaborates on data investigations, also contributed to the project, and The Banner shared its data with nine other news media.

One of the 2025 finalists in the investigative reporting category was a three-year collaboration among the Associated Press, PBS Frontline and investigative reporting students in the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University and the University of Maryland.

They investigated the deaths of people restrained by police using methods that were supposed to be non-lethal.

The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes recognized five other collaborations. The Chicago-based nonprofit Invisible Institute won the local reporting Pulitzer with Chicago’s nonprofit City Bureau for stories about missing and murdered Black women. The Invisible Institute also won the audio reporting Pulitzer, along with the USG Audio podcast company, for a series of podcasts about a 1997 hate crime in Chicago.

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2

Nonprofit KFF Health News2 was a 2024 public service finalist with the Cox Media Group for an investigation of the Social Security Administration’s demands for money from millions of recipients who had been overpaid. A collaborative investigation of the police response to the Uvalde, Texas school shooting by The Texas Tribune, PBS Frontline and ProPublica was a finalist in explanatory reporting.

And an investigation by the nonprofit Mississippi Today and The New York Times of abuses by Mississippi sheriffs was a finalist for local reporting.

The Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship program, supplemented by other assistance from its newsroom, has produced more than 45 collaborative stories, which it has made available to more than 100 other local news media organizations to publish.

Collaboration on investigative reporting projects has been a necessity for the Invisible Institute, which describes itself as “a nonprofit journalism production company on the south side of Chicago” that works “to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable.” It does so with investigative reporting, multi-media storytelling, collecting and curating public information about abuses, and holding public conversations about those issues and its stories about them.

Invisible Institute also shared the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its investigation of K-9 police dog unit abuses in collaboration with AL.com in Alabama, the IndyStar in Indianapolis, and the Marshall Project, a national criminal justice investigative nonprofit.

“We always partner,” Invisible Institute’s executive director, Andrew Fan, told me.

“Partnerships mean we can bring the journalism to a much larger audience. We benefit from being flexible with who we work with.”

Professor Downie is chair of the KFF advisory board.

“We bring expertise on FOIA and data, especially data on the police and criminal justice,” Fan said.

“And the kinds of relationships we have with people.”

Countless collaborations among local news media, often for investigative or explanatory reporting projects, are ongoing every day.

In Florida, 17 local news organizations – led by the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times and WLRN public radio in Miami – formed The Florida Climate Reporting Network to work with Inside Climate News on environmental reporting.

In Utah, the Great Salt Lake Collaborative is a group of 17 newspapers, local television stations and public radio stations that work with colleges and groups of experts to cover the crisis of the disappearing Great Salt Lake.

In New Hampshire, the Granite State News Collaborative shares not only reporting among its more than 20 members, but also professional development of staff journalists and freelancers, and training for community members and college students in covering local meetings.

CoLab, the relatively new Colorado News Collaborative, has its own state-of-the-art multimedia newsroom in the Rocky Mountain Public Media center in downtown Denver. Among its tenants are The Associated Press, Chalkbeat Colorado, the Colorado Sun nonprofit, and Rocky Mountain Public Media. Its entire coalition consists of more than 170 for-profit and nonprofit print, online, radio and television stations throughout the state. The partners have produced several projects on statewide health issues.

“

Collaboration is important for local news at this time. Limited resources have forced people into collaborations.”

— Stefanie Murray The Center for Cooperative Media, Montclair State University director

The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey counts as members several dozen state, local and regional news media collaboratives throughout the country. That collaboration work is in addition to the many more ad hoc collaborations for specific stories and projects like those recognized in the 2024 and 2025 Pulitzer Prize competitions.

“Collaboration is important for local news at this time,” the center’s director, Stefanie Murray, said in an interview. “Limited resources have forced people into collaborations.” Murray told me that research shows that “people trust collaborations more than individual news organizations.”

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Government support for local news media

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A number of democratic countries provide some form of public support for news media, with safeguards to avoid the kind of government control that exists in many nondemocratic countries. That support includes tax breaks and subsidies for news media, or license fees for television access, such as the license fee that British citizens pay to watch live television channels, which funds the BBC’s broadcasting services. Until recently, the only public support in the United States has been the congressional appropriation for the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provided a fraction of the money needed by public radio and television stations and networks, including for their news reporting.

What has changed in recent years is that several states have passed legislation to give tax credits to local news media to grow their newsrooms or to fund fellowships for reporters. Last year, New York State passed legislation to give news media there $90 million in tax credits over three years to help them hire and retain journalists.

Illinois enacted a package of legislation in 2024 to provide $25 million in similar tax credits for local news media over five years, plus a requirement that news organizations there cannot be sold to an out-of-state owner without 120 days’ advance notice, plus a scholarship program for journalism students choosing to work at an Illinois local news organization for at least two years after graduation.

For some time, there has been a movement to find other kinds of government support for U.S. news media, especially since their economic models began breaking down late in the last century.

Opponents of federal funding are concerned about political intrusions on press freedom, such as President Trump’s effort to stop the CPB from funding NPR and PBS because he and his advisors believe they are too liberal. A bipartisan bill to provide payroll tax credits to local news media and advertising tax credits to small businesses that advertise in local news media has not been passed

by Congress.

In 2022, California allocated $25 million for the University of California at Berkeley to give fellowships to local reporters in California newsrooms. In 2023, the state of Washington appropriated $2.425 million for a similar fellowship program. California also included in its 2021 budget $10 million for grants to ethnic media in the state.

Similar kinds of legislation have been introduced but not passed in other states, so it is unclear how much state support for local news media will spread in the country. And the outlook for similar federal support in the current political environment is bleak at best.

Independent local digital journalists The internet has made it possible for independent former journalists and entrepreneurial people to report about where they live or their special local interests in personality-driven digital newsletters or podcasts posted on social media platforms for subscribers.

Local news independent journalists are only part of the rapidly growing number of independent content creators on the internet. But their role is worth watching.

“More and more folks are independently covering local news, some from traditional news backgrounds, others not,” said Liz Kelly Nelson, a former media professional who started Project C to provide training, support and networking for independent journalists. “They are working in the creator economy, trying to monetize their subscribers,” Nelson added in an interview.

Independent journalist Naomi Krueger started the Roseville Reader digital newsletter to cover the suburb she lived in outside Minneapolis.

Entrepreneur and outdoorsman Michael Kauffman launched the Catskill Crew newsletter to cover activities in the Catskill Mountains community.

George Arbogust’s Williamsburg Independent focuses on government accountability in the historic Williamsburg, Yorktown and Jamestown areas of Virginia. Journalist Bryan Vance’s Stumptown Savings covers grocery shopping for subscribers in Portland, Oregon.

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Artificial intelligence and local news media U. S. news media are increasingly experimenting with artificial intelligence for a variety of tasks, including transcribing interviews, analyzing and organizing reporters’ notes and other material, scraping databases, analyzing photographs and satellite imagery, translating stories into other languages, creating automated-voice versions of news stories for their websites, and soliciting advertising, subscriptions and reader memberships for nonprofit news sites.

“We use machine-learning models to sift through vast amounts of data for investigative reporting,” The New York Times told its readers in October 2024. “Our editors may employ generative AI tools to create initial drafts of headlines, summaries of Times articles and other text that helps us produce and distribute the news.

“That’s always done with human oversight and review, in accordance with our principles for the use of such tools,” it added. “We don’t use AI to write articles, and journalists are ultimately responsible for everything that we publish.”

That is extremely important for any news organization, because some AI applications are not factually reliable. In May 2025, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer admitted that they both published a summer book reading section, created by a freelancer using artificial intelligence, that included books and quoted people who do not exist.

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Many journalistic uses of artificial intelligence by news media are more dependable and helpful. AI applications can search archives of information, analyze large data sets from campaign finance records, review state and local legislation, search government budgets, review public meeting minutes, and decode legal documents. They can transcribe interviews, speeches, government hearings and press conferences. They can convert digital text news stories into audio versions for their news websites. Under the supervision of editors, they can assist with copy-editing, headline-writing and proofreading. They can even detect potential breaking news stories from social media alerts.

For example, the nonprofit Civic News Company’s eight Chalkbeat local education news sites use AI to summarize and analyze school board and other public meeting data. Chalkbeat’s New York Cityarea bureau uses it to identify story possibilities and sources from more than 40 school policy meetings a month.

AI applications also can translate digital text stories into other languages. The nonprofit New Bedford Light website in coastal Massachusetts uses an AI application to translate up to 200 stories a month from English into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Vietnamese and Arabic – languages spoken in local communities there. The nonprofit Arizona Luminaria uses it to publish its stories and conduct its fundraising in both English and Spanish.

Particularly useful for nonprofit local news media, artificial intelligence applications can help identify promising donor prospects, draft and customize fundraising letters, and improve the targeting of fundraising campaigns The American Journalism Project launched a Product and AI Studio in 2023 for 28 of its nonprofit news site grantees to help them develop and use artificial intelligence applications for news gathering and revenue-raising. For example, they are experimenting with transcribing, fact-checking and finding stories in public meeting reports from the Chicago City Bureau’s network of community documenters who are used by many nonprofit local news sites around the country.

AJP is working with Stanford University’s Big Local News to use AI-powered data journalism tools to analyze local government records and data sets.

AJP grantees are also experimenting with improving their fundraising operations and building an AIpowered generator of targeted advertising sales kits.

The use of artificial intelligence imaginatively and responsibly for the journalism and sustainability of local news media is still in its infancy. Much more research and experimentation, along with ethical scrutiny, is necessary entering this new era.

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Shaping the future of local news Local news media, vital for the American people and their communities, are in the middle of a historic transformation detailed in this report.

“There is so much happening in local news right now, but it’s incredibly varied,” Jim Brady, formerly of the Knight Foundation, said. “One of the biggest challenges is simply making sense of it all.”

That is one of the purposes of the Knight Center for the Future of News at the Cronkite School.

The Knight Center’s goal is to understand and accelerate the transformation of all American journalism – including local news.

Here are my thoughts about some of what should be done to save and strengthen local news: • Find and execute ways to increasingly compete with and replace chain-owned newspapers and local television stations that have hollowed out their newsrooms and significantly decreased local news coverage.

• Establish relationships and dialogues with local communities, including community advisory committees and public forums, to discover what they need and will support and trust in local news coverage.

• Train community members to help in reporting on meetings and events, involving them in local news coverage.

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• Increase local newsroom staff diversity to reflect the communities being covered – and increase decision-making dialogue among newsroom leaders and staff members.

• Be transparent with the community about how local news is covered and decisions about it are made.

• Include in local accountability journalism the exploration of potential solutions to the problems being investigated.

• Enable the sustainability of nonprofit and limitedprofit local news media with increased community support through audience memberships and donations, local business advertising, public events, and local and national philanthropic support.

• Convert more local news media into sustainable nonprofits.

• Develop and use new technological tools, including artificial intelligence applications, to enable news gathering and to distribute local news in new multi-platform ways to reach wider audiences.

• Take advantage of the growing number of technology companies developing and selling such tools for news media.

• Continue to increase news organization

collaboration on local news reporting, story distribution and sustainability.

• Collectively seek support from state governments, such as tax incentives, that does not risk political interference in news reporting.

Local news should and will be high on the agenda of the Knight Center for the Future of News at the Cronkite School.

Leonard Downie Jr., Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication for the past 15 years, was a local investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and local, national, managing and executive editor at The Washington Post for 44 years. He started as a summer intern in 1964 and rose to be The Post’s top editor from 1991 to 2008, during which time The Post won 25 Pulitzer Prizes.

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