Why We Support This Work
Among the many challenges facing American democracy, from low voter turnout and declining civic engagement to increasing partisanship and disagreement on facts and science, one thing is inextricably connected to these and other problems: the steady disappearance of local news.
One-fifth of Americans live in news deserts and tens of millions more live in communities at risk of losing their last reliable local news resource.
Since 2005, the United States has lost more than one-fourth of its newspapers and is on track to lose one-third by 2025, and the news industry has lost 30,000 jobs since 2008. This problem is particularly urgent in the South, Southeast, and the middle of the country and in communities where the poverty rate is higher than the national average and the median income is lower than the national average, making the lack of access to fact-based journalism and reliable information yet another indicator of growing income inequality.
Moreover, the news media has never done an adequate job of representing or uplifting the voices of underrepresented groups inside their newsrooms nor in their coverage. Lack of trust in the media is and has been a longstanding issue for historically marginalized communities, especially for people of color, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community. One contributing factor may be that newsrooms have not reflected the diversity of the American population.
Meanwhile, journalism has never been a philanthropic imperative, in the same way that education and health care have been, and criminal justice reform and climate change have now become. Over the past 15 years, there has been a steady growth in journalism funding, but overall giving has not kept pace with the seriousness of the problem. During that same period, a handful of foundations have supported innovations and experiments in journalism, and that work has yielded good results, producing models, approaches, and interventions that are proven and ready to scale.
The journalism field has become increasingly self-aware and begun to make progress toward addressing the economic, structural, technological, and cultural challenges that have contributed to its decline. Today, there are more entrepreneurial and diverse leaders leading newsrooms, using smarter tools, and employing better systems to support audience engagement and revenue generation. There is greater likelihood of editorial collaborations, and there are exciting policy ideas that have gained bipartisan support. A local news renaissance is in sight if we can help accelerate the transformation underway.
