From the senior editor
“It’s all hands on deck here, and every kind of tool is necessary.”
That quote comes courtesy of Martha Minow, a legal scholar at Harvard who recently published a book arguing that the government has a role to play in saving news outlets — especially local ones that have yet to find a viable business model. Minow was interviewed for our recent story about how state legislators are using public funds to invest in local news. In California, for example, $25 million was set aside to establish a fellowship program to place reporters in underserved community newsrooms for up to three years.
The California program, along with others in New Jersey and New Mexico, to name just a few, are a welcome development. In the past two decades, more than 2,500 news organizations have closed. It's clear that a wide range of solutions — all hands on deck — are needed to both stem the tide and "replant" newsrooms in regions that have become news deserts. In another encouraging sign, major philanthropic funders are thinking more aggressively about how they can help bolster areas struggling to build and maintain community news organizations. In January, a group with representatives from the Lenfest Institute, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Emerson Collective, among others, got together in Rancho Mirage, California, to discuss "local funding collaborations at much grander national scale."
Days after the summit, organizers released "The Roadmap for Local News," a 27-page document that called for coordinating philanthropic donations to expand access to "civic information," investing in shared services or infrastructure for community organizations and cultivating public policies that support these ventures. The roadmap sparked a vigorous debate, with some arguing that it left out "HBCU graduates, those with GEDs, folks from rural communities" and was too narrow in its approach. Others noted that nonprofit startups will not by themselves solve the crisis.
Wherever you land in this debate, the fact that this discussion is intensifying and state lawmakers are pushing through at least some policy prescriptions — however meager at this point — is a good sign. For the first time in a long time, I have felt an unfamiliar feeling about the state of the news industry bubble up: hope.
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