Major donors join hands to help local newsrooms
But can it help save democracy? I'm skeptical
American democracy is in crisis with too many Americans willing to believe misinformation or outright lies. A group of well-funded donors thinks part of the reason is a shortage of reliable news to help Americans make better decisions.
On Thursday, foundations which for years have individually funded journalism projects decided to pool their resources and try to do something big to help the declining local news business. The new project, called Press Forward, combines resources from foundations whose names you might know. Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are just a few of the approximately 20 foundations that have kicked in an initial $500 million to help save local newsrooms. The eventual goal is $1 billion.
You already have heard the sad statistics. Some 2,500 newspapers have shut down since 2005. More than 20 percent of Americans now live in a “news desert”, meaning they have little or no independent local news sources. Revenue is declining. Audiences are fragmenting into ever smaller pieces. Even newsrooms that survive have far fewer journalists covering the news.
“People are now really alarmed,” Knight Foundation’s president told the New York Times. “There is a new understanding of the importance of information in the management of community, in the management of democracy in America, that I believe simply wasn’t there 15 years ago.”
Two questions come to my mind. Is philanthropy the ultimate answer to journalism’s problems? And how will millions of dollars change the willingness of some Americans to believe in conspiracy theories and lies?
Three Iowa experts weigh in
For some answers to the first question, I reached out to three experts right here in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative who all have experience with the struggles of print journalism. Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, told me, “I am not sure that we can depend on donors to float the boat through non-profit journalism (witness the Texas Tribune which recently laid off a bunch). What it does do is allow us to buy time to build out our digital products that will sell, that are selling.”
Cullen’s newspaper has experience with donated funds. “The Western Iowa Journalism Foundation saved us,” he says. “As a result, we have added two reporters in Storm Lake, plus a reporter and sports editor in Cherokee. Paid circulation is growing. Before donations, circulation was going the opposite direction.”
The Western Iowa Journalism Foundation is a three-year-old charity that has raised more than $1 million to support local newspapers in western Iowa. Its president, former Des Moines Register reporter Kyle Munson, hopes the Press Forward project can help. “We need all the serious funding and experimentation we can get in the name of independent local news,” Munson says. “I think everybody working in this sector realizes that philanthropy alone isn’t the permanent answer.”
Doug Burns knows firsthand the toll that declining revenue and growing expenses can take. His family owned the Carroll Times Herald for nearly 80 years before having to sell last year. For his newspaper, philanthropic funding came a little too late, even though he’s a co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation.
Doug tells me he hopes donated funds will eventually help other papers survive. "Community newspapers are in so many ways the last bastion of collective reality where we can come together. Local, local, local is what defines the newspapers the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation supports, and the reporting that emerges is a very real lifeboat that keeps rural Iowans from drowning in the swelling rivers of misinformation that have created something of a cold cultural civil war in our state.”
Can it help?
Which brings us to my second question about whether stronger newsrooms can make a difference in people’s attitudes about current events.
The president of the Knight Foundation, one of the big contributors to Press Forward, said in a news release, “The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.”
The way I interpret that statement is that we live in a country where too many Americans believe banning books is good, that Covid vaccines are bad, and that climate change is a hoax. The Press Forward folks, God bless ‘em, hope that hundreds of millions of dollars can help fix that by giving people more facts.
I hope they’re right. A billion dollars can solve a lot of problems. It can help the Storm Lake Times Pilot, Carroll Times Herald and even the Des Moines Register cover the local school board and county supervisors. That is of significant benefit to local citizens.
But on major national and global issues like health care, climate change, criminal justice and education, Americans have more access to facts than ever before. If people refuse to accept those facts, I’m skeptical how any amount of money can help. It’s certainly worth a try.
You can read Art Cullen, Doug Burns and Kyle Munson plus other thoughtful, interesting writers in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative:
I grew up in an era of newspapers, radio and typewriters and, like lots of others, have at times struggled with moving to the next stage of communications, whatever that happened to be. I share deep concerns over the direction of the country and related to that is the diminishing of news sources and sharing of differences of opinion that overall help us to form our own outlooks. I have concerns over the outlook for newspapers but fear more a lessening of news sources and identification of the person who authored the story. I feel that what is really a competition among news sources is a vital part of coming to the truth and the openness of society. I hope newspapers can find a way to remain a positive factor but even more that we can continue to have a multitude of sources, all helping to keep the others honest. The last thing we want, I'd think, is a government news source as the major decider of what is important and what is the truth.
About a decade ago, I suggested to the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), a simple program improve the public’s understanding of the importance of the media to American democracy. RTDNA, working with local journalists and public schools, could develop a series of classroom lessons when schools were discussing civics and America history. These lessons would center on the First Amendment and why the founders believed that freedom of the press was important. I don’t think RTDNA ever did this. And the public’s negative view of news organizations continues. I hope that an infusion of money will save some media. But the public has to believe it reads, sees and hears from legacy media as well as digital publications. Until that happens, no amount of money will fix this negative perception.