5 Pieces of Good News About the News

Local Dollars for Local News

The deepest crisis in the country remains the accelerating collapse of the local newspapers that used to cover the City Council, for instance, imperfectly keeping government accountable even if the coverage wasn’t always widely read. With newspapers’ advertising business in ruins, there’s no real path to rebuilding their newsrooms for a digital age. And the real problem is money. A generation of nonprofit newsrooms has begun to pick up the slack, often seeded by national organizations like the Knight Foundation, that have a kind of broad interest in journalism.

But big national donors can’t — and probably shouldn’t — be funding the media everywhere. One piece of good news is that the sorts of local philanthropists who used to donate to the opera or museums now see local journalism as a worthy cause in a path promoted by the American Journalism Project. In Wichita, Kan., the Wichita Community Foundation is set to commit more than $1 million over three years to a new project called The Wichita Beacon (an outgrowth of The Kansas City Beacon), which is in the process of hiring an editor. “This is a part of the evolution of journalism and if charitable support makes sense for the opera, why wouldn’t it make sense for an informed community?” asked Shelly Prichard, the president and chief executive of the Wichita Community Foundation.

Another innovation in funding local media is underway in Colorado. There, a recent Harvard Business School Ph.D., Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, used a leveraged buyout — “the good kind, backed by foundations,” she said — to purchase a chain of local newspapers whose owner had put it up for sale. Ms. Hansen Shapiro, the chief executive and co-founder of the National Trust for Local News, then recruited a small Denver-based digital outlet, The Colorado Sun, to run the newspaper group, in a deal that will turn over control to The Sun as the debt is paid down.

The leveraged buyout, better known for its use by Wall Street raiders, in this case allows local foundations and institutional donors to guarantee loans to buy independent community papers. Ms. Shapiro has also begun making the case for a “local news bond” that anyone can buy to help invest in their own local paper.

She said in an email that roughly $300 million “would be enough to preserve nearly all the independent community papers at risk” in the United States.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/media/good-news-media-sites.html