News From Your Neighborhood, Brought to You by the State of New Jersey

The crisis in the news media has been acutely felt in New Jersey, where the press corps covering the state government in Trenton has withered and larger newspapers in the region have reduced their staffs and their coverage.

“We need to do something,” said Joe Amditis, an associate director for the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, one of the schools involved in the effort. “We just can’t sit around and expect it to get better.”

Under the bill establishing the journalism consortium, grants will be handed out by a board of directors made up of appointees by the governor and Legislature, as well as representatives from state universities, community groups, the news media and the technology industry. Prospective projects would require collaboration with one of several state universities, and applicants would have to show how their work would benefit a community. The consortium will place an emphasis on projects aimed at low-income or minority communities, or areas that have been especially undercovered by news organizations.

Proponents initially sought $100 million from the more than $330 million that New Jersey made from auctioning the licenses of two public broadcasting stations last year. But that figure was eventually whittled down to $5 million. Some have questioned whether that will be enough to make a difference, given the costs of reporting as well as staffing the consortium, which will also seek grants and donations.

The closest model is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports television and radio outlets at a national level, but the initiative in New Jersey has a more expansive mandate.“We saw this as a reimagining of what public-interest media looks like,” Mr. Rispoli said, adding that effort also seeks to improve media literacy and counter the influence of social media in disseminating unreliable or false information.

Proponents hope that the initiative can serve as a model to other states, but Ms. McBride and others have cautioned that it was a political feat that will likely be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Public broadcasting has been a frequent target of conservatives who have sought to cut taxpayer funding and leveled accusations of liberal bias. (Both houses of the State Legislature are controlled by Democrats, and the legislation to create the consortium, whose funding was already approved in the recently passed budget, is awaiting the signature of the governor, Philip D. Murphy, also a Democrat.)

Some say one journalistic bright spot in New Jersey is an emerging ecosystem of smaller organizations spread across the state, covering communities at a granular level. Many of them grew out of Patch, an ambitious investment by AOL several years ago in hyperlocal news, starting websites in hundreds of communities across the country and in dozens in New Jersey. (AOL has since handed over its majority stake in Patch, which has been scaled back considerably.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/nyregion/nj-legislature-community-journalism.html?partner=rss&emc=rss