The Marblehead Current, a nonprofit local news organization that was founded in 2022, has published an editorial about Press Forward, the initiative announced by 22 foundations to donate more than $500 million to support community journalism over the next five years. I think this is key:

But while we are excited about what Press Forward or a new law might mean for our industry as a whole, we have a nagging fear that news of such developments will create the funding equivalent of the “bystander effect” in Marblehead, fostering the assumption that the Current will be fine, its needs attended to by someone else, someone from “away.”

There is no substitute for a strong funding base at the local level. National efforts should be seen as a supplement.

Leave a comment | Read comments

Discover more from Media Nation

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.