After reading Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s interview with Richard J. Tofel about her new report, “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs,” I was concerned that she was going to propose widespread consolidation in the local and hyperlocal news space. I was alarmed enough to write a blog post reminding my readers of the old slogan “Local Doesn’t Scale.”
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So once the actual report came out, I set aside a couple of hours to read it carefully. It is more nuanced than her interview with Tofel suggested, and I found much of it to be both useful and thoughtful. A reminder: Hansen Shapiro is the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that purchased newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia and ran them with rather mixed results. We interviewed her in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, and she was a guest on our podcast.
Oddly enough, Hansen Shapiro’s conversation with Tofel garnered more attention than the report itself. Tofel told Nieman Lab that it was his all-time most-viewed post. Well, I’m here to rectify that. It’s a dense report, but it’s well worth reading. I’ll guide you through some of the highlights.
Hansen Shapiro writes that she used AI as a tool to help her conduct analysis for her report, and, in that spirit, I’ve made use of it as well, producing a summary, an outline and some bullet points so that I don’t overlook something important that I want to take note of.
Her report, which was commissioned by Arnold Ventures and published by Media Impact Funders, takes a look at 559 proposals submitted to Press Forward seeking funding for infrastructure. Press Forward is a national consortium of major foundations that is helping to fund local news organizations. (We interviewed Press Forward executive director Dale Anglin on our podcast last month.) With an assist from AI, Hansen Shapiro sorted those 559 proposals into 11 “problem domains” in an attempt to understand what local news publishers think they need to grow into sustainable enterprises.
Hansen Shapiro examined two types of news organizations: nonprofits and for-profits that have a relationship with a nonprofit organization that supports their journalism. Ellen and I have looked at both at What Works, with examples of the latter ranging from large daily newspapers such as The Minnesota Star Tribune to smaller outlets such as The Provincetown Independent. As an aside, we’ve also found that a number of publishers have concluded that nonprofit is where the money is; several projects we wrote about in our book have converted from for-profit to nonprofit, including The Colorado Sun, The Mendocino Voice in Northern California and Santa Cruz Local, in the San Francisco Bay area.
A couple of Hansen Shapiro’s observations struck me as being especially pointed and on target. In one section, she writes that one of the hazards of nonprofit journalism is that, in some cases, it tends to be geared toward the needs of funders rather than the community. She puts it this way:
Because philanthropic funding often requires significant time and organizational attention to secure and maintain, it can weaken the role of audience response as a primary signal shaping newsroom priorities. Success can become partially measured by alignment with funder interests, narrative frameworks, and reporting categories rather than by sustained audience use or support.
In lay terms: When the revenue is coming primarily from foundations and wealthy patrons rather than local readers and advertisers, the temptation is to pursue the interests of those well-heeled funders. In-depth projects that win awards keep the money flowing. But it’s the quotidian coverage of community life that may best serve the audience, such as city council and school board meetings, neighborhood issues, law enforcement, arts and culture, and sports.
This clash between funding priorities and audience needs sometimes results in nonprofit news outlets that don’t reflect the life of the places they cover. I write quite a bit about the New Haven Independent, one of the original digital nonprofits, and one of the reasons for that is that it has a real sense of community-based vitality. It is of New Haven, for New Haven, to adapt a slogan used by the Graham family back before they sold The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos. There are a lot of nonprofit news leaders who could benefit from studying the Independent.
Equity and infrastructure
Another section of Hansen Shapiro’s report that resonates concerns diversity and equity. Here she strikes a particularly nuanced balance between the genuine need for diverse newsroom and the interest funders have in providing money for projects that are seeking to pursue equity programs. In other words, equity is both a real need as well as a reliable source of funding. Here’s how Hansen Shapiro puts it:
The volume of proposals addressing equity-related challenges reflects real and persistent structural inequities in journalism that cannot be dismissed or treated as peripheral. At the same time, the prevalence of this framing also appears shaped by broader field dynamics. Over the past several years, many funders have elevated equity and representation as central organizing principles for their giving and sensemaking, and applicants have understandably articulated needs in ways that align with those priorities.
Her response to this challenge is to advocate for infrastructure solutions that strengthen news organizations and, as a consequence, help solve equity issues as well. She writes that equity concerns “should be understood in relation to underlying infrastructure conditions,” adding that “well-designed investments in core services, shared technologies, and collaborative infrastructure can produce equity-enhancing effects precisely because they reduce structural burdens across the ecosystem.”
One area in which I partly disagree with Hansen Shapiro is her assertion that philanthropy alone won’t be enough to meet local news and information needs. “A simple aggregation of the annual operating budgets represented in the applicant pool exceeds $500 million, which is roughly equivalent to the total amount Press Forward has pledged to invest over five years,” she writes.
Well, no. Fair enough. But philanthropic dollars should be used to supplement funds raised at the local level. No one should imagine that Press Forward is going to meet the needs of every local news organization. The challenge is to educate local foundation leaders and high-net-worth individuals (nonprofit-speak for wealthy people) that they should support news in their own communities. Moreover, as Dale Anglin and Steven Waldman of Rebuild Local News argue, we also need changes in public policy to support local news, from tax credits to corps of young reporters — in some cases subsidized through government sources, as in California.
Hansen Shapiro’s approach to consolidation is cautious, calling for collaboration where it makes sense and consolidation at the hyperlocal level — not of reporting capacity, but of the back-office operations that we see so many startups trying to reinvent rather than adopting shared solutions, such as “advertising sales capacity, fractional financial management, legal support, or specialized business expertise.”
I’ll add that an off-the-shelf, low-cost content-management system is one of the top needs for startups. It’s disheartening to see folks trying to start a news outlet in their community waste enormous amounts of valuable time finding a platform, adapting it to their needs and coming up with a custom design. Services such as the Tiny News Collective, Newspack and TAPinto have made this process somewhat easier, but a lot more could be done.
I could go on, but I’ll close with one final observation Hansen Shapiro makes that tracks closely with what Ellen and I have seen: Funding for nonprofit news is strongest in urban and suburban areas where grantmaking foundations are located, which is why rural areas and urban communities of color are too often left behind. She writes:
New nonprofit outlets have clustered disproportionately in major metropolitan areas that are themselves philanthropic centers. This pattern reflects a rational response to funding availability, but it produces a structural inversion: the communities most likely to require ongoing subsidy to sustain local news are often the least likely to have access to philanthropic capital, institutional donors, or dense nonprofit ecosystems. As a result, geographic inequity in journalism provision is reinforced rather than mitigated by reliance on place-bound philanthropy.
Now, that particular observation pertains more to rural areas than urban communities. Yet, as we write in our book, Wendi Thomas had to use credit cards to launch her hyperlocal news project, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, in Memphis, Tennessee, because she couldn’t entice major funders. Meanwhile, a high-profile startup like Houston Landing seemingly had little trouble attracting $20 million in funding from national foundations only to shut down in 2025, three years after it was founded.
An AI summary
To round this out, here are five bullet points summarizing the report that were produced by Claude, the AI assistant that I used to help me organize this post. Since I’ve read the entire report, I can attest that these do a pretty good job of encapsulating Hansen Shapiro’s major findings.
1. The problem isn’t a lack of good ideas — it’s a lack of shared tools and systems. Local news organizations know what they need to do. What’s holding them back is that each small outlet has to build everything from scratch — technology, back-office operations, fundraising systems — on its own. That duplication is expensive and unsustainable.
2. Having lots of small outlets is both a strength and a weakness. The growth of hundreds of small nonprofit news organizations has been great for innovation and serving communities that big outlets ignored. But all those tiny organizations operating independently drives up costs, spreads thin leadership even thinner, and makes it nearly impossible to build the kind of shared systems everyone needs.
3. Grants alone can’t fund all of local news, but the field is behaving as if they can. The organizations in this proposal pool collectively need more money each year than Press Forward has pledged over five years. Too many organizations treat philanthropic funding as a permanent lifeline rather than seed money to build something more self-sustaining. That’s a dangerous assumption.
4. The staffing crisis goes deeper than hiring more people. Local newsrooms are short-staffed and burning out, but just training more journalists won’t fix the problem if pay stays low, career paths don’t exist, and organizations remain too small to support experienced leaders. You can’t staff your way out of a broken system.
5. Newsrooms working together may be the best path forward. The most encouraging trend in the report is the growing interest in regional collaboratives — outlets sharing reporters, editors, ad sales, and back-office functions across a state or region. It’s not just a nice idea; it may be the only realistic way to make local news affordable to produce at scale.
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