Local News – Media Nation

INN’s NewsMatch program switches from an annual fundraising drive to a year-round effort

From “NewsMatch at 10: A Decade of Impact.”

For nonprofit news organizations, the most important time of the year is November and December, when the NewsMatch program goes live. An initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the program provides national funding as a percentage of money raised locally. It’s not a one-to-one match, but it provides crucial revenues to small (and large) projects as well as an incentive they can use in attracting donors.

Now INN is making a change. According to a new impact report, marking the 10th anniversary of the program, NewsMatch is moving to a year-round model. According to the report:

The next phase will focus on helping newsrooms build on that foundation with more advanced, flexible campaigns tailored to their goals and stage of growth. To support this evolution, NewsMatch is shifting from a single year-end campaign to a year-round model.

We talked to newsrooms about what they were looking for from this opportunity, and they emphasized the value of flexibility, experimentation, and shared learning. In 2027, we’re excited to pilot NewsMatch Catalyst Campaigns, supporting a select group of INN members as they test new fundraising strategies, deepen donor engagement, and build toward long-term sustainability.

According to the report, NewsMatch has raised more than $477 million for local news over the past 10 years, with INN itself growing from 27 investigative news organizations in 2009 to some 500 member outlets today. (INN was originally known as the Investigative News Network.)

Karen Rundlet, INN’s CEO and executive director, calls NewsMatch “the people-powered engine of the nonprofit news field, democratizing donations from a public that wants good, accurate information that helps them with daily decision making. People from all corners of the country donate to newsrooms via NewsMatch.”

Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a good overview of the impact report.

Talking about threats to shut the Toledo Blade, cuts at McClatchy and rural news deserts

The Blade building in Toledo, Ohio. Photo (cc) 2019 by David Wilson.

I had a chance to take part in a conversation Wednesday on “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on WOSU Radio in Ohio. Our topics included the Block family’s threat to shut down The Blade of Toledo if a buyer isn’t found, devastating cuts at the McClatchy newspaper chain, and the ongoing problem of rural news deserts.

Dee Drummond, a former Blade reporter now at the University of Toledo, and First Amendment lawyer Michael Berry were Juravich’s other guests, though we were not on at the same time.

If you’d like to give it a listen, you can click right here.

Margaret Sullivan tells us how national media failures connect with the local news crisis

Margaret Sullivan. Photo (cc) 2016 by Michaelbenabib.

The “What Works” podcast is back after our summer hiatus. My co-host, Ellen Clegg, was feeling under the weather, so I’m flying solo. But no worries — Ellen still handled editing and production, and she should be back for our next episode.

We’re pleased to have Margaret Sullivan as our guest. Sullivan has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: telling the country’s most powerful newsrooms what they’re getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor at The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as its media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing.

Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless newsletter on Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in how the media are covering Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.

But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News, and worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted. In 2020, she published a book about the local news crisis called “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” and, we’re pleased to say, she blurbed our book, “What Works in Community News.”

I’ve got a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can’t find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? I also dive into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.

You can listen here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

In the midst of a national freakout over AI, here’s the latest on what it’s doing to journalism

It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)

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I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.

Continue reading “In the midst of a national freakout over AI, here’s the latest on what it’s doing to journalism”

In ‘Deserted,’ Nick Mathews explains how the local news crisis is devastating rural communities

*Old store in Nelson County, Va., a focus on Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted.” Photo (cc) 2010 by Ted Hodges.*

Local news is in crisis everywhere, but the challenge is more daunting in rural areas than it is in cities or affluent suburbs.

Consider the Storm Lake Times Pilot, which serves a farming community in Iowa. As co-founder Art Cullen explains in the 2021 documentary “Storm Lake,” the rise of agribusiness wiped out much of the local advertising that had once sustained the paper while the spreading tentacles of social media grabbed another large chunk. When Cullen appeared that same year on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” he told us that both he and his brother, John Cullen, were living on Social Security rather than take a salary out of their precarious newspaper revenues.

The Storm Lake Times Pilot is emblematic of a national phenomenon. In 2025, the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School found that 213 U.S. counties lacked a local news outlet, and that nearly 80% of those counties were in rural areas.

This depressing state of affairs is the focus of Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America.”

Read the rest at The Arts Fuse.

Three local news outlets unveil a detailed guide to this fall’s state ballot questions

*Illustration by Field Nine Group / CommonWealth Beacon*

Mystified by that inscrutable guide to this fall’s ballot questions sent out by the secretary of state’s office? You’ll want to check out “The Massachusetts Ballot Questions, Explained,” a special project published by CommonWealth Beacon in partnership with The Bay State Banner and El Planeta.

The digital version was posted Tuesday by CommonWealth, but there’s more to come, including a print version and explainer videos on social. (Note: I’m a member of CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

Voters could find the ballot especially confusing this year because there are nine questions they will be asked to sift through, including public records reform, a switch to all-party primaries and the repeal of marijuana legalization. The project comprises an overview, explainers, data visualizations, pro and con mini-essays and links to past coverage.

Like all of CommonWealth’s journalism, the ballot-questions project is freely available for republication either in print or online. Or local news outlets could just link to it in a prominent place on their homepages.

Government by ballot question isn’t ideal, but legislative inaction has made it an increasingly important outlet for voter frustration. Don’t go into the ballot booth without knowing what you’re voting for.

Union employees at USA Today Co. protest a deal with ICE-enabling AI surveillance firm Palantir

*ICE agents on the streets of Los Angeles in 2025. Public domain photo by DHSgov.*

For USA Today Co., our largest newspaper chain, there is no bottom. Formerly known as Gannett, the publicly traded company is reviled in communities across the country for slashing its newsrooms. Now the chain is embarking on a venture that is sleazy even by its own low standards: a deal with Palantir, the infamous AI surveillance firm.

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As Frank Landymore wrote recently at Futurism:

The optics of partnering with Palantir — a company that provides military targeting software and wields a vast surveillance panopticon — are undeniably touchy. It’s worked hand in hand with ICE, secretly providing the agency a tool that scours citizen’s Medicaid and other government data to create a map of people it could potentially deport. It also supplies the Israeli military with an AI battlefield decision-making tool that can analyze enemy targets for elimination.

Now USAT’s employees are fighting back. Natalie Korach, reporting for the media-news site Status, notes that workers (sub. req.) at the company’s 31 unionized publications have signed a statement urging executives to “immediately end its partnership with the company,” citing Palantir’s work with the federal government. As Jon Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild-Communication Workers of America, told Korach, “It’s a company that is actively involved in highly sensitive matters that journalists are covering. Having that company now on the inside of the systems that the journalists use to then write about that company, I think is where the problem is.”

On top of that, Korach reports that USAT is embarking on yet another round of layoffs and buyouts.

From perusing the coverage, I’m not entirely sure exactly what Palantir will be doing for USAT. Korach writes that Schleuss says readers don’t want AI news content, but that doesn’t seem to be what this is about. Rather, chair and CEO Mike Reed told investors that Palantir will build an “intelligence layer” to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform,” according to an account in Nieman Lab.

Then again, as Darren Zullo reported for Boston.com last year, USAT is already using AI to generate stories. Because of course it is.

Update: USA Today Co. has responded to this post.

California may soon offer tax credits for local news. Could this be the goad that Massachusetts needs?

*The California Statehouse in Sacramento. Photo (cc) 2008 by Tszeiler1.*

Earlier this year, it looked like California might be the place where government efforts to revive local news went to their grave. As I wrote for Poynter Online, a widely touted partnership between Google and the state that would have provided $250 million for community journalism over five years was scaled back drastically, the victim of budget pressures and political infighting.

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But now California is on the verge of passing an ambitious bill to assist struggling news outlets. As Gretchen A. Peck reports for Editor & Publisher, the Community NEWS Act would provide significant tax credits for hiring and retaining journalists over a five-year period: $20,000 a year for retaining up to five full-time journalists; $15,000 for each additional full-timer; $7,500 for part-timers; and $15,000 for each full-timer hired to a new position.

Continue reading “California may soon offer tax credits for local news. Could this be the goad that Massachusetts needs?”

What I learned about suspended Spokane editor Rob Curley when I reported on him years ago

You may have seen the disturbing news that Rob Curley, executive editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, has been placed on administrative leave.

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Amaris Castillo reports for Poynter Online that publisher William “Stacey” Cowles cited “several personnel complaints,” and that the newsroom union has voted no confidence in Curley’s leadership. It appears that a dispute over coverage of the recent Spokane fires led to what has been described as “a verbal confrontation.” Here’s the statement from The Spokesman-Review.

I have a bit of insight into Curley, having reported on him for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” when he was editor of the Orange County Register. Curley was cordial and engaging, but he would not give me an on-the-record interview during my visit in March 2015.

Continue reading “What I learned about suspended Spokane editor Rob Curley when I reported on him years ago”

A hoped-for deal between NJ Spotlight News and Montclair State comes to fruition

*The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.*

There’s good news to report about the future of NJ Spotlight News, a 16-year-old website that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey. We learned in June that NJ PBS, the public television network that partners with Spotlight, would be moving to Montclair State University because of federal and state budget cuts totaling some $2.25 million a year. Previously NJ PBS had been a subsidiary of WNET, the New York public media giant. (You can find a lot more details here.)

At the time, it seemed likely that Spotlight would wind up at Montclair State as well, but the details had not been worked out. Finally, last Friday, Montclair State announced that an agreement had been reached with WNET, which had owned Spotlight since 2019.

Continue reading “A hoped-for deal between NJ Spotlight News and Montclair State comes to fruition”