Press Forward – Page 2

Priyanjana Bengani talks about ‘pink slime’ and her research on disinformation

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and I talk with Priyanjana Bengani, a fellow in computational journalism at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Her work focuses on using computational techniques to research issues in digital media.

Her most recent project, published in the Columbia Journalism Review, focused on uncovering networks of “pink slime” local news outlets. There have been several iterations of pink slime sites over the years, such as the North Boston News. Bengani has studied partisan political sites disguised as genuine community news organizations. (There’s no such place as “North Boston,” by the way.) They get their name from the pinkish beef paste that is added to hamburger meat.

In Quick Takes, I revisit Press Forward, the $500 million philanthropic effort aimed at revitalizing local news. When Press Forward was announced a few months ago, many observers were worried that a national, top-down effort might clash with local needs and local concerns. Fortunately, Press Forward is now getting involved in the grassroots in an attempt to leverage its funding and help a wide range of local and regional news projects.

Ellen delves into a piece in Racket, an alternative news site in Minneapolis. (The What Works podcast with editor and co-owner Em Cassel can be found here.) Racket takes a steely-eyed look at Steve Grove, the new CEO and publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Just before taking the journalism job, Grove settled a lawsuit alleging he withheld public records from the press when he was a state government official.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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Press Forward presses forward with local chapters

Press Forward, the recently announced initiative to raise $500 million for the support of local news, is establishing local chapters in Alaska; Chicago; Minnesota; Philadelphia; Springfield, Illinois; and Wichita, Kansas. According to the announcement, “Press Forward Local chapters are an opportunity for funders to create place-based initiatives for local news, driven by the specific needs of their communities.”

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Catherine Tumber tells us why reliable local news matters in fighting climate change

Catherine Tumber in Buffalo, New York. Photo by Chris Hawley. Used with permission.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Catherine Tumber, who was a former colleague of mine at The Boston Phoenix, a longtime friend and a source for my 2013 book, “The Wired City.” These days she’s an independent scholar and journalist who’s affiliated with the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She’s also a fellow at the MassINC Gateway Cities Innovation Institute and a contributing editor for The Baffler.

Tumber is the author of “Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.” She holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree from the University of Rochester as well as a bachelor’s in social thought and political economy from UMass Amherst. Our conversation is about a recent report that she co-authored for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy called “Greening America’s Smaller Cities.” She, along with Joseph Schilling and Gabi Velasco, offer a wealth of suggestions about how industrial legacy cities can be part of the climate solution. Our question to Cathy: How does the lack of reliable news and information in many of these cities contribute to the challenges of turning that vision into a reality?

In our Quick Takes, Ellen is back on the Midwestern beat with good news about a startup weekly paper called The Denison Free Press in Iowa. It’s scrappy as hell. Or heck, as they might say in Iowa. I’ve got a rave for a new effort to inject $500 million into local news over the next five years — with a caveat. The initiative, known as Press Forward, brings together 22 different foundations in an effort to provide a significant amount of funding for community journalism. But there may be less to that effort than meets the eye.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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Press Forward, philanthropy and the inequities facing BIPOC news outlets

My Northeastern colleague Meredith Clark and her co-researcher, Tracie Powell, spoke with Nieman Lab about funding inequities for local news start-ups serving BIPOC communities and how that might play out following the Press Forward announcement, in which 22 philanthropic organizations have pledged to provide $500 million over the next five years.

Clark, who’s the director of Northeastern’s Center for Communication, Media Innovation and Social Change, spoke with Ellen Clegg and me on the “What Works” podcast last year and is featured in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.” Clark tells Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez:

Really well-meaning people with access to social structures and access to capital are jumping in and wanting to get involved, but they’re not addressing some of the root causes that got us here in the first place. Instead, they’re building out infrastructures that allow the money to move from one place to another — but as it goes through that movement, it gets siphoned off.

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A nonprofit news outlet issues a caution about Press Forward

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.

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Questions and concerns about Press Forward’s plan to raise $500 million for local news

It’s been a week since Press Forward, a $500 million initiative to fund journalism, was announced by the 22 organizations that will contribute money. Because it’s not clear exactly how it’s supposed to work, I’ve said little about it. Now, is this a Good Thing? Yes. A half billion dollars is a lot of money, and, if applied properly, could accomplish quite a bit of good. Despite the rise of independent, community-based news organizations in recent years, the need remains great.

But a few cautions seem to be in order, too. For those, I refer you to Richard J. Tofel, who writes the Second Rough Draft newsletter and is the retired president of ProPublica — a large investigative nonprofit whose mission has been underwritten by large sums of donated money. Perhaps the most intriguing tidbit in Tofel’s piece about Press Forward is that the $500 million, to be spread out over five years, is not really $500 million. He explains:

The big press release claimed that the initiative commits “more than $500 million” to local journalism. But what it didn’t say is that not all of that funding is new. I know of at least four Press Forward funders out of the 22 announced who are in fact not making funding commitments beyond those they had already planned. To be fair, I have also confirmed that at least four other funders, including the two largest, are making incremental commitments.

Tofel does not offer any numbers on exactly how much of the $500 million isn’t new money, but it’s a little disheartening to think that the funders — which include some big names like the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Lenfest Institute — decided that making a big splash was more important than laying out precisely how much money will raised.

Tofel offers a number of other cautions, including the hazards of top-down funding, the negative effect that the initiative has already had on other journalism fundraising efforts, and an announcement made with such haste that no one seemed to realize that there’s already a well-known organization in Canada called Press Forward that’s devoted to more or less the same mission. Let the confusion begin!

To Tofel’s concerns let me add a few of my own. My first worry is that a lot of money is going to be lost or wasted on local efforts that have not been well thought out and that were proposed mainly as a way of getting a piece of the pie. I’m not talking about corruption; I just mean that people are going to think that they’ll be able to do great things if they can land some of that money, and that they’ll sweat the details later.

My second worry is that, fundamentally, this is not the way to build a local news organization. It takes community-based planning and, ultimately, community-based funding from local institutions, members and advertisers. Big bucks from a national organization can be a godsend in supplementing that mission, but it has to be bottom-up, not top-down — and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. As Authentically Local, one of the early organizations of digital startups put it, “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

That said, Press Forward is welcome news, and I wish them all the best. We need more high-quality local journalism, and this seems like an ambitious effort to pay for some of it.

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