Overview
The Local News Program, in collaboration with Press Forward, operates through a time-limited investment through 2028.
Organized around four approaches—Equity, Engagement, Infrastructure, and Visibility—our grantmaking is designed to create the conditions that help local news ecosystems progress from nascent to emerging to thriving.
What We Fund
Local News funds a diverse range of newsrooms and information providers—including independent digital outlets, legacy newsrooms in transition, statewide accountability outlets, collaborative journalism networks, community-driven initiatives, trusted messenger networks, and alternative information services—alongside the ecosystem infrastructure that sustains them: journalism support organizations, backbone organizations, training programs, accelerators, local intermediaries, and advocacy coalitions.
Together, these investments build ecosystem-level capacity across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Appalachia, the American South, and Chicago - filling gaps and complementing existing investments. We also fund national organizations, with clear and measurable impact in our priority geographies, and replicable models of strategic innovation—including AI- and tech-enabled applications, new sustainability models, and collaborative approaches.
No single grant can address all the needs of a region. It is the range of our portfolio—investments across approaches, archetypes, ecosystem stages, and geographies—that creates the conditions for thriving news ecosystems. There are seven distinct models of local news archetype organizations—from independent digital newsrooms to community-driven outlets—that, taken together, create the conditions for a sustainable and trusted local information environment.
Each year, we assess the state of each priority geography across key dimensions—including ecosystem stage, intermediary capacity, subgrant reach, and policy infrastructure—and adapt our grantmaking focus accordingly. Local news ecosystems are the interconnected networks of news organizations, journalists, and civic institutions that serve a place. We’re focused on four: Chicago, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Appalachia, and the South.
By the end of 2028, Local News aims to have helped catalyze at least three local news ecosystems characterized by diverse local news archetypes, sustainable funding, innovative delivery of content and engagement with audiences, and strong backbone organizations and connections with journalism serving organizations that increase capacity and reduce costs.
While we are not accepting unsolicited proposals at this time, we are always eager to hear new ideas and perspectives.