Editorial: The time is right for public grantmaking for Mass media

If you’ve read The Shoestring’s newsletters or fundraising emails in the last few years, or come to one of our events, you might have heard me say something like, “nobody has figured out the trick to funding local news, or else we’d all be doing it.”

And it’s true. Display ads and classifieds — two of the pillars that supported legacy newspapers during their heyday — were both undercut by Google, Facebook, and Craigslist, and as readers began to find free, lower quality, more addicting media online, subscriptions fell, too. While some nonprofit local news startups have been able to find sustainable markets, none have been widely replicable enough that the rest of us can stop worrying about what next year will look like.

It can be hard to grasp the scale of what has been lost locally over the last few decades. The phenomenon of daily newspapers getting thinner each year hasn’t gone unnoticed, but what that translates to, up and down the Connecticut River Valley, is dozens of public meetings each month that would have once had a reporter watching them, now operating out of view of the press. Add to that the loss of oppositional and alternative voices once found in alt-weeklies and you’ve got a recipe for limiting local political horizons and narrowing participation in local government. 

These are gaps that The Shoestring and other startups around Massachusetts try to fill, but to really make a dent in fulfilling the information needs of our communities, we need the landscape in which we all operate to become more hospitable. The situation is dire enough that we at The Shoestring feel it’s time for our leaders at the state level to try something new and bold.

Enter public grantmaking, a process in which the state creates and funds an independent nonprofit organization to serve as a grantmaking body for community news sources. It’s a practice that was trailblazed by New Jersey in 2021 that we think could be adapted to help reverse course on the decline of local news in Massachusetts.

This year, about half of The Shoestring’s $110,000 budget comes from grants. We’ve been fortunate enough to find some grants that are not particularly competitive and that don’t require significant investments of time into an application, but these are the exceptions to the rule. And what’s worse, the few major philanthropies that do fund journalism are increasingly choosing to fund “journalism support,” rather than simply giving dollars directly to newsrooms, despite loud protests from those of us on the frontlines of keeping our communities informed.

Public grantmaking is an opportunity to build a grant process for local media that models accountability and transparency. Should Massachusetts residents decide we want to push our legislators to pursue it, we should advocate for a grant board made up of people who intimately understand the information needs of our communities, like representatives of civic organizations, local labor leaders, and journalists and publishers.

Once the state government establishes a public grantmaking organization, there’s no reason the private sector couldn’t join in, either. In New Jersey, hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from private foundations have flowed through the state’s grantmaking consortium in addition to the millions dedicated by the state government. A Massachusetts consortium could help drum up interest from the state’s community foundations for sustaining local news, which has historically not been a priority for them.

We realize that public grantmaking is an idea that can take some getting used to. The phrase “government-funded media” conjures for some Americans visions of maligned geopolitical foes du jour, despite public media being all around us. Political power-brokers who would rather operate under cover of darkness do much to keep that sentiment alive: just this week, Republicans in Congress dealt a massive blow to public and independent media by rescinding funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But presently, nonprofit media in the United States is beholden to a far less transparent and accountable source: wealthy philanthropists and foundations. 

Through public grantmaking, journalists and readers on the ground in Massachusetts communities can play a role in agenda-setting for grant priorities, rather than waste time chasing fickle trends in the world of philanthropy. Independent media has always had firewalls to prevent editorial interference from funding sources, be they advertisers, owners, donors, or grantors, and so far in New Jersey, similar firewalls that prevent consortium funding from being wielded for political ends have been a success.

Public grantmaking won’t be a cure-all for Massachusetts’ media woes, but it is right for our present moment: one in which the small media outlets that keep the state’s communities informed only have a few months of savings in the bank at a given time. For local publishers to grow to the point of more self-sufficiency, we have to be around next year, and the year after that. Even if public grantmaking in Massachusetts only lasts long enough to keep the lights on at local newsrooms for a year or two while we keep experimenting and organizing for our communities’ access to quality information, it will have been a success.

But we think it can do much more than that. At a time when redistributive function and support for public goods are under attack at the federal level, public grantmaking could be a policy at the state level that models support for low-budget, high-impact work by people who know their communities best. 

There’s only one way to find out, though. We think it’s well worth putting the idea to the test.