Report: The Critical Role Support Organizations Can Play in Maturing the Local News Field
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In recent years, support organizations in journalism have faced growing criticism for inefficiency and disorganization. Critics have questioned philanthropy’s continued investment in these groups, called for better alignment with news businesses’ needs, labeled them as bureaucratic gatekeepers, and pushed for more strategic alliance building.
Having spent nearly five years at LION Publishers– a support organization for independent news– I experienced these tensions firsthand. I also heard from many newsmakers and funders that the work we and other support organizations were doing was an indispensable lifeline for them. To address this tension, I thought increased coordination between support organizations could help. But after talking with nearly 30 local news leaders, I realized this was only part of the solution.
The more impactful solution? A field-level agenda.
That’s the conclusion we came to after completing our report, “The Critical Role Support Organizations Can Play in Maturing the Local News Field,” commissioned by Democracy Fund and written by me and Darryl Holliday, long-time local news leader and my cofounder and business partner of Commoner Co.
Read the report here: The Critical Role Support Organizations Can Play in Maturing the Local News Field
Drawing inspiration from other field building work, we define a field-level agenda as a plan that brings an expansive but representative cohort of the field together to define common goals within a collaborative rubric. Critically, this agenda should help the field more effectively organize itself in service of communities’ information needs. The idea of a field agenda is, in fact, building on many of the ideas first introduced by The Roadmap for Local News, which came out of the 2022 Local News Summit organized by the Lenfest Institute and Aspen Digital.
To write this report on support organizations, we interviewed field leaders, convened an advisory council, and researched field-building frameworks used by other fields to drive innovation. Many of these leaders’ insights are reflected in this report. Recognizing the importance of broader input, we also shared the report with other local news support leaders and invited their feedback before publication.
Below are three major themes that emerged:
1. There’s genuine interest in coalition-building and a field-level agenda.
We received many copy/pastes, screenshots and +1s to this sentence in the report that follows a summarized list of core critiques of the support space: “We believe these are all symptoms of a core problem: There is no shared sense of what field infrastructure is needed because we have not, as a local news field, agreed on how we know whether the field is succeeding.”
David Grant of Blue Engine Collaborative wrote, “Today, we can only vaguely define who needs local news and then only vaguely measure whether an organization is actually serving a material portion of their intended community or not.”
Mary Walter-Brown of News Revenue Hub added, “As the leader of a support org, I acutely relate to each issue, especially the lack of accountability and shared impact metrics. Journalism support organizations (JSOs) should earn support based on how effectively they help newsmakers grow and help the field mature. Those metrics are easy to track; we just need to agree on what they are and develop standard reporting parameters.”
The other common piece of feedback we received was that the taxonomy of support organizations was useful. “The genius part of the report is calling out the differences among support orgs - that is new, revolutionary and actually helpful,” said S. Mitra Kalita, cofounder of URL Media and publisher of Epicenter NYC.
Some also noted the ecosystem building efforts they’re already undertaking, including organizational strategic plans that help position their work within the field and coordinating with other support organizations.
2. People want to know what role they can play, and what role others should play.
Some folks gave feedback along the lines of, this is great, now, who does what? Other folks pointedly questioned why we didn’t interview newsmakers or funders, and in particular, why we didn’t look more deeply at the role of funders in this conversation.
“Philanthropy has an outsized role, and they could force a quicker maturation by demanding standards and accountability for anything their money is supporting,” said Damon Kiesow, Knight Chair in Journalism Innovation at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and member of the Local News Impact Consortium Steering Committee.
Tristan Loper of Lenfest Institute agreed and said, “This field is highly competitive, and genuine collaboration can be difficult to achieve—but funders have the ability to encourage it directly. The recent Press Forward infrastructure open call explored this idea by promoting partnerships instead of having applicants compete for high-stakes grants without a full understanding of peers’ efforts. It also delegates some decision-making authority to an expert review panel, helping to ensure that the strongest proposals are selected. I’m hopeful this approach will inspire greater alignment among funders and reduce duplication and attempts to play the refs.”
Karen Rundlet of the Institute for Nonprofit News, and a former funder herself, suggested, as a provocation to funders, “Might funders begin a grant by making it clear to the grantee that this is a 3-year intervention or a 5-year intervention?” she asked. “Some JSOs are launched and encouraged to become sustainable without clear discussion about how long they have to solve a problem. Should certain JSOs exist for 7-10 years and then sunset? Conversely, there are funders who start an initiative saying they will commit for 25 years. How might funders better determine which programs/projects to sunset and which to stick with for decades?”
Lizzy Hazeltine of the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund said, "Funder ownership of some of the dimensions of field building needs to be explicit because we’re in such a strong position to reshape the field [and] to set an agenda."
Additionally, a couple people noted it was unclear who the report recommendations are for: support organizations or the field at large?
The through line of this feedback we hear is a desire to identify next steps and delegate to leaders who will carry those steps forward. It’s a great question, and one that this report only scratches the surface of exploring.
When we started the report, we didn’t anticipate arriving at our proposed solution of a field-level agenda. Now that we have, we believe we cannot create that agenda without gaining a similar understanding of newsmakers and funders.
In other words, we should map out the challenges faced by funders and newsmakers, categorize them clearly, and align those findings with our existing analysis of support organizations. This is the only way to get a full, accurate scope of the field that can inform a field-level agenda.
3. There is no single monolithic experience but there is a desire to collaborate on solutions.
In the report, we attempted to identify one common challenge that support organizations said they faced. We couldn’t. And that was only based on talking to less than a third of support organizations. So we summarized the various challenges we heard in our interviews.
Most people who shared report feedback said this list resonated with them. We heard from a handful of people who said some specific points did not.
Kalita said, “...the initial third of the report takes a defensive tone and seems to fall for the criticisms of support networks as fact… The report does not seem to overtly cite media outlets who benefit immensely from resources, centralization and expertise of support orgs. The general nature of the report does not seem to actually bolster support orgs as much as give more oxygen to critiques of them. When asked whether support orgs or local news entities should be funded, the answer is yes and yes.”
Stefanie Murray of Center for Cooperative Media also said she was surprised to read the critique that support organizations lack accountability. “Every funder we work with has high standards that we have to meet and show impact,” she said.
We highlight this feedback to illustrate two points: This report does not speak for every single support organizations’ experiences and there will continue to be disagreement on symptoms of the problem we’re trying to solve. That’s why we urge those reading the report to critically think about the core problem we offer: the local news field hasn’t agreed on how to know whether the field is succeeding. It’s our opinion that if support organizations, and the local news field at large, can find consensus on this or some version of it, we can progress the field toward collective solutions.
A shared identity is essential to any field of practice. Here’s a diagram of how we organize the support space into a taxonomy that helps get field players closer to a shared identity based on the type of work they do. We recommend doing the same exercise for newsmakers and funders.
Other ideas and questions to explore
Those who sent feedback raised additional points that we think could be further researched to provide a more complete picture of this conversation:
A more thorough history of the support field: The history and evolution of the support field that we offer is very high-level and incomplete. We’d love to see a more detailed history that includes more influential players and key turning points.
Further study of other sectors’ balance of B2B and B2C: Rundlet asked, “Are there other sectors that offer a calculation/market analysis on how much investment intermediaries/support organizations (B2B) should receive alongside public facing customer serving (B2C) like newsrooms? The tension in the field between news orgs and JSO/intermediaries receiving philanthropic capital exists because today's independent newsrooms are undercapitalized. What can we learn from other sectors here?”
Continue to refine and add to field taxonomies: Gabe Schneider of The Objective raised the point of adding a category of bridge builders to the support organization taxonomy. He said, “I think there's a specific subset of industry support groups that aim to interface between the role of journalists and movement/community groups, but primarily serving the latter.” We also heard feedback that it would be helpful to better understand the types of newsmakers and funders through similar taxonomies.
Our next steps
We’re working with Press Forward and Democracy Fund to research and develop a field-level agenda for local news by working with newsmakers, support organizations, and funders using the Strong Field Framework.
“While this report is one step of many to reach a needed shared vision and field level agenda, we look forward to seeing how it can be utilized at this important time in the evolution of the field, the conversation it sparks and where it goes next,” said Teresa Gorman of Democracy Fund. “Journalism support organizations will play a vital role in this evolution, and we are proud to have supported many of them and this work.”
Dale Anglin of Press Forward added, “We are grateful to Commoner, Democracy Fund, and the field leaders who contributed their time and energy into producing this report. Not only does it help funders and newsmakers better understand the various types of intermediaries that are hard at work supporting local news organizations, but it also takes a clear-eyed, community-focused view of what’s needed to move forward to strengthen the field, together.”
Read the report, “The Critical Role Support Organizations Can Play in Maturing the Local News Field.”
If you’re a support organization interested in learning more about this work, email us at hello@commoner.company.
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to our advisory council for their thought partnership and feedback on this report: Sarabeth Berman (American Journalism Project), Lindsay Green-Barber (Impact Architects), Tim Isgitt (Public Media Company), S. Mitra Kalita (URL Media), Joy Mayer (Trusting News), Bridget Thoreson (Hearken)
Thank you to everyone we spoke with that helped shape this report: Becca Aaronson, Alicia Bell, Shannan Bowen, Jennifer Brandel, Cierra Brown-Hinton, Chantelle Fisher Borne, Tim Griggs, Jesse Hardman, Damon Kiesow, Chris Krewson, Courtney Lewis, Tristan Loper, Melissa Milios Davis, Pete Plastrik, Tracie Powell, Carolyn Powers, Mike Rispoli, Karen Rundlet, Gabe Schneider, Richard Tofel, Mikhael Simmonds, Sonam Vashi and Mary Walter-Brown
For investing in this research and offering valuable feedback along the way, we thank Democracy Fund’s Christine Schmidt, Teresa Gorman and Josh Stearns.
