Nieman Lab and News Funders Highlight Commoner's Report on Local News Support Organizations
We're excited to share that Nieman Lab has featured our recent report examining how support organizations can better serve the local news ecosystem in an in-depth article published on February 18.
The Nieman Lab report followed up on highlights from the Knight Foundation on February 13, Democracy Fund on January 30 and many lively field conversations on platforms like LinkedIn.
Our Research on Support Organizations Featured
Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab highlighted our Democracy Fund-commissioned research that identifies more than 100 local news support organizations operating in the U.S. today and explores how they can work more effectively to serve local newsrooms.
One of the biggest challenges we identified is the need for a fundamental shift in thinking—from organizational to field-level impact. As Anika told Nieman Lab:
"We are asking funders, support organizations and newsmakers to think beyond their organizations. It's one thing to say you care about saving or revitalizing local news and then talk very loudly about how your organization is doing that. It's another thing to say you want to ensure every person in our country has access to news and information that meets their needs and then work with others within and outside the local news field to contextualize the work you're doing and make sure it's moving the field closer to that goal."
Taxonomy of Support Organizations
A major contribution of our report, highlighted in the Nieman Lab piece, is our proposed taxonomy of support organizations, which categorizes them into six distinct types:
Funding intermediaries (like the American Journalism Project)
Associations and networks (like LION and INN)
Client services (like URL Media and Hearken)
Researchers and analysts (like the Local News Impact Consortium)
Advocates (like Rebuild Local News)
Educators (like Trusting News and Listening Post Collective)
"We think it's more useful for the field to align on support organizations' function and purpose," we note in the report, helping to "name field peers, potential gaps, and areas of overlap."
Practical Solutions for Better Coordination
One of our most concrete recommendations, which received significant attention in the Nieman Lab article, is the creation of a "Yellow Pages" directory and hotline to help newsmakers identify support, funders identify who to support, and support organizations identify overlap and gaps.
Our report also addresses how support organizations can make their offerings more accessible and navigable while streamlining, consolidating, and strengthening those offerings.
The Nieman Lab piece noted our recommendation that funders should use the proposed resources "to prompt and inform conversations with support organizations about mergers, joint operating agreements, and closures that could strengthen the field," citing positive examples like "the dissolution of the News Leaders Association and the intentional sunsetting of the Membership Puzzle Project."
We're pleased to announce that we’re working with Press Forward to produce a canonical local news support directory, with plans for a public rollout later this year. We’ll also be continuing our field agenda research with a focus on local newsrooms and newsmakers.
Get the Full Report
As we continue this work, we're focused on how support organizations can better serve the needs of local newsrooms rather than operating in isolation. As Darryl emphasized in the article, "We, as a field, need to be able to make coherent, persuasive, rigorous, and empirical arguments for why local news and information is critical to the health and safety of our communities."
If you haven't had a chance to read our complete report yet, you can access it here. We'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how journalism support organizations can better serve the needs of local newsrooms.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to develop practical tools to help support organizations work more effectively.