Infrastructure Alone Won’t Save Local News. Funders Must Pair It With Direct Support.
Editor’s note: At Media Impact Funders, we’re seeing a growing conversation about how philanthropy can strengthen the systems that support public-interest media. At the same time, important questions are emerging about how those systems are experienced on the ground.
In this piece, Tracie Powell, founder of the Pivot Fund, offers a perspective rooted in direct work with newsrooms, highlighting the relationship between infrastructure and capacity. Her insights contribute to a broader dialogue across the field about how to align funding strategies with the realities of the organizations they aim to support.
Over the past several years, philanthropy has increasingly rallied around the idea that local journalism needs infrastructure—shared services, training programs, accelerators, and technical assistance. This is a critical shift, and long overdue.
A new report, Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: What nearly 560 applications reveal about scale, sustainability and system-level investments by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, has helped galvanize this momentum. Drawing on nearly 560 proposals submitted to Press Forward’s infrastructure funding process, the report finds that many of the most persistent challenges facing local journalism are not isolated newsroom problems, but system-level constraints tied to fragmented infrastructure and limited shared capacity.
It also makes a compelling case that the field is moving beyond a period of experimentation and into a phase where scaling solutions—and the infrastructure that supports them—must take priority.
But there’s a fundamental flaw in how this strategy is often deployed.
Infrastructure only works if newsrooms have the capacity to use it.
For most hyperlocal, independent newsrooms, that capacity is far from guaranteed—especially for those serving historically marginalized, under-resourced, and rural communities. These are not large metro dailies with layers of staff. They are often teams of two to five people—publishers and founders who are simultaneously reporters, editors, fundraisers, and operations leads.
For these outlets, infrastructure without direct funding can become a burden rather than a benefit.
The Capacity Paradox
Consider 285 South.
Based in suburban Atlanta, 285 South serves immigrant communities living outside the city’s perimeter—communities that are often overlooked by traditional metro media. With support from The Pivot Fund, it has grown into a newsroom with two full-time staff members, a part-time editor, an intern and freelance support—an important milestone for a hyperlocal outlet.
Its reporting fills critical gaps. 285 South often covers underreported issues, and as a result, larger outlets like WABE, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Decaturish have sought out partnerships to republish and amplify its work. That means stories originating in immigrant communities are now reaching broader regional audiences—helping to inform and connect those communities with the wider Atlanta region.
Recently, one of its reporters was selected for the prestigious Ida B. Wells Fellowship.
This is exactly the kind of recognition and professional development the field should celebrate.
But it also creates a strain.
When that reporter steps away to participate in the fellowship, the newsroom loses a significant portion of its dedicated reporting capacity. For a small team, that’s not a marginal loss—it’s operationally significant. Stories go uncovered. Deadlines tighten. Remaining staff stretch even thinner.
For an outlet like 285 South, that doesn’t just affect internal workflow—it directly impacts whether critical stories about immigrant communities are told and shared across the region.
This exposes a rarely discussed reality: many fellowships, trainings, and accelerators are designed with an implicit assumption that newsrooms can absorb the temporary loss of staff time.
For very small outlets, that assumption simply does not hold.
When Opportunity Becomes Disruption
This challenge is not limited to fellowships.
Our grantees are routinely inundated with invitations to participate in trainings, incubators, and accelerators—each offering valuable support. But participation comes at a cost: time away from the newsroom.
For small teams, that tradeoff is steep.
Every hour spent in a training is an hour not spent reporting, editing, publishing, or engaging the community. Over time, these well-intentioned opportunities can erode the very capacity that makes these outlets valuable to their audiences in the first place.
The Founder Burnout Trap
There is another issue the field must confront.
Too often, our response to these challenges is to train the founder to do everything—operations, editorial, technology, revenue, audience, partnerships. We ask them to become, simultaneously, a publisher, editor, chief technologist, salesperson, and operator.
And then we ask even more.
We encourage them to participate in leadership programs, audience engagement trainings, revenue accelerators—layering responsibility on top of responsibility.
At the same time, these organizations often lack basic administrative and shared back-end support, so founders routinely have to stop reporting to handle bookkeeping, answer phone calls, manage HR, write grant applications, or handle other operational tasks that keep the organization running.
This is not a pathway to sustainability. It is a recipe for burnout.
Training a founder to do everything, without giving them the capacity to delegate, the resources to build a team, and the space to breathe—to take care of themselves, to support their staff, to think strategically, to dream—ultimately constrains the very growth we say we want to see.
These organizations don’t stall because of a lack of vision or effort. They stall because we have designed a system that depends on unsustainable labor.
What Actually Works: Pairing Infrastructure with Direct Support
At The Pivot Fund, we’ve taken a different approach—one that intentionally pairs infrastructure with direct investment in newsrooms.
Underscore Native News offers a clear example.
A $150,000 grant from The Pivot Fund allowed Underscore Native News to hire an audience engagement manager, reporter and managing editor in 2025. The versatile, direct funding enabled the newsroom to respond to evolving organizational needs amid a shifting media and political landscape by directing funds to urgent priorities in order to best serve Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.
The funding helped Underscore build out other funding streams while creating pathways to long-term financial resiliency and sustainability, ultimately contributing to the outlet surpassing $1 million in total revenue in 2025. Today, Underscore is an eight-person, multi-platform newsroom with an expanding audience and revenue base.
It swept the Indigenous Journalists Association Awards, has become a go-to source for two-spirit and LGBTQ coverage, and is increasingly partnering with larger outlets to share stories about Indigenous communities—helping connect those communities more fully to the broader region.
This is what happens when infrastructure meets capacity—and when funders invest in both.
A More Effective Funding Strategy
If philanthropy is serious about building a sustainable local news ecosystem, it must move beyond an either/or mindset.
Infrastructure is essential—but it is not sufficient.
Funders should consider a more integrated approach:
- Provide direct, flexible funding so newsrooms can hire staff and stabilize operations
- Pair infrastructure investments with capacity-building grants that ensure outlets can actually use the support offered
- Fund backfill support so participation in fellowships and training programs does not come at the cost of newsroom output
- Invest in teams—not just founders—so leadership can be shared and sustained
Encourage flexible program design that reflects the realities of small teams
The Bottom Line
Hyperlocal newsrooms do not lack ambition, innovation, or commitment. What they lack is slack—the margin that allows them to grow without breaking.
Infrastructure can accelerate their progress. But only direct funding can give them the capacity to take advantage of it.
The formula is simple: Direct Support + Infrastructure = Newsroom Sustainability
Without both, we risk building systems that are technically robust—but practically out of reach for the very newsrooms they are meant to serve.
What Funders Should Do in the Next 12 Months
If we want a sustainable local news ecosystem, the next year is critical. Funders don’t need more theory—they need to shift how capital flows.
Here’s where to start:
- Fund capacity first, not just programs
Commit that a significant portion of your journalism portfolio—at least 50%—will go to direct, flexible operating support. Without staff, no newsroom can take advantage of infrastructure, training, or tools. - Pair every infrastructure grant with newsroom funding
If you invest in infrastructure (technology, training, shared services), pair it with direct grants to participating newsrooms so they have the capacity to engage. Infrastructure without uptake is wasted investment. - Create backfill funds for fellowships and training programs
Set aside dedicated funding pools that allow newsrooms to hire freelancers or temporary staff when team members participate in fellowships or accelerators. No newsroom should have to choose between growth and survival.
- Fund roles, not just projects
Shift from project-based grants to role-based investments—reporters, audience editors, revenue leads, operations staff. As Underscore Native News demonstrates, a single strategic hire can unlock the full value of infrastructure support. - Invest in shared administrative infrastructure
Support solutions that reduce operational burden—bookkeeping, HR, legal, and other back-end services—so founders can focus on journalism rather than paperwork.
- Redesign participant expectations
Audit your programs. If participation requires hours per week, travel, or intensive engagement, ask: Who can realistically say yes?
Build flexible, modular, and asynchronous options that reflect the realities of two- to five-person teams.
- Fund teams, not just founders
Stop designing programs that assume a single heroic leader. Invest in distributed leadership so founders can delegate, rest, and lead strategically rather than operationally.
- Measure what actually matters
Shift evaluation away from participation metrics (number of trainings completed) toward capacity and sustainability outcomes:- Staff Growth
- Revenue Growth
- Audience reach and trust
- Retention of key personnel
- Simplify access to funding
Reduce application and reporting burdens. For small teams, time spent applying is time not spent publishing. Streamlined processes are not a luxury—they are a capacity intervention.
- Coordinate, don’t compete
Work across philanthropy to align funding strategies. Fragmentation is one of the system-level challenges the field is trying to solve—don’t replicate it in funding practices.
The Opportunity
The field is right to focus on infrastructure. But infrastructure alone won’t get us where we need to go.
Over the next 12 months, funders have a choice: continue investing in systems that assume capacity—or invest in the capacity that makes those systems work.
Only one of those paths leads to sustainability.
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