MIForum26: Opening Remarks from Abby Rapoport

At the 2026 Media Impact Forum, MIF Executive Director Abby Rapoport opened with a powerful message for funders: the biggest risk facing public-interest media right now isn’t funding or political pressure—it’s a failure of imagination. What’s needed now is cross-sector, infrastructure-level thinking to chart a new and better path forward.

Watch her remarks and read the full transcript below.

At this gathering, we start with a seemingly basic premise: that media, in its many forms, is fundamental to the way that we as individuals connect to our communities and societies. As the central mechanism through which we connect, listen, learn and share, media creates our modern public square and in many ways our realities.

And we recognize, like so many forward thinkers throughout the last 100 years of modern media, that this critical function cannot solely be left to commercial interests and market incentives.

This past year has seen devastating federal funding cuts, profound technological disruption, journalists and media makers around the world killed without repercussion, and a number of once respected for-profit news outlets seemingly kowtowing to political pressure.

At least in the short-term, a lot rests on philanthropy’s ability—your ability—to fill the gap that’s been left by others, to prevent a slow and steady dwindling and instead to actively lay a path to a different future. At Media Impact Funders we believe that requires a broad public interest media to assert itself in the midst of all this change.

We will always be outspent by commercial interests and will be up against powerful forces. That’s why we must be strategic and coordinated, we must be smart, we must be bold and we must be brave.

We know what the stakes are. We know the urgency of the work. So what’s holding us back?

This fall, I spoke with more than 100 media funders and stakeholders and the themes I heard were consistent.

The information landscape is fragmenting across audiences, platforms, funding and so too is the philanthropic response to it.

Too often, even the strongest strategies are built in parallel, in silos, often without visibility into what others are doing, not because funders don’t care about coordination, but because there’s not enough shared infrastructure to make what is being done legible to potential allies.

So many of you here are doing exciting and critical work, taking risks and gaining new insights and understandings, even when your projects haven’t necessarily succeeded. But if we’re not talking to each other and sharing our hard-won knowledge, the value of this work is severely limited.

We must find ways to learn across silos to share strategies that work and find partners who can help us expand our ideas and impact.

This is where Media Impact Funders comes in.

We believe there are so many important media to fund—news and narrative, local, national and international, visual, audio and text, broadcast and digital. We are here to support all of it.

But we also believe there are effective and ineffective ways to do so, right ways and wrong ways to fund.

We’re here to support each of you to achieve your goals through confidential, candid conversations that bridge different funding philosophies and issue areas. We offer a place where you can locate trusted peers, and share concerns and coordinate actions.

A central, driving priority of MIF is to continually expand the community of philanthropists committed to supporting independent, non-profit media. A recent piece notes that hundreds of billions of dollars in potential new philanthropic capital is about to become liquid, dollars created not far from here at the AI tech companies we already hear about.

They will be looking for organizations that move fast, execute well, and tackle problems on a massive scale. And it’s on this community to make the case that investing in public interest media can create transformational positive impact.

At MIF, we access a unique vantage point on the field, and we embrace the opportunity that gives us to push and prod the field.

And since I’m charging everyone here with stepping up and being brave, I’ll say we too won’t shy away from sharing difficult observations. This is a room of amazing funders. But we’re having a conversation about incorporating content creators a decade late—and MIF is determined to make sure we do not make the same mistake when it comes to conversations about the emerging technology like generative AI that’s rapidly transforming not just content creation but content distribution.

And while so many of you are rightly focusing on critical questions of sustainability, safety is not getting the priority that it needs. We cannot have sustainable media if reporters and filmmakers cannot work without fear.

But undoubtedly our biggest risk right now is the possibility of a failure of imagination—especially the chance that, preoccupied with challenges as we are, we might fail to imagine new and better path forward.

Yesterday, a group of funders and practitioners from across journalism, public TV and radio, documentary, educational media and community storytelling spent the afternoon together doing something we don’t do often enough: thinking about possible future scenarios and then talking across sectors about what a shared public-interest media ecosystem could and should look like and what it would take to sustain it.

That cross-sector, infrastructure-level thinking is exactly what this moment requires and it’s not something any single funder or sector can do alone. Since the rescission cuts to public media, MIF has been convening station leaders, connecting funders across silos, and bringing nontraditional funders into conversations they’d never otherwise join, because the path forward has to be built together.