Practical Grantmaking: INN on How to Find and Support Small, Strong Newsrooms

Local nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlets are an essential part of our media ecosystem, providing communities across the country with reliable, trustworthy information. Philanthropy has a critical opportunity to strengthen and expand the field of nonprofit news by supporting the small newsrooms leading the reinvention of news.

In a session from the 2023 Journalism Funders Gathering, Sue Cross, former Executive Director & CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), shares four practical ways funders can find, support and scale small and strong local newsrooms.

1. Leverage your Grants to Build Broad Support
   INN’s NewsMatch is a nationwide matching-gift fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. It’s a strong example of how national funding can help ignite local and individual support. Between 2017 and 2023, nonprofit publications leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to raise a total of nearly $300 million.
2. Be a Seed of New Growth
   Over the past 15 years, thousands of local news outlets have shut down. To solve this crisis, grantmakers cannot simply fund outlets that already exist. Cross urges funders to support emerging outlets when they’re still early in their development. “Even if funding startups or innovation isn’t your main portfolio strategy, we encourage you to think about how you can carve out 10% of your portfolio to fund experiments and innovations that are shaping the future—you can have a huge impact,” she says. She also emphasizes the importance of embedding equity and inclusion practices into every grant in order to diversify the field. “Nonprofit news looks considerably different in a good way compared to the traditional media that most of us grew up with.”
3. Focus on Sustainability
   Newsrooms can’t live on project grants alone—general operating support is essential to the long-term sustainability of individual outlets and the nonprofit news field as a whole. Cross explains that project funding often overlooks the core infrastructure required to deliver high-quality reporting. “If you’re doing project funding, don’t just fund the reporting,” she says. “Fund the web software so your grantees can get their reporting to the public, fund the editor, fund the media liability insurance. Otherwise, we see project funding actually weakening nonprofit newsrooms’ ability to tell stories and serve their communities.”
4. Fund Innovation as Impact
   Consider innovation as part of your impact. Cross emphasizes that if your grant helps a newsroom experiment or try something new, that’s impact. She also underscores that community is the most powerful force in journalism today—and that communities themselves should guide how impact is measured. “Let the communities served by the newsrooms define the metrics of success, and then hold your grantees accountable to meeting those measures of success.”

Source: Institute for Nonprofit News