Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs
Introduction
Media Impact Funders has published “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale,” a new analysis by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, PhD, examining the structural constraints shaping the future of local journalism.
The report draws on nearly 560 applications submitted to Press Forward’s nationwide infrastructure open call, offering one of the most comprehensive practitioner-defined datasets on the infrastructure needs of local journalism to date. Rather than focusing on individual organizations, the analysis examines patterns across the field to identify where infrastructure is underbuilt, fragmented, or failing to support scale, coordination and long-term sustainability.
Taken together, these applications provide a rare aggregated signal from across the local news ecosystem, revealing shared challenges around operational capacity, revenue development, collaboration, and shared systems. The findings invite funders and field leaders to reconsider assumptions about sustainability and to explore what more coordinated, system-level investment may require.
Context: A Field-Level Snapshot
The dataset analyzed in this report emerged from Press Forward’s nationwide infrastructure open call, which invited organizations to propose solutions addressing persistent challenges facing local newsrooms, including revenue generation, internal operations, human resources and audience growth.
Press Forward received 559 letters of interest from organizations across the country, providing a rare window into how local news leaders themselves describe the barriers they face and the solutions they believe are needed.
As Press Forward Executive Director Dale Anglin writes, the applications provide a field-wide snapshot of the barriers facing local journalism, and represent something unusual for the field: a collective snapshot of the systems challenges shaping local journalism. Examined together, they reveal that many of the most significant threats to local news are not isolated newsroom-level problems, but ecosystem-level infrastructure challenges.
Recognizing the value of this dataset, Arnold Ventures commissioned an independent analysis by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, which Media Impact Funders is publishing here to help inform philanthropic strategy and support deeper coordination across the field.
👉 Read Dale Anglin’s reflection on the open call and the dataset.
Continuing the Conversation
For more information on MIF’s plans to engage funders going forward, email Nina Sachdev, Deputy Director of External Affairs, at nina@mediafunders.org.
Use This Guide to:
1. Explore the way challenges from local news providers converge together across the eleven problem domains and how seemingly disparate needs are actually intertwined infrastructure issues.
2. Create a framework to think about how your investments stabilize singular organizations vs ecosystem wide interventions.
3. Consider how a problem-centered taxonomy might influence calls for proposals and funding rubrics.
Suggested Content:
1. Effective Practice Pillar Resource Hub
2. This is Local News Now
Featured Members:
Arnold Ventures
Source: Media Impact Funders