Funders, media makers and nonprofits are working together to unleash the power of media to move the needle on important social issues.

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… Read More

Earlier this month, we published “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale,” a new report by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro analyzing nearly 560 proposals submitted to Press Forward’s infrastructure open call. The response was immediate—and intense. One interview Elizabeth did with Dick Tofel became his most-read post, generating more than 70 comments. We saw record attendance on our network call exploring the findings. Across the field, funders, publishers and journalists began weighing in—on LinkedIn, at Nieman Lab and elsewhere. All of it points to something important: This report is less a conclusion and more a starting point for a much larger conversation about what comes next. And it’s a reminder of something we don’t say out loud often enough: There is real demand in this field for more candid, outcome-oriented conversations—not for their own sake, but to actually move the work forward. For all the attention on media right now, there still aren’t enough spaces where funders can wrestle with these questions together. That’s part of what we’re trying to build at Media Impact Funders. In some ways, it’s always been the work. But this moment is asking more of all of us—and we’re trying to… Read More