What Comes Next? The Conversation Emerging Around “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale”

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 meet it.

The report itself offers one of the clearest snapshots we’ve seen of the structural challenges shaping local journalism today. By analyzing hundreds of proposals from across the country, it surfaces patterns in how the field is trying to rebuild the systems that support civic information.

But as often happens with research like this, the most interesting insights are emerging in the conversation that follows. Across these discussions, a few tensions are starting to surface about what these findings might mean for the future of media philanthropy.

Infrastructure vs. Newsroom Funding

One of the report’s main arguments is that stronger shared infrastructure could make it easier for more news organizations to operate sustainably. That includes things like legal services, risk management, publishing platforms and revenue support—systems that can serve many organizations at once instead of requiring every newsroom to rebuild the same capacity independently.

Many people agree these kinds of shared services are still underdeveloped.

At the same time, some practitioners have raised a fair concern: If philanthropy shifts toward infrastructure, does that come at the expense of the organizations actually producing journalism?

It’s a real tension, and it points to a bigger question funders will need to wrestle with: How do you balance investing in shared systems with the ongoing need to sustain the reporting organizations serving communities directly?

The Role of Intermediaries

The report also highlights the expanding ecosystem of journalism support organizations (JSOs) and service providers.

These organizations can play an important role by coordinating resources, lowering operational barriers and helping newsrooms access tools they couldn’t build on their own.

But the growth of this layer has also prompted questions about duplication and fragmentation.

As several commentators have noted, the next phase of philanthropic investment may require a clearer understanding of which kinds of infrastructure actually reduce friction for newsrooms, and which may simply add another layer to an already complex system.

Visibility and Geographic Equity

Another theme that has come up repeatedly is visibility bias. Organizations with strong national networks or existing relationships with funders are often more likely to surface in philanthropic conversations. Meanwhile, smaller organizations working in rural or under-resourced communities can remain largely invisible.

If philanthropy moves toward larger and more coordinated infrastructure investments, there’s a real question about how to ensure those organizations aren’t left out.

The Question of Scale

The report’s discussion of consolidation and shared services has also sparked debate about the role of scale, which means different things in different contexts.

Some see this as a shift away from a decade focused on innovation and experimentation toward coordination and long-term sustainability. And some practitioners caution that past attempts to scale local journalism weakened local ownership and community connection. Others point out that certain types of infrastructure—especially technology and shared services—only work at scale.

The challenge is distinguishing between scaling systems that support journalism and scaling newsroom models themselves.

One thing that has become clear is how many people across the field are wrestling with the same questions at the same time.

Funders are trying to understand what kinds of infrastructure investments actually strengthen the ecosystem. Newsroom leaders are thinking about how collaboration affects independence and sustainability. Intermediaries are asking where they truly add value.

One of the roles Media Impact Funders plays is creating space for those perspectives to surface and interact. Not to resolve these debates quickly, but to make sure the field has the opportunity to work through them together.

So What Does Philanthropy Do With This?

What’s becoming clear across these conversations is this shared realization: The challenges facing public-interest media aren’t just about individual organizations. They’re structural.

If that’s the case, philanthropy may need to think differently about how it invests—not only supporting individual outlets, but strengthening the systems that allow civic information to be produced, distributed and sustained.

At the same time, any shift toward infrastructure has to stay grounded in the realities facing the organizations doing the work in communities across the country.

These are the questions the field will continue to wrestle with in the months ahead.

At Media Impact Funders, we’ll keep creating space for that conversation—including at the 2026 Media Impact Forum, where funders will come together to examine how the ecosystem is evolving and what it will take to build a more durable system for public-benefit media.