A community-centered approach to supporting local journalism
By: Shay Totten
Tags: Community Foundation, Journalism, Philanthropy, Local News

In addition to creating good journalism, The Compass Experiment was launched to find ways to make local news financially sustainable.

The long-term success of our newsrooms will depend on a variety of revenue sources — loyal readers, local businesses and philanthropic donors. We also know that we must be ready to adapt as needed in this ever-changing and evolving world of community news.

In early 2020, to mark Mahoning Matters’ six-month anniversary, we launched a voluntary giving program that asked readers to financially support our newsgathering. Dozens of people stepped up to contribute thousands of dollars — either in monthly payments or one-time donations — all to keep our site free and accessible to all.

One additional area of success lies in building strong alliances in the local philanthropic community. These smaller foundations are emerging as an important source of much-needed support for local newsrooms across the U.S. according to Mark Glaser’s recent report highlighted by the Knight Foundation as well as this Media Impact Funders report from a year ago. We can attest to their findings and hope to build successful local models in the communities that our sites serve.

Since 2009, 114 community foundations have given $68.5 million of the $1.4 billion (excluding Newseum grants), or 5 percent, according to Media Impact Funders. As Glaser notes, too, that funding is expected to increase in the years to come.

“It’s heartening to see the growth of support for local news — nonprofits and for profits — from foundations and donors around the country. Local foundations who had largely been on the sidelines have been instrumental in supporting new journalism collaborations in Wichita, New Hampshire, Northeast Ohio, Western New York and Southeastern Michigan,” Glaser writes.

We couldn’t agree more. It is heartening to see these crucial local institutions focusing some of their support on sustaining local newsrooms that, as we know, can be crucial in the health and well-being of a community’s democracy and civic engagement.

At Mahoning Matters, we have worked in close collaboration with Todd Franko at Report for America to make the case for donor-funded journalism in Youngstown. Franko, like much of our staff at Mahoning Matters, once worked at The Vindicator and has deep ties in the community.

In July, the Thomases Family Endowment of the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation, became the first local funder to support our work with Report for America. They were soon joined by the Youngstown Foundation and the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley. We are humbled that these pillars of the local funding community have come together to help us build a future for local journalism.

These gifts were crucial to laying a strong foundation for sustainable local news in our community and to open up the possibility of what we could build by working together.

Then, on our one-year anniversary, we announced the launch of The Mahoning Matters Journalism Impact Fund with the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, which ensures our future contributions are managed professionally in the community.

The Mahoning Matters Journalism Impact Fund is an innovative and community-centered approach to funding local journalism and one that we hope to replicate in Longmont, Colorado in support of The Longmont Leader. We’ve only been publishing there for six months, but have already received initial funding from Community Foundation Boulder County in support of our Spanish-language news translation and reporting. As in the Mahoning Valley, our goal is to create a long-term Impact Fund in Longmont to support that newsroom’s sustainability and special community news initiatives — and potentially work more broadly to support newsrooms and collaborative journalism projects throughout Boulder County.

The Impact Funds are designed with a mission to sustain our accountability and solutions-oriented reporting and will give us an avenue to begin accepting tax-deductible donations with our fiscal sponsor, the McClatchy Journalism Institute. Currently, all contributions in support of our free-for-all-to-read approach to community news is not tax-deductible as our sites are for-profit newsrooms.

This new kind of funding means we have to be more accountable than ever to the community, and that’s a good thing. It’s a responsibility our newsrooms have taken seriously since day one, especially in being as transparent as possible when it comes to how we make big decisions and how we are funded.

And, that kind of accountability builds trust — not just with these important local philanthropic funders and foundations — but with our readers and the communities we serve.

Shay Totten is Growth and Membership Specialist for The Compass Experiment. Emily Dresslar, Head of Business Operations, also contributed to this post.

The Compass Experiment is a local news laboratory founded by McClatchy and Google News Initiative’s Local Experiments Project. This Medium site is set up to share news and learnings from The Compass Experiment’s local news websites, which include Mahoning Matters in Youngstown, Ohio and The Longmont Leader in Longmont, Colorado.