We haven't yet found the money for the news we need, so what can we do next?

I spoke to Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro about her recent report Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale. It's clear current levels of philanthropic funding won't be able to sustain or create enough high-quality local news and information to meet information needs across the country. Hansen-Shapiro and I spoke about what both funders and news organizations might need to do differently when they should stay the course and what words like "scale" and "civic information" really mean.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, but both the questions and responses are, admittedly, a little long. This was a true conversation, where we were thinking through issues together and trying to come to a shared understanding. That dialogue has been preserved.

Sarah Alvarez: Did doing this report make you feel more hopeful or less hopeful about the field?

Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro: Because this report is just looking at the problems surfaced by applicants, the temptation is to be like, "Oh my gosh, everything sucks."

But that was just one side of the coin. The other side, which I try to get to in the analysis, is how many interesting things are happening across the field. So much cool stuff has been built. Where I've ultimately landed is that I have a lot of hope on the practitioner side. We have solutions and things that are working. I think the remaining challenge is really on the funding side, because there's such a gap between the amount of resources needed for the things that have been built in the field and the amount of resources that are actually available. Funders are going to have to start thinking systemically. It's clear that all the problems are systemic.  

SA: You write that the organizations applying for funding have combined annual budgets of more than $500 million, and Press Forward was hoping to raise $500 million in 5 years. It's clear that the field is too big to be supported by philanthropy that we have today. But it's also too small and maybe ill-equipped to reliably meet the social and individual roles necessary for a well-functioning society.

EHS: Yes.

SA: And your analysis is that this is not an individual newsroom problem. It’s an ecosystem problem?

EHS: Yeah.

SA: This is tricky because a lot of the problems in news were getting blamed on things that were beyond the individual newsroom's or industry's control, like the internet, for a very long time. But there was also a widespread failure to adapt and innovate at an individual and ecosystem level.

How do you think about the challenge of us needing to take accountability for things we’re not doing well as newsrooms and as an ecosystem, but acknowledge there are some problems with the underlying economic market underneath it all that will make success very difficult?

EHS: All of those things are true. And it's important to keep in mind that the primary audience for the report is really funders. I’m asking them to think about the field differently. Can you think about the field not as a series of innovation problems, or a series of weak operators, or a series of problems adapting to the internet, but really as a set of systemic failures that no individual newsroom can solve and no individual funder can solve? Can you think about this field and collaborate with your peers differently so that there's a smarter use of resources?

SA: That's interesting. Because there are newsrooms that have been organizing to try to make their work and their requests to funders more impactful and coherent. And they are organizing to try to make the benefits of their work travel further. So is what you're talking about here a level of funder organization that needs to happen? Self-organizing in the funding community?

EHS: Very much so. And for a level of coordination, so that duplicated initiatives aren't being funded in a way where there's, for example, one training program to address this problem over here and then another training program to address the same problem over there. What's the way to do that where you try to solve for that problem once? Then resources can get redeployed to some other problem area.

SA: There’s a line that you have that says, “Grant dependence can stabilize organizations without enabling resilience.”

I think that there’s been an issue where news organizations have been financially stable but not valuable, or financially stable but not resilient for a long time. It's led to a lot of confusion about what a financially stable organization signals. Stability is not necessarily signaling high quality. It's not necessarily signaling value. And the reverse is true as well.

A frustration I had working in a newsroom was that these questions about sustainability are important. But they seem secondary if what we're trying to solve is the value of the news problem.

EHS: I totally agree. The challenge with philanthropic funding is that it can warp the incentives for a news organization. To the extent that resilience requires creating a product that people care about and are willing to support in some way, those kinds of strategies can get crowded out by focusing on being successful on the fundraising front. An organization can have messaging that is optimized for funders even if that hasn’t really reached or grown an audience. Then you have that divergence where it's like, okay, we're stable, but are we really resilient?

SA: One thing about funding that can be difficult to talk about honestly is that while some funding can be catalytic, given the economy that we have, long-term subsidies will be necessary in some places.

EHS: Definitely.

SA: How do you feel like funders understand that problem?

EHS: I think it requires making some difficult trade-offs and being precise about what kind of value and what kind of strategy you have as a funder. You're right, there are places that are going to need that long-term subsidy. Oftentimes, grantmaking in those communities is hard. Being there for the long term is hard. What are we going to say no to so that we can say yes to this? It's all just hard choices.

SA: This is a very specific question, but what do you mean in the report by civic information?

EHS: I think of civic information as the substrate of journalism. Information really related to the mechanisms of self-governance in all its various forms. So that could be town meeting minutes around things like zoning or trash collection. That could be statewide data around homelessness initiatives or statistics around voter participation. Or how many elected officials voted in how many different ways, at what levels of government? 

Traditionally, we have thought of newspapers and, to a certain extent, broadcast as the primary translators of civic information. You don't necessarily need to go look at your town meeting minutes because you delegate that task to your local newsroom to do that for you and tell you what it means.

But we've seen that infrastructure collapse. Now I think you're seeing more questions around, like, "Well, if I'm a citizen, how do I get that information?" Cities, municipalities, and towns are also having to figure out how to get important information out to residents.

SA: That’s helpful. I think we're on the same page about that. I wrote down a couple of words to describe civic information: logistics, performance, services, and policies. 

SA: Now I want to ask you some scale and innovation questions. 

If there was one thing that I disagreed with in this report, it was the idea that a lack of innovation in our industry is rational. I think it's completely irrational. Because it's like, "Guys, the status quo is not working!" We all know it. I understand that at an ecosystem level, it appears rational to avoid change to maintain or preserve resources, but at a newsroom level, it isn't. And on the product side, a lot of the innovations have come from very resource-constrained organizations.

EHS: Yes.

SA: So, how do you want funders to think about trying to make innovation go further or spur more of it? How do you want them to do that?

EHS: I think you're right. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? Oftentimes it is those small newsrooms, when there's entrepreneurial leaders and people who have a strong impulse to try to figure something out despite the lack of resources, that are a huge source of innovation. And the flip side is definitely true. The more complacent an incumbent you are, and the more successful and stable you are, those incentives toward innovation often go away. I think you can see that same thing at the system level. Stability might not breed innovation at the system level either. If you end up being driven by funder incentives like stability, you might also end up with not enough innovation in enough places that it really makes a difference.

To me, it goes back to how can funders align their incentives with the community of readers out there? How can funders look for and encourage the kinds of innovation about what our communities need from us in terms of information and services? I think funders can absolutely ally themselves on that end. 

SA: OK, now a question that kept coming up for me as I was reading. What do you mean by efficient scale?

EHS: I think about it in a wonky, business operations kind of way.  Scale in that sense can just mean, like, more than one. Scale, for scale's sake, is not the solution, but scale, meaning “more than one,” has to be the solution. We’re past the time when one-off solutions make sense at the system level.

How can we find those things that really, truly, should not be done locally so that as many of those local resources, given how constrained they are, can be fed back into the newsroom?

There are no easy answers. Consolidation works in some places and horribly in others. A lot of the interesting applications in the grant pool were around how do you achieve consolidation-like efficiencies without having to merge entities? Collaboratives that share an operations function, a business management function, or an accounting function, for example.

There's so much experimentation around what local scale looks like, and I think it is where local funders can have the most leverage.

SA: One last question. You wrote this report for one funder and knew they would use it when thinking through their funding strategy. Then you decided to publish it so it could be available to the whole field. What do you want people who are in the field generally, people like me, to do with this information?

EHS: My hope is that newsroom leaders, practitioners, JSO leaders can, first of all, find themselves in this report. Or not, and reach out and tell me how they don't. This is such difficult work on the practitioner side. It’s chronically resource-constrained. So I want people to be able to understand that some of the challenges that we're facing are not personal, you know? They don't have to necessarily do with, “Well, you haven't innovated your way there yet.” Some of these challenges are shared problems that we're all facing.

Then we can start to have conversations with each other differently about how we can collaborate. How to solve these problems where it's not just one by one.

My last slide for the Media Impact Funders webinar to the funders said, “The field has done its part, and now it's your turn.”

SA: Oh. Wow.

EHS: And I so want that to be true. But I know that the field is going to have to continue to lead. And to the extent that, you know, we all have a shared understanding of the problems, and understand the ways in which some of the challenges we're facing individually are systemic problems, then I think we can have more sophisticated conversations with funders, and really hold their feet to the fire to do better.

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Your feedback is always welcome! If you have more questions, send them my way, and I will get back to you or pass them along.