Chances are, you are thinking hard about your choices this giving season.
As leaders at two New York City news organizations focused on deep, impactful and useful coverage of local communities and issues, we know that many of our donors, just like our readers, are weighing the impacts of inflation, and a possible recession, on their budgets.
More than ever, impact, and return on investment will be foremost in the minds of those who are able to support vital nonprofit work these holidays.
Local journalism is increasingly emerging as an important category, and awareness is growing of the direct benefits it delivers in the form of limiting corruption and abuses of power, driving civic engagement, and combating political polarization.
Less well known is that local reporting delivers impacts that vastly exceed its costs, offering some of the most compelling returns on philanthropic investment available.
That combination of impact and efficiency in the face of hugely complex structural challenges should make donors across the country — from individual givers to the largest foundations — consider including this sector in their allocations for end-of-year giving, whatever issue areas they are most passionate about.
The need is urgent, and the current scale of journalism funding is far from adequate to meet it.
To the extent that Americans have a small but growing movement of nonprofit outlets to turn to for local news, far-sighted national and local foundations have played the most important role in priming the pump. But the community of journalism funders is still relatively small, and some of the current tumult in the tech and crypto industries will be felt acutely.
We need investment, not just from those already convinced of the value of journalism for sustaining democracy, but from donors whose place-based giving responds to local concerns, and from those who seek better outcomes in areas that play out locally: climate change, economic opportunity, racial justice, education, policing, housing, healthcare, immigration and the arts.
We have seen the impact that relatively modest investments can deliver, even in a city as large and complex as New York.
At THE CITY, for example, reporters slowly built trust with Indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican food delivery workers, bringing to light the hardships they faced on the front lines of the pandemic as essential workers and detailing their approach to organizing. Ultimately, their stories led the New York City Council to pass a set of bills that ensured bathroom access, minimum pay, and better conditions for the app-based delivery workers who kept New Yorkers fed during the pandemic. Last week, the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced groundbreaking minimum pay standards. The total cost of this was less than a single journalist’s annual salary.
The same goes for journalism that produces richer civic engagement. At THE CITY, editors and reporters conduct community listening sessions, answer questions, and build data-driven tools to help residents participate in local democracy. Meet Your Mayor, a digital voter’s guide to the mayoral election, was used by over 275,000 people during a primary in which just under a million voted. A year later, it was still in use thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, where KPCC/LAist repurposed THE CITY’s code and research model.
With less focus on chasing advertising and subscriber dollars, local nonprofit journalism has the unique power to amplify the voices of those who otherwise go largely unseen by mainstream media — and they’re experimenting with new platforms to connect with them.
Documented is the only newsroom of its kind, whose Spanish-language WhatsApp channel has supported thousands of immigrant New Yorkers as they navigate the housing and labor market, as well as public benefit programs. It was this commitment to the community that kept a Documented reporter on the story of a massive fire in the Bronx that killed 17 people and displaced hundreds more. He found that despite collecting millions of dollars from fellow New Yorkers, the New York City government had only given out a fraction of that to the victims. Several months of reporting resulted in the city releasing $3 million directly into the pockets of the displaced families.
This giving season, consider donating more to local news wherever you are — these are the organizations, the reporters, the editors who are there for their neighbors in the most underserved neighborhoods every day. From creating election guides to flood maps, these media outlets are providing local readers with useful information that they need to be a better citizen and to make change in their communities.
And maybe your local town or neighborhood doesn’t have a nonprofit news outlet, or Alden Global Capital shuttered your community newspaper during the pandemic. If you don’t know where your money could make the most impact, there are organizations like American Journalism Project that identify and fund viable newsrooms like THE CITY, Documented and VTDigger.
If you’d rather take an issues-based approach to funding nonprofit news, consider funding a specific beat at a local news outlet to uncover the issues you are passionate about, whether it is underwriting a food insecurity reporter at Mississippi Today or a homelessness reporter at Honolulu Civil Beat.
We know that local media is just one of many nonprofit sectors deserving of donors’ dollars. Nonprofit local news would do well to learn from other successful funding and impact models by nonprofits outside of media — and we hope those nonprofits will consider working with local media to help support and create journalism that serves our communities. We will all be more successful at solving the challenges our society faces if we collaborate more closely to make our donations and grants go even further.
Nic Dawes is Executive Director of THE CITY. Mazin Sidahmed is Co-Executive Director of Documented.