Report | Ensuring Community News Coverage: Nonprofits and Other Models of Success — and Failure

This report, “Report | Ensuring Community News Coverage: Nonprofits and Other Models of Success — and Failure,” was written by Tom Davidson for the Center for Journalism & Liberty, a media program within Open Markets Institute, about how dozens of news organizations survive on more than sheer determination to provide neighborhood news.

When a veteran Maryland legislator was sentenced to prison on bribery charges in late July, the story led the home pages of the usual journalism heavyweights of Baltimore: The Baltimore Sun, dominant television broadcaster WBAL, a couple other television-news organizations.

But reporters from lesser known publications, namely Baltimore Brew, Maryland Matters and Baltimore Fishbowl, detailed efforts by prosecutors who charged Rep. Cheryl Glenn with taking $33,750 in payoffs, and telling an informant that the best way to get a cannabis license in Maryland was to know “God and Cheryl Glenn.”

The economic collapse of local newspapers is a sad, oft-told story. (The Sun had more than 250 unionized newsroom employees in 2007; today, with downsizing and centralization, fewer than 90 remain.)

Less told are the stories of the local-news organizations arising – and struggling – to fill the void: digital nonprofit startups, legacy publications reinventing themselves to chase philanthropic dollars, even groups that borrow lessons from dairy farmers’ 18th Century battles against railroad robber barons.

A decade into the transformation of local news, there’s no single template for success.

But there are emerging patterns – organization structures and financial models — being tried in community after community. There’ve been spectacular successes, failures that passed without notice – all told, hundreds of local experiments.

Combined, they offer insights that can help local entrepreneurs, journalists and policymakers decide what models create the best chance to reinvent local news in their community. Clearly the pandemic has accelerated the need to fashion solutions to support local news.

Read the full report here or below.