DES MOINES, Iowa — Editor's note: The above video first aired on May 12, 2023
A group of journalism funders said Wednesday that it would give grants totaling $20 million to 205 small, local news outlets across the country, roughly double what it intended to do when it sought applicants.
Press Forward said it sifted through some 930 applications before settling on its grants. The group said 40% of its new grantees are organizations headed by people of color, and a quarter are serving rural communities. Most outlets are getting $100,000 in general operating funds.
The grants are meant to help "close persistent coverage gaps in their communities" and reinvigorate local news, according to a Press Forward news release.
That's real money for organizations like Black Iowa News, founded during COVID to deliver news about the pandemic; the Nome Nugget, a newspaper that covers a wide swath of western Alaska; and Radio Indigena, which tries to connect California's migrant communities with newscasts delivered in Indigenous languages.
Black Iowa News, an independent digital and print news organization, launched in 2020 to highlight and amplify the voices of Black Iowans.
“What I love most about Black Iowa News is that it was born really out of that need to help,” founder Dana James told Local 5 in a May 2023 interview. “It was born out of the need to make sure that the community was informed in a way that I wasn’t seeing happen.”
Other Iowa news providers, The Burlington Beacon and La Prensa Iowa, also received funding from Press Forward. The Beacon is the local news source for the community of Burlington and La Prensa Iowa is a Spanish-language newspaper based out of Denison.
Press Forward doubled its original funding plans because “we felt that the need was now,” said Dale Anglin, president of Press Forward, which raises money and awareness of struggling local news outlets. Outlets with annual budgets of less than $1 million were eligible.
“I think the public only sees the big journalism leaders like The New York Times and Associated Press,” Anglin said. “We forget that small is important, small still exists, even if some of them are hanging on by a thread.”
Thousands of local news outlets across the country have either closed or stripped down staffing due to economic problems over the past two decades, and philanthropies are trying to lend a hand.