A Local Community Journalism Fund: A new proposal for federal intervention (with local distribution) in America's news crisis
In August of last year, the billionaire Ellison family took over CBS. In December, the Ellisons were the lead investors in a takeover of TikTok. In April, investors voted to allow the same Ellison family to take control of CNN. Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has near-total control of Facebook, billionaire Elon Musk controls Twitter, billionaire Jeff Bezos controls The Washington Post, and the billionaire Murdoch family controls Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. Meanwhile, Wall Street hedge funds have bought up a large number of American newspapers and hollowed them out or run them into the ground.
What is happening? As the business model of the decentralized, free press has fallen apart, billionaire-owned media has moved in to fill the vacuum. The newspaper industry employed nearly 458,000 people in 1990. By 2016 that number was 183,000, a 60 percent drop. Since 2005, more than 3,300 American newspapers have closed and roughly 270,000 newspaper jobs have vanished, a 75 percent loss. Today, more than 70 million Americans live in a county with no daily local newsroom at all.
Tens of millions of Americans no longer have any trusted source giving them the news straight. As local newsrooms close and a handful of billionaires consolidate the national platforms, citizens are cut off from real information about what their government, their employers, and the corporations they depend on are doing to them. This is a tremendous threat to American democracy—as DPN advocate Mark Histed wrote with the launch of our News Dollars kit:
The importance of local news for democracy is confirmed by dozens of academic studies. Local news increases participation in elections. It also slows polarization by de-nationalizing local politics, by increasing voters’ focus on local issues and by reducing the significance of partisan identity and national political conflicts. Further, investments in local news bring financial returns to the public. Studies have found that every dollar spent on local news can bring hundreds of dollars in public benefit by reducing corruption, increasing public oversight and improving government function. Studies also show that local news is associated with a shared sense of community. That is especially important today, as people are increasingly driven apart by social media algorithms favoring divisive, emotional content, and by a commercial media universe where rage and argument can be profitable. In a time of growing division, there is great societal value in the ability of local news to increase social trust and build community.
A new federal intervention: A federal fund for local journalism, distributed to every county, and allocated through local citizen juries
In 2023, DPN began advocating for cities and states to establish “Local News Dollars” systems—programs in which residents are issued publicly-funded vouchers to donate to journalism outlets of their choice. Since then, the model has been promoted in D.C., Seattle, and other cities across the country.
However, city efforts are not enough—it is past due for Congress to address our news and information crisis head-on. Fortunately, various Congressional leaders have shown interest in such efforts—for example, by supporting the Local Journalism Sustainability Act in 2020.
Today, the Democracy Policy Network proposes a new model for how the federal government can directly and substantially address our local news and information crisis: A Local Community Journalism Fund, distributed out to every county in America, and allocated to local journalism outlets through local citizen juries.
This proposal's design aims to address three major challenges that the federal funding of local journalism faces:
- If local newsrooms are going to rely on new federal funding to plan for the long term, how do you create a sustainable funding source that is relatively insulated from rapid defunding efforts by a new Congress or administration?
- How do you distribute federal journalism funding across the country so that it meets particular local community needs?
- And most importantly: How do you provide government funding for journalism without government influence over journalism content?
Here are the five pillars of a model that aims to address these questions:
(1) Create a federal trust fund that would ramp up over four years to provide $10 billion annually in public funding for local journalism. This level of funding would be enough to fund 50,000 new local reporting jobs across the country.
The fund should be housed at Treasury and the appropriation should be mandatory rather than discretionary, meaning it would not require annual reauthorization and cannot be defunded solely through Congressional inaction.
(Note: $10 billion is a starting point. As discussed in DPN's News Dollars policy kit, the United States government at one point spent an estimated 0.21 percent of GDP—$46 billion in today's economy—to subsidize news.)
(2) Distribute public journalism funds each year to every county (or equivalent jurisdiction type) in America. We propose a $650,000 base allocation to each county, plus $35-per-resident above 20,000 residents, plus a $200,000 rural supplement, capping each county at $12 million per year. Counties with populations above 500,000 would be eligible for a supplemental allocation drawn from unallocated base funds, up to $27 million per year. The rural supplement is available to counties designated as rural under applicable federal standards and blended proportionally for counties with mixed rural and non-rural populations.
The formula is calibrated to fund a genuinely viable newsroom at every eligible county size—and allowing newsrooms to build reserves, invest in digital infrastructure, and pay competitive salaries. The surplus grows at larger county sizes as the formula output remains below the cap but above operating costs.
(3) Require that each county, in turn, distribute this funding in a way no politician, special interest group, or billionaire can interfere with: via local juries of randomly-selected citizens (similar to "citizen assemblies"). These juries, selected in a similar manner to the way courtroom juries are, would decide which local media outlets in their community receive the money. This structure ensures that no political administration, federal or local—regardless of its disposition toward the press—can use control of disbursements as leverage over news coverage. These juries could be convened, for example, every four years to allocate four-year grants of federal funds.
The jury selection and administration process could be managed by local universities, libraries, or other capable public entities. The administrator must certify independence from all fund applicants and has no role in choosing the winner. Its function is purely administrative—convening and running the citizen assembly process fairly and impartially.
(4) Set minimum standards for fund-eligible local journalism outlets. If a local news entity meets this standard, it can apply to receive federal funds and be considered by their local citizen jury. The key is to balance having enough requirements and prohibitions to ensure all applicants are sincere local journalism outlets—while not having such thick requirements as to disempower the citizen jury from deciding what forms of local journalism are most useful to the community.
(See our kit on Local News Dollars for various considerations when limiting which local entities should be eligible for public funds, including questions of: format (print, web, video), paywalls, advertising, financial transparency, limits on monopolistic funders, and more.)
(5) Create federal and local oversight mechanisms to avoid waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, and interference. This includes federal certification of citizen jury processes, as well as local oversight by a community board to make sure funded outlets are not grossly abusing funding.
This is a billionaire-proof (and politician-proof) model that can begin to transform and repair American local news. Such a program would inject money into local communities, create more than 50,000 new reporting jobs, and provide a check on government waste, fraud, and abuse. Moreover, it would help bolster the free press and the democratic system that requires it. And even though the newsrooms supported are rooted locally, they could help restore trust in state, national, and international news as well by creating trusted local media infrastructure that can serve as a bridge to a broader media ecosystem across America.
As DPN advocate Michael Swerdlow has argued, news gathering must be reclaimed as a public trust. American democracy was never meant to depend on what a handful of billionaires and hedge funds decide to publish. The U.S. Congress should help shore up this vital sector and return this power to local hands.
Over the coming months, we are going to be rolling out model bill text, as well as further analysis and details of how such a model could work. If you are interested in engaging with the development of this model, please reach out to: contact@DemocracyPolicy.network.
