By Kathryn DeHart, CISLM student employee
As threats to local journalism grow across the country, journalism support organizations and philanthropic funders are turning to a new strategy: public policy. Once seen as a third rail in an industry that prides itself on holding government accountable, public policy is now viewed as a necessary lever to support local news.
On June 17, Press Forward announced five state-level grants to foster public policy initiatives that strengthen newsrooms. This follows the creation of their Public Policy Working Group last fall, guided by four policy priorities to guide their investments:
- Prioritize original, community-centered local news
- Maximize long-term, sustainable revenue sources
- Promote local ownership and leadership
- Protect journalistic independence and integrity
Meanwhile, research from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) shows legislative initiatives supporting local news are underway in 19 states, a shift as advocacy moves from federal to state legislatures.
And local news legislation is still growing. Since June 2024, 38 news bills were introduced across 15 states, more than the total number of bills introduced in the previous two years combined.
The number of bills isn’t the only thing growing; new staff is being introduced, too. In January, LION Publishers announced a new full time policy advocate hire, the first of its kind in the journalism support world. The decision to create the position came from member feedback, a sign that the appetite and interest in government support for journalism is on the rise.
While public policy initiatives to support local media aren’t new, they are changing — here’s an overview of where we are now and how we got here.
Media organizations hire policy staff to protect local news
LION, or Local Independent Online News, has over 400 members in the United States and Canada. Members range in size, but have one thing in common: On an individual basis, they don’t have as much voice as larger media entities in policy discussions.
Chuck Corra, LION’s associate director of policy and advocacy, said his role focuses on evaluating how legislation at the federal and even state level will impact media organizations. He said that changes in the policy landscape have necessitated the role of a policy advocate.
“So much has been proposed in different states throughout the country that will impact our members’ businesses, and that will impact the way that they report on the news, and their ability to do that while also functioning as a business or as a viable nonprofit,” Corra said.
Coalition building
Organizations still rely on industry associations for policy representation, but newsrooms are increasingly asking how policy changes will directly impact them, rather than the concern coming from the C-suite.
And with more visibility and exposure to changes comes more power in shaping policies.
At Rebuild Local News, newsrooms can join a coalition to provide input in policy developments. The coalition, which was started as part of GroundTruth Project in 2020 and went independent in January 2023, is made up of over 3,000 newsrooms of various mediums, tax structures and sizes.
According to Rebuild Local News’ website, the coalition acts as a forum for groups to advocate for public policy. Each group decides whether to endorse a particular policy proposal for itself and on a case by case basis.
Recent policy developments affecting local news
and consultant for the NJ Civic Info Consortium, speaking about public policy for local news at the 2025 Local Journalism Researchers’ Workshop. Photo by Sarah Ellis / Daily Tar Heel)
Since 2017, 96 bills across 18 states and the District of Columbia have proposed solutions ranging from tax credits to fellowship programs to advertising set-asides. A few examples include:
California
In 2023, California legislators introduced a bill, the California Journalism Preservation Act, to provide additional funding to media companies by imposing a fee on tech platforms.
The bill ultimately never became law.
Instead, lawmakers agreed to a deal with Google last August that will send $110 million to news organizations, just a fraction of what the bill itself would have required.
However, the final deal has not been settled, prompting publishers and journalists in California to call for more hearings on the deal in early May of this year.
The deal will also fund a collegiate reporting program, though UC Berkeley said in January it would not house the program as originally planned due to lack of control over how the funding would have been used.
On May 1, Rebuild Local News announced a proposal to extend the original deal by $125 million and require Meta and Amazon to contribute payments.
While many policy organizations have previously advocated for journalism support through tax revenue, the CJPA was met with mixed reviews.
One critique of the bill was that there was not enough differentiation between local media and larger media organizations.
Corra wasn’t working with LION when the CJPA was being negotiated, but he said LION opposed the bill.
In a 2023 letter to the California General Assembly, Executive Director of LION Chris Krewson said the bill would reward legacy media outlets, newspaper chains and “ghost newspapers,” as opposed to local, independent publishers.
“By defining local news as anything read by people in California, there’s no incentive for the publishers helped most by this measure to produce what the bill terms as ‘journalism (that) plays an essential role in California and in local communities,’ let alone further ‘the ability of local news organizations to continue to provide the public with critical information about their communities who read news,” Krewson said in the letter.
New York
In May 2024, the New York Senate passed a bill allocating $30 million in tax credits to newsrooms. Key features included:.
- $25,000 payroll tax credit per employee
- $320,000 cap on the credit
- Publicly traded companies ineligible
- Dedicated funding for new hires and smaller outlets
Ultimately, the legislature included $90 million over the course of three years in the budget to support the Newspaper and Broadcast Jobs Program. However, the language used in the budget appropriation has raised concerns about eligibility criteria.
Fellowship structure
Teresa Wippel is the CEO of My Neighborhood News Network, a non-profit string of news outlets in Washington. Her news organization is one of the newsrooms that comprise Rebuild Local News’ coalition.
“It is, I think, really helpful to speak with a unified voice on these matters and Rebuild Local has been really valuable just in tracking the issues that are going on, both locally and nationally,” Wippel said.
While Wippel said not all of the legislation Rebuild Local works on directly impacts her news organization, both progress and failure, like what happened in California, reverberate across the country’s media ecosystem.
Wippel says that when lawmakers see things happening in other states, it cues them to start paying attention to their own state.
In Washington, Wippel has been in conversation with legislators pressing a bill forward that was inspired by the CJPA — Senate Bill 5400.
The bill would introduce a $20 million yearly commitment to the Washington Local News Journalism Corps program, which would place journalists in local newsrooms across the state.
“The truth is that bills sometimes do spread, or ideas for bills spread from state to state, and legislators sometimes just copied bills from other places,” Wippel said. “I think there’s value in us as journalists keeping track of what’s going on elsewhere, so we can speak with our local lawmakers about things that might help here.
Principles for effective media policy
Though not the only journalism advocacy organization, Rebuild Local News has been advocating for media support policies since 2020.
Rebuild Local News states five principles for policies they support:
- Be content-neutral, nonpartisan, and ensure editorial independence.
- Be future-friendly, potentially helping both existing local players and innovators.
- Be platform-neutral. Help local news organizations develop sustainable models.
- Especially help locally-grounded, diverse or nonprofit media.
- Result in communities having more local reporters.
According to Rebuild Local News’s government advertising policy manager, Lori Henson, a common concern about government funding for media organizations within the industry is the possibility for corruption and conflict of interest. But Henson said ensuring all of Rebuild Local’s policies have a strong firewall that protects the government and media organizations from corruption is a top priority.
“So we’re very aware that it’s not just we want to avoid not just corruption in fact, but even the appearance of corruption, right? We don’t want a system where public policy becomes a tool for politicians to reward or punish newsrooms, right?,” Henson said.
The ethics and importance of journalism advocacy
Media Ethicist and former Eleanor Poynter Jamison Chair in Media Ethics and Press Policy Deni Elliott said that for journalists who are bound by objectivity, advocacy may seem counterintuitive, but if anything, it’s actually essential.
“Advocacy and being unbiased are not contradictory concepts unless they’re applied to exactly the same bit,” Elliott said.
Journalists have to advocate for their profession, because they know it best, and it impacts them the most.
“(Journalists) need freedom. They need access to sources,” Elliott said. “They need to not fear for their own personal safety by saying what they believe is the truth, that doesn’t mean that they’re right all the time, but the ability to do that needs to be protected.”
Policy concerns for local media
While there are promising developments, concerns remain. Corra said that he’s monitoring proposals that might limit public access to records or even meeting spaces, which he warns would have a chilling effect on the press.
And not all supportive policies are created equal.
“Our concern is that we want policy that’s going to be crafted to benefit local, independent media,” Corra said. “And oftentimes, when policy is initially proposed, it’s written for just media at large or that may be more beneficial to legacy media, and so I don’t want to say it’s necessarily, inherently harmful to our members in general, but I think what our concern is is that we want to make sure that the policy is going to be as helpful to local media as we possibly can.”
With more journalism support organizations getting involved, organizations like Rebuild Local News, welcome the momentum.
“We are thrilled to see more activity happening,” said Henson, adding “I think what people are starting to understand is that we don’t have the luxury of leaving any tool on the shelf like we have to bring to bear all the resources that we can to sustain and grow local news, because our democracy depends on it.”