Many journalists would prefer a tall wall separating the state from the fourth estate, yet with local news outlets disappearing at an alarming rate, there have been increased calls for journalism to receive public support in order to survive.
The nonprofit Rebuild Local News advocates for public policies “to counter the collapse of local news and revitalize community journalism.” Founded in 2020 by Steven Waldman, former president and co-founder of Report for America, it includes a coalition of organizations—among them the Institute for Nonprofit News, National Newspaper Publishers Association, Local Independent Online News (LION) and Association of Alternative Newsmedia—that represent more than 3,000 locally owned and nonprofit, community-based newsrooms.
In this conversation, edited for length and clarity, Rebuild Local News policy director Anna Brugmann spoke about the long history of government support for journalism and ways to protect against interference, all while winning over a public that has grown distrustful of news reporting.
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Mark Caro How do you balance resistance to government involvement with journalism with the feeling that there needs to be public support for it because it’s essential to our society?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman I think that resistance comes from the last 40 years, because public policy to support news and journalism broadly has been part of the journalistic ethos in the United States since our inception. There's the Postal Act of 1792 that provided a postal discount [for distributing newspapers] and kind of laid the foundation for a really robust local news network in the United States. Every kind of technological and cultural inflection point in the United States has been met with public policy around news and information, the most recent being public broadcasting.
Anna Brugman
So this is very in line with how public policy has been used to support news, information and journalism in the United States. It kind of fell out of our toolkit in the last 40 years….I think in the last three years, it has become more into the mainstream consensus of our field that this is one of the many tools to address the lack of sustainability in local news. The pandemic really catalyzed a lot of discussion, and it also gave us an opportunity to have not obscure discussions of what would we do but actual discussions of what are we going to do?
By every metric by which you would measure a healthy democracy and community, it trends the wrong direction when you don't have local news part of the equation. And so that gives us a whole lot of data from which to argue that if there's a particular kind of news information that supports democracy in incredibly important ways, that's local news. -
Mark Caro How much of a factor is it that journalism has been under attack so publicly over the past six years? We had a president saying journalists are the enemy of the people, and various polls show that people distrust news outlets. Does that create more urgency for this effort?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman I think there's nuance to that, because even in the Knight [Foundation] poll that just came out, people's trust in news is pretty horrifically low. [Twenty-six percent] of folks said that they trusted the news, but the trust in local news trends much, much higher than news broadly…. There is still bipartisan support for many of these policies. There's a state bill in Wisconsin that has 14 Republicans on it. And the Local Journalism Sustainability Act was bipartisan in the House.
Anna Brugman
I think polarization certainly creates a greater urgency for policy solutions that address the health of communities….But I think it's things like news deserts, like disinformation, like declining media literacy, like lack of civic awareness, those things create a greater sense of urgency than rhetoric. -
Mark Caro In some local news deserts, you've had “pink slime” sites popping up, these fake local newspapers that often are far-right propaganda. So when local sites or publications go away, then what fills the vacuum is often stuff that is not journalism but looks like journalism.
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman I think that speaks to, again, that greater trust that folks have in local news. The actors that are intentionally seeking to undermine credible information are not mimicking national news. They're mimicking local news, because I think folks are implicitly aware that somebody is more likely to trust something that looks like their hometown paper than something that looks just like national information.
Anna Brugman
We do keep our eyes very closely on “pink slime” trends. [We must not] pass policies that fund folks like that, that create a siphon of resources to the very actors that are increasing the polarization and the lack of credible information in really vulnerable areas. -
Mark Caro Where's the sweet spot where there’s enough support from the government for local news but not so much that it has an influence on the journalism?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman There are two perspectives of that: There's the government side, and then there's, of course, the newsroom side. On the government side, you create firewalls, and we have a good example of how a firewall works with CPB. Corporation for Public Broadcasting has withstood many attempts to zero out funding, and there are lots of valid criticisms about its programming and how it's functioned over the last 60-70 years, but it's still there.
Anna Brugman
How do we make a formula that describes how journalistic ethics manifest in business models? We're not going to describe what journalism is because that's getting into dangerous territory. But we know that if you're creating journalism, then you're probably transparent about who your owner is. And we know that if you're making journalism, you probably hire journalists. And we know that if you're doing local journalism, those journalists probably live within a certain radius of their coverage area. And we know that you probably don't take money from PACs, and you're probably not owned by a PAC….And so we can think really creatively about how credible journalistic organizations are likely to be financially set up according to our journalistic ethics. That sets up not human firewalls but formula-based firewalls that are not describing what journalism is by content, that doesn't make any newsroom beholden to a particular type of content or perspective, but it does describe what is likely happening on the business side if you do credible journalism.
The other piece of that puzzle is thinking about how to develop sustainable financial-side solutions outside of public policy. Where public policy becomes quite dangerous is when it becomes the foundation by which newsrooms fund their operations. That's what can create a sense of beholdenness to a government body. So we want to make sure that we're also thinking about developing local philanthropy and equipping news organizations with a more diversified set of skills to fund their journalism, whether that be membership drives or different subscription models or events, thinking more creatively about how you fund journalism and diversifying that.
[Victor Pickard’s] Democracy Without Journalism describes how there's very little skepticism paid to entirely advertising-based models, but we saw how entirely advertising-based models play out when there's a global pandemic, and advertising totally dries up. I talked to publishers who lost 90% of their advertising revenue, and that's not really a sustainable way to provide a public service during a public catastrophe. -
Mark Caro So the government is not the solution but one of a diversity of solutions.
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman None of these solutions is the solution. It's going to probably be really boring public policies and behavior changes and capacity building and local philanthropy that come in and create a better foundation for local news than the one we've had.
Anna Brugman -
Mark Caro In the early ‘90s I remember reading a description of print journalism as the most profitable legal business in America. It's been such a dramatic shift since then given the internet and other factors and most recently the pandemic. Is the speed of that shift part of what makes it difficult to get the industry used to the idea that it should be publicly supported? It had been publicly supported in the past, but maybe they forgot about that because they were raking it in for a while?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman (Laughs) I feel like that should be a question to ask like a panel of journalism historians, which I am not. But I also speak from a very particular generational perspective. I graduated from journalism school the first time [as a University of Missouri undergraduate] in 2016. The industry was already tanking. I already knew that I was entering a field that was not doing great. I have a couple of good friends who graduated from J school about the same time, and we always kind of joke that it takes a particular kind of hubris to enter journalism after the Year of Our Lord 2010.
Anna Brugman
I will say public policy was never taught, and it was never framed in the history of journalism. What I learned a lot about was the commercialization of journalism. So there might be something to that. Broadcast was always regulated. Print and digital folks were going to need public subsidies or public policy. I'm 29, and I've entered a crumbling industry, and maybe that's why it didn't seem like a terribly radical idea to several of my peers that public policy should enter as a potential solution—because there was never a commercial path. -
Mark Caro You’ve talked about this long history of how journalism was publicly supported, yet I don't think that's something most people know.
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman I don't think it's in the mainstream way that we frame what our industry is, and our industry doesn't exist in some sort of sub-government vacuum. We exist in the framework of a democracy—and in the framework of a democracy, if you're doing a public service, then there are likely policies guiding the ways that you do that service. Newspaper boxes on street corners were probably put there based on the purview of a city council or a county commissioner. Somebody asked, “Hey, can we put a box there? Can we sell papers there?” And probably somebody in government said yes. So that is policy that is a government decision that affects how information is distributed and consumed. And we have historically acted like that's ambient, outside of us.
Anna Brugman -
Mark Caro If you could map out like the next five years of the work you’re doing and where the industry goes, how would you like to see this all evolve?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman We have a very granular document that we call The Plan, which sounds very maniacal, but it's actually—
Anna Brugman -
Mark Caro Is it capital P, The Plan?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman (laughing) Yeah, it's capital T, capital P, The Plan. Very maniacal, but it's just a policy framework that represents a lot of negotiation discussion among the 17 or so original members of the Rebuild Local News coalition. It's everything from tax credits to making it easier to become a nonprofit newsroom to tax and grant incentives to maintain or restore local ownership for newspapers. It's student loan forgiveness for local journalists. It's pipeline programs.
Anna Brugman
There's no one policy that's going to be like a bull's-eye on the dartboard, and we have no more problems. Like even if we pass the payroll tax credit, which I do think would be a transformative boon for the entire industry, that still wouldn't be a silver-bullet solution. But when you think about all those things layered on top of each other—an alternative approach to antitrust regulation at the federal level and a payroll tax cut at a state level and then another payroll tax credit at a federal level and an advertising-boost program in some key cities—you would have a much stronger safety net. You would also be able to capitalize on all of that public funding in the private sector. -
Mark Caro Do you think there's enough support for this from a population that appreciates local news but is down on journalism?
Mark Caro -
Anna Brugman That's kind of on us as a field to explain and earn that support. I think from the news fields, certainly, we have to present our solutions in a way that win support, and we have to be responsible and intellectually honest in the solutions that we're presenting from an audience perspective. I think for a very long time journalism—broadly, not just local journalism—kind of rested on all this ambient trust in the air, and we didn't really feel like we had to earn it. We didn't really feel like we had to explain the value that we offered communities.
Anna Brugman
Some of that relates to what some would call objectivity, like we're not the story. Putting ourselves in the story is the wrong way to go about journalism—I think there's always kind of like an allergic reaction to that. But I think that in the past 10 years, certainly the last 20 years, we've had to do more of that, and I think we need to do more of that. People are not going to say, “Of course, we should probably support local journalism” if they don't understand the value that local journalism adds to communities. And part of that is on both the field broadly but also individual publications to prove their value to their communities—and be responsible to their communities and do their best to improve their coverage and increase the conversations they have with their audience.
I do think there's a massive overlap here in the Venn diagram between audience trust and public funding for local journalism. People are not going to want to fund something they don't understand the value of. We have to explain our value, and we actually have to offer value, which means knowing what your community needs and wants and doing it better.