The Local News Field Has a Coordination Problem. Place-Based Backbones Can Help Fix It.
Photo by Edward Lawrence via Unsplash
My first reporting job was at GothamSchools, an education news startup covering New York City's K-12 schools. Just before I joined, GothamSchools was in talks with a similar education news site called EdNews Colorado. Their hypothesis? If they joined forces, shared back office, revenue and other types of operational and financial support, they could invest in place-based reporters to ensure the editorial content was responsive to local communities' information needs. Chalkbeat is now in eight locations around the country, and today, many other newsrooms are experimenting with "multi-local" or "network" models.
The foundational question of this model is: What can be scaled and what must be bespoke to serve the needs of a community? As the local news field debates this question for newsrooms, I'm curious how we might apply this line of inquiry to the local news support organizations that make up the infrastructure of local news.
The Journalism Support Exchange (JSX) has identified over 360 support organizations that provide some type of program, service and/or tool tailored for local news providers. The vast majority are national in scope, meaning they serve newsrooms anywhere in the United States. It makes sense for many of these organizations to scale their offerings nationally — but the field has a coordination and redundancy problem, not just a scale problem. A new field-level analysis of 559 proposals submitted to the Press Forward Infrastructure Open Call found that overlap among support organizations appears less as intentional duplication than as a byproduct of fragmented funding, diffuse field priorities, and limited coordination. The issue isn't the existence of national organizations — it's the absence of differentiation and alignment between them, and the near-total lack of place-based counterparts that can do what national organizations structurally cannot.
Having worked at a national support organization, I can tell you that it's impossible to serve every newsroom's individual needs. It's a capacity issue, but also an expertise issue — some support is more effective when received from people and organizations who are more intimately familiar with the geographically-based communities local news providers are serving. The Press Forward analysis reinforces this: Place-based collaboration was among the most commonly cited infrastructure needs across the entire proposal pool, with applicants consistently describing geographies where outlets operate in isolation, lack shared editorial and engagement infrastructure, and are unable to sustain accountability reporting at the scale their communities require.
I believe we should be investing more dollars into national support organizations with offerings that scale well — while also significantly increasing investment in place-based backbone institutions that can respond to the specific needs of local news and information providers. But this shift needs to be designed carefully. The research is clear that place-based infrastructure only reduces fragility under specific conditions: sufficient capitalization, a clear integration strategy, and meaningful reductions in duplicated systems. Simply redirecting funding locally without those design conditions won't solve the underlying problem.
Democracy Fund defines backbone institutions as organizations with “deep relationships across the ecosystem” that coordinate training, networking, and funding support. I think of backbones as the ultimate air traffic controller, critical to achieving collective impact. They can identify gaps in infrastructure for local news and information providers in their state, survey existing resources locally and nationally, and then coordinate resources to fill those gaps.
The case for investing in these institutions is also, fundamentally, a geographic equity argument. New nonprofit journalism outlets have clustered disproportionately in major metropolitan areas — which happen to be where philanthropic capital is concentrated. This means the communities most likely to need ongoing support to sustain local news are often the least likely to have access to it. Place-based backbone institutions, particularly those operating at the state and regional level, are one of the few mechanisms that can correct this — not just as an efficiency strategy, but as a precondition for geographic equity in civic life.
What this looks like in practice: an experiment in Washington state
I'm not just arguing for this model in the abstract — I'm trying to build it.
Starting last year, I collaborated with a couple of colleagues on a side project called Fresh Ground, a newsletter for people who care about reliable news and information in Washington. Earlier this year, we received a grant from the Washington News Fund, the Press Forward chapter for Washington, to pilot a new effort: the Washington State News Alliance (WSNA).
The WSNA builds on the work of Fresh Ground to coordinate people, funding, and resources in support of a strong, equitable local news ecosystem in Washington. We're designing the Alliance as a peer-led collaborative, meaning this work will be shaped and carried out by a broad group of participants from across the state. Over the next year, with the guidance of our Steering Committee and partners, we'll experiment with three initiatives to lay the groundwork for a broader coalition of people supporting local news:
Grow the Fresh Ground newsletter. Fresh Ground will continue to publish and curate stories about local news in Washington with an eye toward more original reporting and analysis from contributors across the state. Our goal is to grow and diversify our readership, reaching people outside of the journalism field who want to plug in to efforts to support local news.
Host a statewide local news convening. Next month we’re hosting a convening in Yakima, WA that will include people from newsrooms, educational institutions, civic organizations, local government, and other supporters of local news. Our goal is to identify a common vision and shared priorities — exactly the kind of cross-sector coalition building that backbone institutions are uniquely positioned to do.
Launch a Policy Working Group. Given recent momentum for legislation that supports local news, and efforts like SB 5400 that have laid the groundwork for supporting local news as a public good, we will explore WSNA’s role in supporting these efforts through a working group reflective of the broader coalition we aim to build.
Washington is a useful test case for this model precisely because of its geographic diversity — from dense urban centers in the Puget Sound region to rural communities east of the Cascades that face a high information need, limited philanthropic capital, and fewer coordinating institutions to bridge the gap.
It’s important to note that we’re structuring this as a pilot project, not an organization or even a fiscally-sponsored project— both of which would have required a lot more paperwork and overhead for something that we aren’t even sure is needed yet. It may turn out that this needs to be a standalone entity or that it could live within the Washington News Fund. What's most important to us is ensuring every dollar effectively supports local news providers. We want this to feel impactful and valuable to the people doing the work across our state.
The backbone institutions that have inspired our work in Washington
I’ve learned, and continue to learn, so much from the local news backbone institutions who have been doing this work for years. Examples include NJ’s Center for Cooperative Media and New Jersey Civic Information Consortium; CO’s the Colorado Media Project and COLab; the New Mexico Local News Fund; and the NC Local News Fund Lab and NC Local. Research shows that all of them have helped contribute to strong local news and information ecosystems.
Backbones shouldn't look exactly the same in each state. But all backbones could commit to a set of local field-building practices that we know strengthen local news infrastructure:
Information needs assessment and other local field research
In-person and digital convenings that inspire camaraderie and peer learning
Cross-sector coalition building
Leveraging existing place-based support
Identifying gaps in infrastructure
Filling infrastructure gaps by localizing national resources
There are existing groups that could serve as backbones, including Press Forward Locals, of which there are 44 in 34 states. We can build on what exists — while being intentional about capitalization, coordination, and design — to strengthen local field-building practices that we know work.
Across the country, more people are realizing that to strengthen local democracy, they need to engage locally. The trend of the past decade has been building national movements and national efforts. A growing body of research confirms what many practitioners have long felt: that trend meets this moment least. By setting standards for and doubling down on place-based local news infrastructure — designed well and funded adequately — we can ensure local news providers get the specific resources they need, and work directly with local residents, organizers, and institutions to champion local news as a critical piece of well-functioning local democracies.
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Anika Anand is a cofounder of the Washington State News Alliance and a cofounder/partner of Commoner Co.
