Last summer, Press Forward made almost $23 million in grants to 22 organizations aimed at bolstering the infrastructure for local news. The grants by this local news funder were the culmination of a request for proposals process that began accepting applications in November 2024, and elicited 559 proposals.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, with support from Arnold Ventures (disclosure: an occasional consulting client of mine), was given the opportunity to review in depth all of those proposals, and has prepared a provocative and thoughtful report, entitled “Rebuilding local journalism at scale: A field-level analysis of infrastructure needs,” which is beginning to circulate in the industry for local news funders, and will be published next week by Media Impact Funders. (I’ll add a link here, and revise the wording of the previous sentence when that happens.) She generously agreed to talk with me ahead of the report’s formal publication.

Hansen Shapiro was the cofounder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News (for which I also did some consulting) from 2020 until February of last year. She has had research postings at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and sociology from Harvard Business School. Our conversation about local news funders, which took place earlier this week, has been edited for length and clarity.

RICHARD TOFEL: Thank you for doing this. My sense is that you say in your report about local news funders that people trying to build infrastructure need to distinguish between efforts that promote newsroom-based solutions, often focused on training and otherwise helping people individually, and field-based solutions — and that they ought to favor field-based solutions. Do I have that right? And if so, why do you feel that way?

ELIZABETH HANSEN SHAPIRO: You have that exactly right. I feel like we’re coming to the end of a period where there’s been a lot of philanthropically funded individual experimentation in newsrooms, lots of new newsrooms, lots of attempts to solve this problem of collapsing local journalism by local news funders. Some of those solutions have achieved some level of scale. Some have not. I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way for local news funders to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.

Read the full article about local news funders scaling up infrastructure solutions by Richard Tofel and Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro at Nieman Journalism Lab.