Giving Compass' Take:

• With funding from the Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Ford Foundation,  CUNY’s Center for Community Media can expand from NYC to serve news organizations in communities of color and immigrant communities. 

• What impact will this expansion have on communities? Why is it crucial to publish different voices? 

•  Read how local news outlets can fill the media trust gap. 

Community news outlets around the country scored a win today: CUNY’s Center for Community Media announced it is expanding from its New York City base to serve news organizations in communities of color and immigrant communities across the country.

The center, based at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY (full disclosure: my alma mater), is doing so with $1.45 million: $900,000 from the Knight Foundation, $400,000 from the Democracy Fund, and $150,000 from the Ford Foundation. It’ll use that money to scale up its services, like providing outlets resources, tools, and opportunities for networking to help their publications survive and thrive during a rough time for all local news.

CCM, founded in 2012, used to be named the Center for Community and Ethnic Media. It also used to publish Voices of New York, a site that highlighted the best of the city’s community and ethnic media (it’s now operated by City Limits) and put on the now-defunct Ippies to honor reporting in ethnic communities.

“We decided to take all the lessons learned in New York and bring them to a national scale, and offer resources and skills and trainings to these outlets that are struggling with the same issues as everyone else,” said Graciela Mochkofsky, CCM’s executive director and a 2009 Nieman Fellow. “But they have less resources, they’ve been marginalized by mainstream media, and don’t necessarily have access to the same conversations that mainstream media editors and publishers have.”

The Knight Foundation’s contribution is part of its larger $300 million commitment to rebuild the future of local news over the next five years. “Trust is the No. 1 value that these news organizations have,” said Knight director for journalism LaSharah Bunting.

Read the full article about community media by Hanaa' Tameez at NiemanLab.