Media Impact Funders has published “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale,” a new analysis by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, PhD, examining the structural constraints shaping the future of local journalism.

The report draws on nearly 560 applications submitted to Press Forward’s nationwide infrastructure open call, offering one of the most comprehensive practitioner-defined datasets on the infrastructure needs of local journalism to date. Rather than focusing on individual organizations, the analysis examines patterns across the field to identify where infrastructure is underbuilt, fragmented, or failing to support scale, coordination and long-term sustainability.

Taken together, these applications provide a rare aggregated signal from across the local news ecosystem, revealing shared challenges around operational capacity, revenue development, collaboration, and shared systems. The findings invite funders and field leaders to reconsider assumptions about sustainability and to explore what more coordinated, system-level investment may require.

Context for Rebuilding Local Journalism Infrastructure: A Field-Level Snapshot

The dataset analyzed in this report emerged from Press Forward’s nationwide infrastructure open call, which invited organizations to propose solutions addressing persistent challenges facing local newsrooms, including revenue generation, internal operations, human resources and audience growth.

Press Forward received 559 letters of interest from organizations across the country, providing a rare window into how local news leaders themselves describe the barriers they face and the solutions they believe are needed.

As Press Forward Executive Director Dale Anglin writes, the applications provide a field-wide snapshot of the barriers facing local journalism, and represent something unusual for the field: a collective snapshot of the systems challenges shaping local journalism. Examined together, they reveal that many of the most significant threats to local news are not isolated newsroom-level problems, but ecosystem-level infrastructure challenges.

Recognizing the value of this dataset, Arnold Ventures commissioned an independent analysis by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, which Media Impact Funders is publishing here to help inform philanthropic strategy and support deeper coordination across the field.

Read the full article about rebuilding local journalism infrastructure at Media Impact Funders.