 Good afternoon and hello everyone and welcome to the 19th edition of Informed and Engaged. At Knight Foundation we believe that our democracy depends on highly informed people so that they may engage in their communities. Unfortunately in recent years we've seen the spread of misinformation and disinformation create chaos and confusion and as the traditional business model for newspapers has declined and newsrooms across the country have been so diminished we find that misinformation and disinformation is filling that vacuum. So yesterday we saw the impact of a highly uninformed group of people storm the capital. That is not the level of engagement that promotes democracy. So one of the biggest weapons we have to fight misinformation and disinformation is accurate information and filling the void in cities and towns across the country are inspiring leaders who are producing new models and new methods to fill the critical gaps in local original reporting and local news and information. So one of the best opportunities we have to create a highly informed community to battle misinformation is with accurate non-partisan journalism and equitable and inclusive community news and information. So please join me today in welcoming three tremendous leaders who are leading organizations and programs that are making a really big difference on the local media landscape and what they're going to do today is tell us what were some of the largest and most important achievements in the last year but really this program is a look at head. It will offer hope and optimism and inspiration. So please join me in welcoming Courtney Hurt who has formerly had a business operations at WDET in Detroit and the field was so lucky to persuade Courtney to take over news match which is a matching gifts program that is run by the Institute for not-for-profit news and led by Courtney that provides matching gifts to more than 250 not-for-profit news organizations across the country. It helps them with their end of the year campaign which just closed a week ago and it helps these organizations build the capability and capacity so that they can get on the path to sustainability. Also joining our conversation today is Sarah Beth Berman. Sarah Beth is the new CEO of the American Journalism Project which is a venture capital organization, a philanthropic venture capital organization that is bringing a whole new approach to inspiring and driving success and sustainability for not-for-profit news across the country. What the field of journalism is so lucky to get in Sarah Beth is 10 years experience in the not-for-profit sector most recently leading global affairs for Teach for All so what Sarah Beth has been able to do in a very short time having just joined the American Journalism Project in May is bring much needed expertise of the non-profit sector to the field of journalism and finally we have Chris Gruson who leads Lion Publishers and what we know about the future of journalism is that there's not a silver bullet, there's not a magic bullet, it's a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit news organizations in different methods and practices that is what we need to ensure that communities will be well informed so that they can be engaged in their communities and Chris is going to tell us about the tremendous progress that Lion members have made in the last year and what's ahead but first let's begin with Courtney. So Courtney just a week ago the news match campaign finished up it's 2020 end of the year campaign. My goodness we had 195 news organizations participating in a year ago and this year there were more than 250. I know it's too early that we're still counting up the impact that news match has but what can you tell us about this year's campaign? Yeah certainly so I'm so excited to be here and kind of amplify the work that newsrooms are doing nonprofit newsrooms are doing around the country. Jennifer to your point you know the news match 2020 campaign just ended but you know throughout the entire campaign we've been in touch with newsrooms to monitor how they're how they're going. I think it's important to just level set the newsrooms we serve through news match so the Institute of Nonprofit News we represent more than 300 nonpartisan news organizations they're all required to abide by a set of editorial independent standards a set of ethics and financial transparency. The news match program they fundraise for the year in campaign you know by raising money that is then matched by funders. It's really exciting to see particularly emerging newsrooms that were actually founded in recent years to fill information gaps to fill voids in their targeting at serving or audiences that are traditionally underserved people of color immigrants who are vulnerable to misinformation and I like to kind of talk about these organizations in business terms you know they're serving they're providing a news product for underserved markets and providing a news product where commercial news outlets might have either divested in or never invested in and they're very distinguished in that way um so I wanted to just speak to a few of them that we've seen some anecdotal success this year. The first is Sahan Journal. Sahan Journal is a start-up media organization that provides hard-hitting news for immigrants in Minnesota and this is a growing population in that state. They led their first fundraising campaign through news match in 2019 just a few months after they launched there they were just getting their feet wet. This year they launched their second fundraising campaign and what they were able to do is leverage news match as a way to actually secure additional matches from local funders. We provide a pot of money that matches gifts but they were able to actually raise 40,000 more from local foundations. Just on New Year's Eve just to speak to kind of the work that they do you know just on New Year's Eve there was a situation that happened with a Somali a resident in Minneapolis and the police raided this young man's home. He was previously actually fatally shot at a stop in Minneapolis and then afterwards they raided his home and because the news outlet had relationships with the Somali community they were able to quickly get in touch with the family immediately after it happened report on the story which resulted in officials releasing the body cam footage and this is the type of work that these organizations are doing and they're using news match to really learn how to sustain this type of work. I'll give one more example and then pass it on but another one is outlier media they're a text-based media outlet and connect they connect one-on-one with residents in Detroit to provide news and information and since April they've been in touch with more than they responded to more than 8,000 text messages with the staff of three editorial reporters and what we learned through this year's news campaign news match campaign with them is that while we can provide the templates for mass email appeals that work for some traditional digital digital publications for them it's all about personal appeals from their staff so just learning the nuances and differences between different newsrooms and how they fundraise I feel like has been a great advantage to this year's campaign and I know Courtney will hear later about your vision for the next chapter of news match because what makes it so effective is that news leaders and not-for-profit leaders spend much of the year learning to hone their audience development skills and their efforts to build individual donors thank you so much Sarah bet so at American at the American Journalism Project when you look ahead when you look at the challenges that that that we all face as original reporting has vanished as equitable and inclusive community news and information is not always provided and amid the swirl of misinformation and you wrote recently in an op-ed for the LA Times about your concern about the rise in more than 1500 websites masquerading as local news why is it so important why is the American Journalism Projects just so important right now thanks Jennifer yeah as you say we are living in a moment where we are seeing a very dark landscape for local news and the cascading implications on our democracy and our community and the for those of us who are firm optimists we have a really strong chance to take a swing at this problem and that is to try to beat back the proliferation of disinformation with trusted local journalism that is rooted in the values of anti-racism of engaging communities of providing deeply reported information and news to communities and so the American Journalism Project is using a venture philanthropy model which means we're pairing philanthropic investments with business planning coaching and capacity building to help a new generation of nonprofit newsrooms grow their revenue and set themselves up to be able to expand and grow into more and more communities Jennifer I'll speak to some of the organizations that I think are really giving us a sense of what's possible one example is Vermont Digger it's now the largest newsroom in Vermont last year when COVID-19 hit Vermont BT Digger really went into overdrive producing stories to keep Vermonters informed they produced daily coronavirus briefings a newsletter they created an essential services business directory they had a searchable FAQ they launched a series of Vermont remembrances to really cover all the people throughout Vermont that had died from the virus and at the end of October Senator Leahy highlighted Vermont Digger as being one of the reasons that Vermont has been so successful in controlling the spread of the virus because they really did provide consistent information that filled a void that beat back the disinformation and served Vermonters and and frankly this showed up in their revenue they last year was their best year in terms of major gifts and also in terms of membership another organization we're really excited about and I think gives a real sense of what's possible with nonprofit news in September in West Virginia we helped launch a new news organization called Mountain State Spotlight this was launched by some of the prominent journalists in West Virginia Ken Ward who had won a MacArthur Genius Award for his coverage of the human and environmental cops of coal Eric Eyre who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the opioid crisis in the state and Greg Moore their longtime editor of 27 years they left the Charleston Gazette Mail and launched a new nonprofit newsroom called Mountain State Spotlight by the time it launched in September it was already the second largest newsroom in West Virginia and when they launched they spoke to the fact that now is an incredibly important time and more important than ever to have an informed citizenry and I think if we needed any fresh evidence of the importance of an informed electorate you may have seen the reporting that yesterday one of the people that stormed the Capitol was a newly elected Republican state lawmaker from West Virginia so we and I will just say one on at the American Journalism Project we're really sort of focused and and frankly obsessed with the business model and so with Mountain State Spotlight a lot of people asked I understand how a nonprofit model can work really successfully in a place like Texas where the Texas Tribune has thrived and where there is an enormous amount of wealth and people who can support philanthropically and and the environment to create a news organization that can bring in lots of lines of revenue and a lot of people ask I get how it works there but how's it going to work in a place like West Virginia and what's been so fascinating is that our early evidence is that this model can really work in a place like West Virginia they are early days but we are seeing really good evidence that there is that there are people that will support from a major gifts from perspective they brought in a lot of reader revenue and they're setting themselves up to bring in the diversified revenue necessary to sustain their newsroom and keep West Virginians informed thank you Sarah Beth and Chris so you formally led Billy Penn as the editor in Philadelphia and you're able to bring that startup spirit and experience to lion publishers I think what would be helpful is for folks to first hear a little bit about lion publishers how it started what services lion publishers provide its members because it's quite it's just quite amazing how much progress has been made just recently and and the importance the importance that there's a mix of solutions and with lion publishers you have both for profit and not for profit news organizations yeah that's right thanks for thanks for bringing that up so so lion publishers has existed since 2012 it kind of grew out almost spontaneously in a grassroots fashion of publishers who had taken this step many of them right after the the economic recession that forced massive changes in newsrooms right before 2010 so we have members that have been publishing digitally since then publishing in pockets across the country our membership is a lot like I and then's membership and like a JP's membership there's actually a lot of overlap but the main difference is about 60 of our members are for profit that is not to say that they are wildly profitable it's you know for profit nonprofit is a tax status not a business model and what we've done at lion since I started you know lion had only ever had the resources for an executive director and had individual grant funded programs but we stabilized with a night foundation grant a few years ago that allowed us to hire a staff for the first time we went out and formed partnerships with the google news initiative and the facebook journalism project and the democracy fund which allowed us to doubled our membership we're more than 330 members from you know California to Connecticut with a handful in Canada actually and build on that peer learning system of sites helping each other what we did over the past year was organize a series of lion lessons which allows our members to kind of in like help each other launch a membership program or build an audience program talk about successful strategies around grants or build sponsorable verticals so just really kind of focusing on news as a small business we also partnered with the red lab at the Texas Tribune to launch something called the entrepreneur skill series which trained these publishers in everything from managing a budget to designing products with the audience in mind to building inclusive news businesses all of which we think is important so it's really an approach that focuses on identifying who potential founders are and enabling them with tools and technology to grow scalable businesses in their community that's not the same thing as kind of an out of town news model like you've seen the collapse of you know as the news industry changes so much and you know finally one of the things we did was really revamp our mission statement and our values as an association we did some work on this this past year you can see this on our site right now we have our 2020 annual report up and and really the independent media whether for-profit or non is the key to this we think that businesses that have a face in their community and are accessible to that community and are accountable to that community really should help at the grassroots for for some of this kind of plague of misinformation that we've seen pushed out centrally and promulgated across people's social networks that the remedy to that is in no small part locally owned media supported by and built around the needs of a community and so some of the work we're doing at Lyon now and partnering with others to do especially a new project with news catalysts called the tiny news collective is to try to lure out more founders and founders to launch newsrooms in their communities with a centralized base of support and really begin to kind of it has a very kind of ambitious goal of launching 500 new newsrooms in the next three years if we make it cheap easy and and share the you know share the kind of experiences in a cohort based system we should be able to help solve some of this local news crisis using kind of shared resources to do that so there's a lot going on in the last it's been a busy year and a half I've spent here at Lyon bringing a team together and working with folks across the industry to try to make some of these changes and Chris before we go back to Courtney to talk about news match and the role that that Courtney sees for news match building the field there was quite a an impressive announcement by one of your members just a few weeks ago the Charlotte agenda and joining with Ted Williams joining Axios so and still it's still it's early days but the fact that we have a national digital player like Axios getting into the local news business and partnering and by purchasing the Charlotte agenda and by enlisting Ted Williams with his expertise and his experience to help launch more versions of the Charlotte agenda around the country tell me what what opportunity do you think there is for for communities with an Axios type type model and what are the limits frankly with an Axios type for community information yeah I think a lot of what we've heard about in the last maybe year or two has been the solidifying of the idea that non-profit is a very strong branch on which to build the future of the news business but I don't think it's it's limited to that you know Ted proved that with a relatively low overhead model and something that was you know a profitable newsletter business year-long agreements with sponsors these are all things that you know Ted came out of the business side of the the Charlotte newspaper that was owned by you know McCratchy at the time right and you know launched something in Raleigh early on and then pulled back you know he was an experimenter but ultimately it matched and aligned with what Axios was trying to do which was similar to what you know when Jim van de Hyde was working at Politico what they did when they acquired Capital New York before they turned that into a local branch of Politico before folding that into the whole organization so you know Ted was able to catch a wave that when you build a business as a for-profit you're able to build equity in that business and that equity might have value for someone else there are advantages to launching a for-profit newsroom it's faster to launch as an LLC and not form a board of directors and not wait for 501c3 status from the government but you could be on the hook for taxes right so it's a little more complicated to get grants you need to find a fiscal sponsor and things like that so there are different hoops to go through but at the end you could be acquired you could you know build equity in a business that someone else sees value in and invest in and find yourself part of another company which is an exit whether you're you know a newsroom or another private business that's a that's an end story that a small business owner is pretty familiar with so I think that it's a good upward trend story we've heard a lot of sort of negative news in the news industry and a lot of justified worry about the future of local news but small light low overhead high potential organizations can still be a source of you know acquisition for companies that are looking to grow it quickly and probably or in Axios's case didn't feel the need to repeat what someone else had already done and found it faster to to invest in what I already exist great thank you it sure is it sure is an inspiring story in Courtney tell us you shared like such wonderful examples when you describe the role of outlier media and the sahan journal what tell us about your vision for for news match in the coming year and for news match members because one of the most important things I think that you noted was that INN members abide by guidelines shared community guidelines and values a commitment to be independent to be transparent about their funding to use that transparency and high commitment to the highest ethics and standards to build trust in their communities so tell us how do you see the news match program moving forward yeah I think the future of news match you know the match component is really the tip of the iceberg of the program you know below the surface is an investment in knowledge and skills and talent development to really unlock that opportunity you know to capitalize on the opportunity of a matching gift campaign and I feel like the future of the program is double you know doubling down on that component of the program that capability building and capacity building within newsrooms to fundraise both for news match but really all year long I think that can happen in two ways one the program expanding to really cover the full arc of building a campaign strategy not just um and right now we have a lot of resources invested in implementing your campaign strategy but I think we need to expand on like what even is a campaign strategy who even is your target um how do you crunch your past performance in order to inform how you're gonna how you're gonna run the next year's campaign of the second opportunity kind of relates to what Sarah Beth mentioned earlier about their newsrooms that are taking new forms and have a new tone and new voice and the um some of the best practices of fundraising maybe for a digital publication might be different for these newsrooms that are really taking an innovative approach so you know the question is can news match expand and incentivize or accelerate some of that innovation when it comes around how they're fundraising I think that's going to be a huge opportunity and question to answer next year and I think more largely speaking in terms of iron and members you were mentioning about all the standards that they need to abide by another huge opportunity next year is really going to be about educating the public on why that matters um you know allowing there to be a campaign for people to realize what distinguishes these newsrooms from other sources of information and making it easy for people to find them um and discover discover quality news in in in their community so I feel like those that's kind of what's on the horizon for for news match next year thank you Courtney and again we're just so thrilled that you're in this role and leading the way thanks Sarah Beth uh again yesterday at the US Capitol we saw so many people clearly highly uninformed um four years ago we could blame Russian trolls for the spread of misinformation and disinformation but in recent years sadly it's been the president of the United States who has been spreading misinformation and disinformation and so many people sharing it on social media and consuming it on social media going back to to what you said about the importance of of local reporting um how how might and why is it like so important for communities for communities to have um what the American Journalism Project describes as as a ceo a community news organization and why is the not-for-profit model so important uh to build that trust and commitment in quality reporting and quality news and information at the local level thanks Jennifer I mean that's not what Courtney was just saying around really raising awareness about this issue you know for you and me and probably for most people tuning in the crisis in local news is something we are deeply aware but the reality is is that the vast majority of Americans more than two-thirds of Americans do not know that local news is in crisis so we have a job to play to really help people understand that there is a problem here and more importantly that there are promising solutions and the solution one of the solutions is going to involve a new social contract a belief that we as Americans need to uphold this public service that is a vital companion to us as citizens it's a tool that we need to be able to participate in our communities and so what that looks like practically from our perspective is we need to be at the national level really trying to build momentum and philanthropic support for helping set up a new generation of newsrooms that will build diverse revenue and provide their communities with news and information and at the local level we need organizations that can build a local movement can become what we've been using the term anchor newsrooms in their communities that can through engaging their communities and through providing them the original reporting that the communities are asking for and that they want they can establish themselves as really pillars of communities and we see that show up in revenue I mentioned vt digger earlier in the same year that they're having outsized impact in their reporting is also a year where they're having really great revenue because when people see your value they will support both philanthropically or as readers as members and from the perspective you Jennifer you asked about the non-profit model and why we think it's so important I mean from our perspective this is about looking nationally and saying how do we make sure that we have an informed citizenry how do we build a business model that can provide this vital service to communities and that's leading us to believe we need to find a business model that is sustainable and we believe that the path to a sustainable model is going to be through building community by community mixed revenue models of which philanthropy needs to play a big role but not the whole rule of course there are lots of different lines of revenue that these organizations should and can pursue events small dollar gifts advertising revenue but philanthropy can play a really big and important role and and we we see ourselves and others in this in this movement as trying to really set this as a philanthropic priority the fact is is that philanthropy has historically not funded journalism largely because they didn't need to because journalism was sustaining itself but now as we see as we saw yesterday the real implications of what happens when disinformation takes hold and polarization increases we need philanthropies to start saying this we want our communities to be informed and alongside our other philanthropic priorities we're going to prioritize journalism because that we know that that is foundational to our the other priorities that we have if we care about education we need to care about whether or not the local school board or charter boards are being covered and that's true for so many of the other issue philanthropic issues that we prioritize thank you sarah bet and we have several questions from twitter and from the chat from our audience and i'd like to um to uh turn to chris uh to answer um one of these um questions about about the role of media literacy and when you look at um at what your members are producing every day this is kind combination of two two questions should should the news media should local media be more engaged and involved in media literacy and helping consumers um understand the difference uh between what uh chris for example lion members are producing and those 1500 websites masquerading as as local news uh yeah i mean i think you know local publications that are part of lion or part of these other associations you know part of in and part of the ajp um hold themselves should hold themselves to to high professional standards uh should be transparent with their audiences about uh the news i think that the i in lion the independent part is is you can't understate how important it is for these sites to uh practice what they preach in terms of um you know telling stories uh for the community based on the needs of that community representative of that community um listening to that community's needs and providing you know not just news and information but a whole business plan around what the community needs um this year really for the first time in a pandemic especially uh one that the that has such a not trying to be politically here but i think it's easy to say it was a decentralized response um for the first time you can say local news you've always been able to say has been important for the civic health of the community but in a pandemic local news saves lives accurate local information we can say if we're pointing to a coronavirus outbreak if we're pointing to um a hotspot and uh local news is sometimes the only source of critical information for the actual public health in a community right so um especially in a time when um small businesses are hurting uh as much as anything else you know small businesses have traditionally been a key part of the business model for almost every kind of media and um you know prior to 2020 strategy that was pretty successful was based around events and where to go and what to do and then there was nowhere to go and nothing to do for long periods of time right so um it's been a learning experience uh uh uh to your to your point about the 1500 kind of pics live websites i think that it's definitely something to be aware of i think we at lyon have not seen any movement from places like that to try to become a member or infiltrate our associations we certainly are our application guidelines definitely draw some lines to try to keep that out and we approve every member you know by hand so we're not going to see any of those creeping under the banner of lyon and i'm sure it's the same with the other organizations um i'm not convinced how much audience those places actually have versus just ways to try to milk local politicians for for press release money um i but um you know our our you know local businesses with local owners are uh shop local read local you know by local it's it's one good message to support um your neighbors in efforts that are really aimed at civic health and public health so we only have a couple of minutes left and and we still have more questions in the chat so uh so what i'd like to do is to ask the question about about diversity um equity and and inclusion because as we all know um traditional mainstream media um uh Courtney as you um noted did not serve um all communities and you highlighted sahan journal and outlier media which has been in which two sites that which have done a really terrific job in in serving uh traditionally underrepresented communities so what what changes and responses and i'll just love just uh um everyone just to jump in here um have you seen in the field and what's different um and what has changed since the black lives matter movement i think that a lot of these organizations are distinguished in the trust that they have with those communities um and because of that they're able to honestly access perspectives and stories that and narratives that are actually hard for other outlets to to access because there's not a relationship or there is not trust i feel like um to sarah beth's point what's been the most encouraging to see is how they are becoming successful in sustaining this work and that um their work is very mission driven but it also is making sense in terms of their ability to fundraise and and and fund it um and i think that's really most exciting to see my and another example i didn't mention earlier but one that everyone should check out is prism um they're at our prism dot org but they were recently founded this year to honestly take to take the headlines and look at it from a perspective of people of color and um and indigenous people in america and immigrants in america and really be a voice and add a new narrative and perspective to headlines and so i think that the fact that we're seeing promise in their ability to fundraise and sustain really uh is kind of like a case in an incentive for others to either emerge in their community and for other and for legacy news organizations to sort of expand expand their reach thank you and what what efforts uh sarah beth and chris are you seeing uh your organizations take to to address the uh gaps in in diversity and serving underrepresented communities yeah at a at ajp as you know we're focused on building a next generation of newsrooms and as we think about that we are putting front and center the belief that we have the opportunity to build a new local news infrastructure that actually reflects and engages the diversity of the country and what that looks like is investing in leaders that are from historically marginalized communities and organizations that are focusing on serving audiences that are historically marginalized we just announced last month a new investment in a really promising organization called documented in new york city that is focused on serving immigrant communities in new york they've started with a spanish-speaking population they had a huge whatsapp channel where they're not just pushing information but hearing information and developing that ongoing feedback loop with their communities and they see a real opportunity to continue to expand that model and we've invested in them to help them do that into new community new immigrant communities across new york and so what what we're finding to be really promising is that i think this is at the top of our collective agenda we know that we need to hold ourselves to a much higher standard in terms of making sure that local news is not for some but genuinely is for all communities and all of participants in communities so um chris i'll hand this over to you i know you all have been thinking about this a lot as well we have thanks um especially through our work with the google news initiative on uh a program that we ran called uh the gni north america start-ups lab bootcamp where uh we helped sort of 24 new projects the vast majority of which were owned and operated by um by people of color uh in communities uh in need and um you know helping those founders and funders with support at that crucial early stage um is really uh work that we feel really proud of and and support that you know we think is going to make a difference in the long-term health of those um of those founders um we're actually uh excited to um talk about the second phase of that where we're going to help uh existing organizations with support including a certain amount of funding from the gni as well as a one-on-one coaching for those founders information about how people can apply for that program is online publishers dot com right now as well as gni startups lab dot com you can find information about uh if you're in a position of running one of these organizations and you need that kind of support we're actually looking to to fill up slots in that camp right now it's going to start um shortly and run through april i want to say um so yeah it's a it's a really exciting time at lyon to be able to provide this kind of of key support well thank you everyone for joining us today and thank you for just playing such key important leadership roles as together we are rebuilding the local media landscape in the same way that we can fight bad speech with good speech let's fight misinformation and disinformation with accurate non-partisan independent original reporting and community news and information thank you everyone thank you so much for joining us today and please join us everyone next week at the same time for discovery