Insights

Last week’s cascade of alarming news about all things COVID-19 reminded me of the last time I wondered if the world was coming apart, in the third quarter of 2008.

You are on a mission. You’re tired of hearing the bad news about local news and its deleterious effects on civic engagement and democracy: The layoffs, the cutbacks, the mergers and potential mergers of large newspaper chains. So now is your time to act, to launch a new local news outlet that will provide the coverage of your community that has bee

Elizabeth Green and I founded the American Journalism Project more than two years ago with the idea to build the first venture philanthropy focused on local news. We knew that the organization would require an exceptional leader who is also a strong operating executive.

During the American Journalism Project’s first few months, one focus of ours has been to understand what’s known and what’s not known about Civic News Organization revenue operations.

We shared in our newsletter on July 2 that we’ve invited our first set of proposals for investment and support. This week, we wanted to take a moment to share some of what we’ve learned in talking with more than 100 Civic News Organizations (CNOs) over the past few months, particularly as it relates to their revenue capacity needs.

Since the American Journalism Project launched earlier this year, we’ve had the privilege to talk with and learn from more than a hundred local civic news organizations, and recently joined many of them at the INN Days conference in Houston, where a record number of nonprofit news organizations gathered to share, learn and build connections.

Today we’re excited to share publicly the funding criteria of the American Journalism Project. Our goal is to be transparent about our intentions and goals, and to help organizations know when and how they can reach out to us to begin a conversation.

It’s a big day for us at AJP, as we formally unveil our ambition to build a first-of-its-kind venture philanthropy firm focused on local news. Below this note is an announcement that includes our founding investors, team, and board members.

My inbox is accustomed to cold pitches. I’ve been a reporter and editor for more than a decade. But starting a few years ago — and increasingly each and every month — I’ve been getting a new genre of email solicitation: the request for business coaching, from my fellow journalists.