Philanthropists, including local foundations, backing rural journalism collaboration in Mountain West - Entrepreneur Generations

As traditional news revenue sources wane, philanthropists are showing increasing interest in funding local journalism. "But media philanthropy, like most everything else about media, is still largely centered on the coasts and in major metropolitan area," Christine Schmidt reports for Harvard University's Nieman Lab. "A handful of local foundations (along with Report for America and Solutions Journalism Network) are now upping their commitment for a journalism collaboration across the Mountain West, a.k.a. where those Rockies go from Montana and Idaho down to New Mexico — focusing especially on rural issues and Native American stories."

The group has committed $660,000 for a one-year initiative to expand SJN's local engagement training in newsrooms and hire seven Report for America journalists. The collaboration began with a 2015 survey LOR and SJN conducted of Mountain West residents; only 20% of respondents deemed local news "consistently relevant and valuable," Schmidt reports.

In 2016 LOR and SJN launched a pilot between seven New Mexico and Colorado newsrooms, and in 2017 shifted and expanded it to 12 newsrooms each in New Mexico and Montana. Over three years the two organizations built partnerships with 50 newsrooms, but kept finding there weren't enough reporters for in-depth local news coverage. Other foundations got involved, culimating in this year's $660,000 commitment, Schmidt reports.

Some of the foundations are local, which SJN president Keith Hammonds says could bode well the project and future ones like it. "I think it’s incredibly important that local and regional foundations see the importance of local media as part of the infrastructure of civic life in their communities and also see the indelible importance, the relationship between high quality local reporting and the rest of civic life they are funding," Hammonds told Schmidt. "Whatever a foundation’s local interests are, it cannot advance without the free flow of quality info that keeps businesses informed engaged and activated. I think that that piece of this may be the most critical of all."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2Wk8qr7 Philanthropists, including local foundations, backing rural journalism collaboration in Mountain West - Entrepreneur Generations

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