Effort to raise $1 billion for local news, which just got past $500 million, says it will raise the rest of it at the local level

When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation recruited the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other major philanthropies to a campaign to raise money to reinvigorate local news, their hope was that they could get pledges for $1 billion over the next five years. They raised more than $500 million, but their reach exceeded their grasp. Now Press Forward is going local.

“Our goal is to raise the next $500 million at the local level,” MacArthur President John Palfrey said in a press release Friday. “For local news to be sustainable over the long term, communities will need to stand up and support their local news providers. We will need to invest in local news the same way that we invest in arts and culture, hospitals, or our alma maters. We are building a movement.”

Press Forward announced its first local chapters in Alaska, Minnesota, Kansas, Philadelphia and Springfield, Illinois. Palfrey wrote about the effort in The Atlantic, which gave his piece a pithy headline: "We’re making a $500 million investment. The other half is up to you."

He wrote, “Democracy in America is in crisis. The dramatic decline of local news is a major part of this crisis, and there are great ideas and organizations to fund, across all 50 states, to address it. These models include public media operations, nonprofit media start-ups, and for-profit companies. They include television, radio, and digital-only outlets as well as intriguing combinations of all three.”

Most of those efforts have focused on urban areas, but the National Trust for Local News is expanding its rural footprint, and plans to buy more existing media outlets, which is sees as the only way to accomploish a broad rescue of journalism in rural America.

In Press Forward's identification of three types of local ecosystems -- flouishing, expanding and nascent -- rural America's place was clear: “Too many Americans live in news deserts, in communities at risk of becoming news deserts, or in places where existing news sources are struggling to meet the information needs of audiences. In some of these places, a donor or group of donors are coming together to support local news and information for the first time.” Those include the Press Forward chapters in Alaska, Minnesota and Springfield, Ill.

Press Forward said its national donors will announce the first round of grantmaking in December, and issue grantmaking guidelines early next year. To express interest in forming a chapter, go here.