BINJ would like to work with fellow journalists and allied organizations to convince our state legislature to give it a shot
When you’re a journalist, as I regularly tell the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism’s “legion of interns,” you have to consume a lot of news every day if you want to keep your edge and continually improve your work. So yesterday morning, like every morning, I was busily checking out what was happening around Massachusetts and beyond when I came upon what looked like a Worcester Telegram article at first glance. But reading just under the headline I saw that it was a “USA Today Network – New England” story.
Now a non-journalist wouldn’t notice that info, but here’s what it means: the Worcester Telegram is owned by the huge media conglomerate Gannett (itself owned by other companies, not coincidentally), as is the national news outlet USA Today. But the USA Today Network is not a news service like the Associated Press, it is a marketing service. And businesses that can afford that service can get what amount to press releases placed as news in as many Gannett news outlets as they wish, whenever they wish—and a host of related attention-getting offerings besides.
The article in question was titled “Best One Bite Pizza Reviews of July 2025: Top 3 spots Dave Portnoy ranked in MA.” I wouldn’t hazard to guess what Portnoy’s robust media operation may or may not be up to with Gannett’s marketing wing at this juncture, but the story itself is a fine example of why news publishers like BINJ have joined with media scholars and reformers in declaring a crisis in local news.
Because hundreds of once-independent local and regional news outlets have been bought up by Gannett alone in the last 30 years across the US. Gannett (and other large media companies doing the same thing) have then shut down many of those news properties outright, merged many of the rest into each other, laid off most of the reporting staff in their employ, and filled the resulting “zombie outlets,” as they have come to be called, with non-news of various types … a lazy pizza-themed fluff piece that could be marketing copy in the guise of news included. All to squeeze every last drop of profit out of those publications before ultimately casting them aside and moving on to more profitable new media ventures.
Which has turned the communities that many of these zombie outlets now purport to serve into “news deserts”—locales that no longer have professional reporters covering them in the public interest. Thanks to an accelerating process of “media consolidation” that has led journalists like my partners and I to found news organizations like BINJ over the last 20 years to attempt to fill the ever-expanding void in local and regional coverage thus created.
But media consolidation is not the only force ripping apart local, regional, and now national news organizations. The rise of the Internet itself has destroyed both the commercial and nonprofit economic models that made it possible for news outlets to raise enough money to survive and thrive heretofore.
Leaving the dwindling number of independent news publishers like BINJ scrambling to find a new economic model to replace the failing older ones before we also go broke. Problem is, the Silicon Valley giants and the billionaires that own them are now so powerful that they are able to block and/or destroy every avenue that most news outlets might conceivably use to raise funds. Up to and including encouraging us to bring our audiences to their social media platforms and then forcing us to pay to reach them once that’s done—which most of us cannot afford to do.
However, there is one economic path less travelled that might help independent news outlets at the local and regional level stay in business: public funding. That is, money from the government. Not the place that indy journalists have traditionally looked to for assistance in this most capitalist of nations, true. And there are very real dangers that have kept us from “crossing the streams” of government and journalism. Like the possibility that a government that provides money to news organizations might decide that they need to start running government propaganda on command. Something that has worked out very poorly for the people of countries that have had that arrangement forced on them.
Fortunately, there is a long tradition of public grantmaking in the US, notably for the arts and the humanities. The model is well-established: Government sets up independent or quasi-independent agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, provides funds to them, and leaves it to their independent boards to give grants in their areas of endeavor. This provides a good firewall between the government and grantees and minimizes the risk of publicly-funded works of art, scholarship, or, until this very year, journalism, turning into government propaganda.
Unfortunately, this is the worst time in the last century to try to get public grants from the federal government, particularly media-related grants. With the conservative Trump administration on the verge of wiping out most federal funding for the main public media networks in this country, PBS and NPR, I would certainly not suggest that it was a good idea to try to get it to start funding journalism for at least the next year and a half when we see how the midterm elections play out.
But many state governments still have considerable leeway for maneuver. And efforts to get public grants for independent journalism have been underway across the country for nearly a decade.
Our colleagues at the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium are the furthest along with such efforts and have managed to win bipartisan consensus in their state legislature to get $12 million plus allocated in the last few years. Funds that the consortium’s independent board has been able to grant to over 65 news and civic information organizations (basically any group that provides people with info they need to be free and self-governing) around its state.
One of the key players helping organize the consortium and win ongoing fiscal support from NJ state government ($2.5 million for the coming year alone) has been the national media reform organization Free Press. A group BINJ has worked with on a variety of journalism- and media-related policy projects—especially in getting the Mass journalism commission law passed in January 2021, basically derailed by pandemic chaos though it ultimately was.
Massachusetts has a Democratic government that is trying to push against the federal political tide and keep up some semblance of public investment through the second Trump era.
So, we think it’s the perfect time for BINJ to do our best to help mobilize local and regional news outlets on the economic ropes in the Bay State to push the Mass legislature to start providing funding for our own statewide independent consortium that can then give grants to independent news outlets and civic information projects the way that the NJ Civic Information Consortium has been doing successfully for the last few years.
We can also join colleagues in New Jersey and several other states that are working with Free Press’ journalism policy network Media Power Collaborative to go much further toward solving the economic crisis faced by independent news outlets like ours around the US by trying to win a 1% tax on the advertising revenues of corporate giants at the state level. That would provide tens of millions of dollars a year that would go a long way toward reviving the fortunes of our failing Fourth Estate hereabouts from Provincetown to Pittsfield. An even tougher lift than getting a Mass civic information consortium established, but a critical one nonetheless.
Time is of the essence and these ideas are speculative at the moment, but BINJ is definitely interested in working with fellow news outlets, Free Press, and allied organizations of all kinds to make them a reality. We will just have to see if the Mass legislature is interested, too.
This editorial was produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
