Press Forward gave $20 million to 205 local newsrooms over two years. Here’s how some of them spent it.

Most local newsrooms in the U.S. have one thing in common: They need more money, and many dream of dollars they can use however they want.

In 2024, Press Forward, the nonprofit trying to mobilize a philanthropic army for local news, announced it would give at least 100 small local newsrooms — those with annual budgets under $1 million — just that type of unrestricted funding. Almost 1,000 newsrooms applied. Ultimately, Press Forward distributed $20 million to 205 outlets. Most of them received $100,000 each, split over two years.

I wondered what the recipients had done with the money, and which problems it had (or hadn’t) solved. Between May and October, I spoke or emailed with more than 30 grantees.

The grantees represented every U.S. state, came from cities, suburbs, and rural areas, and published in multiple languages. They included for-profits and nonprofits, print and digital-only publications, college newsrooms, and public radio stations. Statewide newsrooms with fully staffed teams like The Maine Monitor, scrappy news startups like 285 South, and community newspapers powered by freelancers and part-time staff like the Copper River Record in Alaska all received funding.

For many newsrooms, Press Forward was the first grant they’d ever applied for. “Many of the country’s newsrooms are small, and few get foundation grants,” said Press Forward executive director Dale Anglin. The open call was designed to change that and to distribute the money quickly. Grantees were required to complete two LION sustainability audits a year apart; Press Forward is analyzing that data now and will release its findings next month.¹

“People tell me that what Press Forward did was unusual and rare within philanthropy,” said María José Ramírez Braiz, founder and CEO of Midwest-based grantee Te Lo Cuento News.

“They said to us at the beginning of the grant period, before the shit hit the fan with the federal government, ‘If you need this money to keep the lights on, keep the lights on,'” said Copper River Record editor Allison Sayer, one of the paper’s two part-time staffers. “I feel that this was really a gift.”

First-time grant applicants and recipients, in particular, said Press Forward’s recognition gave them credibility and visibility with other funders. And publishers described the funding as a morale boost that validated low-paid work.

“It has been a life-changer, a lifesaver for us,” said Gretchen Sporleder Orr, who publishes the World Journal in southern Colorado with her husband. Her voice broke when she talked to me about the funding. “I don’t know if we would be in business right now if it wasn’t for the Press Forward money.”

The Real WV “would not still exist without Press Forward,” said Stephen Baldwin, the site’s volunteer publisher. (He’s also the former minority leader for the West Virginia Senate and a pastor of two churches.) The outlet was one of eight grantees that received just two $25,000 grants over two years. “There’s not exactly a lot of capital floating around West Virginia for nonprofit news,” Baldwin said, “and without this outside impact, we wouldn’t be able to do this work.” But he hopes that the site can be less reliant on grants in the future.

The funding did not save every recipient. One grantee, Atlanta Civic Circle, shut down earlier this year. Atlanta Civic Circle did not receive its second $50,000 grant because it didn’t complete the first LION audit, Anglin said. (Atlanta Civic Circle did not respond to my request for an interview, but executive director Saba Long wrote on LinkedIn in June that “the funding environment for local nonprofit journalism is extraordinarily difficult right now.”) Other recipients have merged or transformed since applying for the grant.²

Medill’s annual State of Local News report, released this month, describes a local news ecosystem in a “state of precarity.” That state of precariousness helps explain how $100,000 over two years can be a “godsend,” a “miracle,” and not enough. As one grantee put it, “Right now, these are shanties built on a beach, waiting for a hurricane to come through.”

“Press Forward reached newsrooms that don’t have existing relationships with major national funders,” said Nina Ignaczak, the founder, publisher, and editor of Planet Detroit. “The challenge now is whether the commitment holds.”

“A stabilizing force”

The funding helped newsrooms keep the lights on, whether they used it to pay bills, pay down debt, make payroll, or as a buffer when something went wrong.

“The flexibility that Press Forward has given us has allowed us to fill — I wouldn’t say emergencies, but unexpected gaps,” said Richard Young, founder and executive director of CivicLex in Kentucky. It brought on a consulting editor to keep city hall coverage going after losing a reporter, and purchased new software. Without the funding, CivicLex likely would have had to dip into its reserves, he said.

Bob Bonnar, publisher of the News Letter Journal in Wyoming, used the first payment from Press Forward to upgrade computers and cameras and give some staffers raises. “That chewed up the money very quickly,” he said, “and I probably should have held some of it back because the News Letter Journal ended up having a pretty rough year in 2025.” He had to use about half of the second $50,000 payment to repay an operating loan. The rest covered the remaining revenue shortfall and kept the organization in the black through the winter.

Vandana Kumar, publisher of the California-based ethnic media outlet India Currents, described the funding as a “stabilizing force” that allowed the newsroom to keep operating despite a contraction in philanthropic giving and cuts to local government advertising.

The Copper River Record built infrastructure to host digital ads and created a new website. It held listening sessions with Native villages in its coverage area and donated subscriptions to local Tribal offices. It improved the design of its print newspaper. Sayer paid freelancers to complete Press Pass training and pursued other professional development. And she was able to take on more ambitious stories about PFAS and “forever chemicals.”

The Press Forward funding was “the biggest single windfall in nearly 20 years for our small community newspaper,” Sandpoint Reader publisher Ben Olson told me. The Idaho-based paper used the money to travel to the state capital for Press Club awards and design a new media kit, which Olson said has improved ad sales. The Reader also paid a large chunk of its printing bill, paid its rent a year in advance, and gave staffers bonuses. (The bonuses helped the paper become 100% employee-owned; Olson’s two employees bought in when Olson’s business partner and co-owner retired.)

The open-ended nature of the grants gave Colorado’s World Journal “the flexibility to be able to make a change, do a thing, and then pivot as needed,” Sporleder Orr said. “When we were in the toilet, all I could think about was, like, ‘Is there going to be anything in the post office today so that I can make payroll?’ ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got to pay rent.’” Sometimes she and her husband skipped their own paychecks to pay staff. The grant gave them “emotional bandwidth” to plan ahead.

“Sustainability isn’t just about having the funding”

Many grantees used the funding to hire full- or part-time staffers. Sometimes, that worked out well.

The Mānoa Mirror, an online newsroom based at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, received two $25,000 grants, which it used to hire a managing editor, a student editorial coordinator, three student reporters, and a social media producer. (The managing editor was paid a stipend, and the other positions were part-time.) The work had previously depended on “faculty goodwill and volunteerism, which was not sustainable for long,” said Hye-ryeon Lee, who was professor and chair of the school of communication and information until retiring this summer. With the new hires, the site went from publishing a few stories a month to publishing daily.

The Real WV’s first LION audit pointed to a need its small team had already recognized: hiring someone to sell ads. It hired a public school teacher with sales experience (including selling ads for the yearbook) part-time.

The funding allowed Te Lo Cuento News to pay contributors consistently and to add contract, part-time positions including a sales manager, an office administrator, and a couple of reporters. The only position it could sustain beyond the grant period is the part-time sales manager, Ramírez Braiz said.

The Texas Spur is one of five weekly newspapers owned by Paragraph Ranch Media. Originally, the team planned to use the Press Forward grant to secure a loan to improve company housing and hire a journalist based in Spur (population 863 as of 2020). But nobody took the newspaper up on the free housing offer, said editor and general manager Barbara Brannon. So the company hired four early-career journalists (two full-time, two part-time) living in its 10-county coverage area. Three of the four left for jobs in other industries halfway through their second year. The one who stayed is doing well as a regional sports reporter, Brannon said, and a hire who replaced a person who left is now managing editor for The Post Dispatch.³

The turnover Brannon experienced isn’t unique to Spur. Other newsrooms also found hiring with grant money challenging.

Sometimes, that was because of location. “Had we been able to find the right people from the outset, I believe the grant would have had a greater impact on the business,” said Anton Kaufer, regional publisher for Hagadone Media Montana. In rural Northwest Montana, though, recruiting and retaining staff is a challenge, and Hagadone’s Mineral Independent struggled to replace its salesperson and office manager after they retired. The experience “reinforced for us that sustainability isn’t just about having the funding,” Kaufer said. “It’s also about having the people in place to make the most of it.”

The World Journal tried placing an ad for a salesperson with the Colorado Press Association and got “absolutely no interest,” Sporleder Orr said. “People living in northern Colorado don’t particularly want to come live in a teeny-tiny town in a rural, broke part of the state.” (She credited the grant with giving her the mental space to fire a salesperson who wasn’t working out, then regroup.)

Other times, the money just wasn’t enough. “The reality is that $100,000 over two years isn’t a lot,” one grantee who asked to stay anonymous told me. “You can’t hire somebody with that.”

EcoRI’s experience illustrates those limitations. Before receiving the Press Forward grant, EcoRI had used other grant funding and reserves to hire a director of development in a one-year contract position. In its grant application to Press Forward, the team proposed converting that role into a full-time staff position with benefits.

The salary limited the hiring pool, though. The development director position paid $65,000 a year, which “is really not the market rate for a director of development” in the area, publisher and cofounder Jo Detz said. (She said it should be more like $90,000.) The staffer they ended up hiring came from another state and hadn’t worked in news before. In a staff position, he cost more than he was bringing in. Detz laid him off and eliminated the position last December. She called the experience “heartbreaking.”

“At the point where I knew this wasn’t working,” she said, “there wasn’t enough runway to pivot, rethink, rehire.”

Beyond the salary limitations, Detz thinks the development director didn’t have enough runway to succeed. The kind of development the staffer was hired to oversee — major gifts and individual giving — is a long game; “that position would need at least two or three years to begin to see some benefits,” she said. Now, she’s back where she started, juggling fundraising with her other work.

“I know it’s crazy to say that $100,000 over two years wasn’t enough,” she said, “but it was not enough to make a meaningful difference to our revenue strategy.”

Planet Detroit’s Ignaczak was in a unique position: Around the same time the newsroom received the Press Forward grant, Planet Detroit also received a $500,000 three-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation. That grant allowed her to hire a managing editor, she said.

Ignaczak believes general operating support is what small nonprofit newsrooms need. But to be effective, “I really think fully funding a revenue role for a minimum of three years is what needs to happen to build sustainability, if that is the goal,” she said. “And $100,000 over two years is not enough to achieve that.”

Print and operating in the physical world

NotiVisión Georgia, a Spanish-language local news outlet with one full-time staffer, is committed to print in a world moving away from it. The print newspaper is the only way the outlet has been able to use to “generate real economic value,” said CEO Mónica Pirela, because it’s where local companies want to place ads. The organization spent some of its Press Forward funds on printing and distribution. Pirela wears “every hat” right now, and the organization’s top need is a dedicated sales manager, she said.

California’s BenitoLink, meanwhile, used some of the Press Forward funding to begin printing in 2025. That will allow it to apply for newspaper of record status and get paid for running legal notices.

In Minnesota, Swift County Monitor-News publisher and owner Reed Anfinson called the grant a “godsend” at a time when tariffs and rising gas prices have driven up printing and delivery costs and weakened advertisers’ budgets. The for-profit Monitor-News put some of its Press Forward funding toward redesigning its print newspaper. Anfinson also purchased materials as part of an “Out of Sight/Out of Mind” advertising campaign stressing the value of print. (He created the campaign himself, using Midjourney for the images.) For news organizations in small towns, Anfinson believes, digital revenue will never be enough to sustain operations.

“The space to ask what our readers really need”

Some organizations used the funding to expand their remit beyond news.

For instance, the Copper River Record partnered with the Copper River Native Association to include weekly language graphics in the paper for Ahtna, a critically endangered language, coordinating with a local kindergarten class. That project required a lot of time and investment up front, Sayer said, but it can continue beyond the life of the grant.

Planet Detroit used some Press Forward funding for reporting, but “the most significant thing the grant made possible wasn’t any single story,” Ignaczak said. The grant gave the team time to work on its Civic Action Toolbox, which turns reporting into civic engagement prompts. In a story about a local ballot proposal, for instance, the embedded toolbox flags upcoming public meetings, links to contact information for local representatives, and suggests an organization to follow. The tool is also in beta testing with other newsrooms.

“The whole project came from having the space to ask what our readers actually need from us beyond information, and then building toward that,” Ignaczak said. “Unrestricted funding makes that kind of work possible.”

Anfinson of the Monitor-News took the unusual step of writing a grant application on behalf of the local school district, which was losing students to adjacent districts. He used some of the Press Forward funding to match a $2,500 grant to the district. The district then ran $5,000 in ads in a “goodwill effort” to stem declining enrollment. The partnership helped to raise the Monitor-News’s profile, he said, by highlighting the benefits of newspaper advertising.

“It felt like a lot of pressure”

Press Forward required grantees to complete two LION sustainability audits. But it also offered optional coaching via the media consulting company Blue Engine to help implement the first audit’s recommendations. Of the 205 grantees, 154 participated in coaching, Anglin said.

The coaching kicked off in January, with most individual coaches and grantees meeting monthly. Multiple participants said the support would have been more beneficial if it were introduced earlier. This was a tradeoff of Press Forward moving quickly to get money out the door, Anglin said.⁴

This was the first large, unrestricted grant Austin Common had ever received, and it struggled with how to spend the money. “It felt like a lot of pressure,” said Amy Stansbury, the site’s editor-in-chief and only full-time staffer.

Stansbury wanted to bring on the organization’s first full-time employees, but didn’t want to make those hires (and spend all the grant money) until she had a clear plan. The coaching helped her figure out which hires made the most strategic sense and how to budget for them.

A few publishers were lukewarm about the substance of the coaching, but the majority I heard from were enthusiastic. At first, Baldwin was skeptical and worried the coaching might amount to “checking a box.” In practice, though, he said it’s been “tremendously helpful” for tasks like writing the job description for the Real WV’s sales position.

Sporleder Orr called the coaching “incredible.” The monthly sessions helped her with everything from tackling grant proposals to improving her Google Analytics skills. The combination of money and coaching, she added, “makes sure that the recipients don’t just continue doing business as usual.”

“This secret shadow world”

In addition to the funding, Press Forward paid for grantees to attend conferences. Anglin said 111 grantees attended the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit in Philadelphia in 2025, 81 attended the same conference (which I also attended) in 2026, and 87 attended the Business of Local conference in Salt Lake City in 2025. A handful of grantees attended affinity conferences.

Stansbury found attending conferences for the first time helpful and eye-opening. It taught her “there’s this secret shadow world of [invitation-only] foundation and grant funding.” Press Forward’s travel support to attend a national conference was “transformative” for India Currents, Kumar said, giving it visibility and access to relationship-building.

To small newsrooms, the grant felt like a Press Forward stamp of approval that put them on the map for other funders. The Mirror’s Lee called the Press Forward funding “instrumental” in securing a $20,000 grant from a local foundation. But that was an exception among publishers I heard from; most didn’t feel the visibility and credibility conferred by the grant directly translated to other funders giving them more money.

So several publishers, including Ramírez Braiz of Te Lo Cuento News, would like to see Press Forward go a step further and make individual introductions to funders. “Those more personal introductions can make a major difference for small organizations,” she said.

Ramírez Braiz also called for “more shared learning around outcomes and impact.” Few grantees had a good sense of what others in the cohort were up to, and some were interested in more knowledge sharing with peer organizations, though the day-to-day grind of keeping one’s own newsroom running was a common impediment.

“Folks in the local news ecosystem don’t know how good they have it”

Since 2023, Anglin said, Press Forward’s network of more than 130 funders has invested $258 million directly in newsrooms. That suggests that over half of the more than $400 million the coalition says it’s invested has gone to newsrooms.

When Press Forward first announced the direct funding for newsrooms, it “felt really awesome,” the grantee who asked to stay anonymous told me. To the grantee, it was meaningful to see Press Forward give funding to more organizations than planned in response to the scale of need. But when Press Forward went on to a second funding round in which single organizations, including both newsrooms and newsroom-adjacent organizations like the International Women’s Media Foundation and LION, received as much as $1.5 million for infrastructure projects, the same grantee said it felt like “a slap in the face.”

“Many of the problems newsrooms face aren’t unique to them individually,” Anglin said. “If we are attempting to solve problems at scale, we have to intervene not just at the newsroom level, but at the systems level, too.” She said that because many of the infrastructure grantees serve multiple newsrooms, “investing in them creates a multiplier effect across the industry.”

The argument that funding support organizations and infrastructure lifts more boats is “a cop-out,” this publisher said. “I think the philanthropists know it, I think the associations know it, and I think the potential grantees that are not funders or associations or intermediaries know it.”

Young had a different perspective. Because of CivicLex’s broad scope, it seeks out funding from both democracy funders and journalism funders. Young thinks local news funders are way ahead on getting dollars into local communities.

“I think Press Forward has done one of the more effective jobs of anything I’ve seen in the broader landscape of my world, and the civic renewal space, of delivering resources to the local level,” he said. (He added, “No one is ever happy in the local news ecosystem when I say that folks in the local news ecosystem don’t know how good they have it. That does not win me a lot of friends.”)

Philanthropy as “infrastructure”

Most publishers I heard from see grants like this as critical to continued operation, yet they’re wary of overreliance on philanthropy.

Young said he’d be surprised if local news is still a focus for national philanthropy in eight years. “Filling your cup up with money that will be impossible to recover in four years is a danger zone,” he added.

Right now, more than 80% of Planet Detroit’s revenue mix comes from foundations. Ignaczak said the organization hopes to bring that down to 50% by 2028. “But for nonprofit newsrooms covering environmental and public health issues in a mid-size metro, general operating grants aren’t a crutch,” she said. “They’re infrastructure.”

As for Press Forward, “Time will tell, as these grants go away, what impact [they’ve] actually had on the newsrooms that received [them], how many have managed to build sustainability,” she added. “I think a newsroom that needed $50,000 to survive to next year had problems that $50,000 isn’t going to solve.”

LOOKOUT executive director Jake Hylton believes there’s enough funding to go around. “While there may not be enough to support every single newsroom at a very large amount,” he said, “I do believe that there is a larger investment in news that could be done.”

A second grantee who asked to stay anonymous was blunt about their fears for the future. “We’re scared shitless about 2027,” this person said, “because not only is the Press Forward money not returning, we also see none of the national grants that sustained us in 2024 and previous years.”

“We’d love to be thriving, but we’re happy to continue to survive”

The Copper River Record was in the black before receiving this grant, and the lean paper’s fixed overhead remains low. For the Record, Press Forward has been like “a fairy godmother,” Sayer said.

“I’m not going to lie: I will miss having the money to say yes to any reasonable story,” she continued. “But I think that, even going back to our original budget, the strength of what we learned will continue to help us deliver a higher quality paper that is more relevant to the communities we serve.”

The Sandpoint Reader, Olson said, is “surviving” right now. “We’d love to be thriving,” he added, “but we’re happy to continue to survive when many print publications aren’t.” He credited the Press Forward grant with giving the burned-out team “the chance to fall in love with our industry again.”

Sporleder Orr feels nervous about what’s ahead, but with the World Journal in a much more comfortable cash flow position, she and her husband are “in a way better mental state about the business.”

“We feel good about the future right now, that we are going to be able to keep going and make it,” she said. “We’re back to, ‘This is what we do ’til we die.'”

1. Grantees are included in LION’s public database capturing median staffing, revenue, and audience numbers from audits completed by more than 400 newsrooms. LION’s data suggests local newsrooms with budgets under $1 million are common; about three-quarters of the newsrooms that completed its most recent audit reported revenue under $1 million.
2. Press Forward paused grants to the St. Louis Argus after other local outlets reported the organization was taking their work without permission. Press Forward required the Argus to complete training from the Maynard Institute, then gave it the funds.
3. Not all the successful hires have journalism backgrounds. One current managing editor is a former school superintendent. “Every day that we have to teach someone from another field how to craft a lede, or cover a public meeting, or sell an ad by column inches, we are still grateful,” Brannon said.
4. “For this program, the timeline was tight,” Anglin said. “Our grantees have told us where we can do better, including offering coaching sooner, and we plan to incorporate that feedback in the future.” The open call launched a month after Anglin was hired, which meant she was still hiring the rest of Press Forward’s staff. Press Forward did not hire Graham Ringo, the grantee engagement and support manager who built out the program pairing audits and coaching, until several months later.