For a growing number of local journalists and supporters of local journalism, the relevant question in 2026 is no longer, “Should public policy to support local news exist?” but “What should public policy to support local news look like here?”
At least 21 states and territories have proposed legislation intended to financially support local news — including government advertising set-asides, employment tax credits, newsroom fellowships, and small business advertising tax credits, among other models. Newsrooms are starting to see the money some enacted policies have unlocked. Organizations like Press Forward, INN, and LION are all dedicating more funding and resources toward the public policy frontier. And the nonprofit Rebuild Local News is hiring coordinators to coalition-build and advance policies in states with lots of activity like Pennsylvania and California.
All of this means many people who care about local journalism have inched, or swung, from considering lobbying antithetical to the duties of reporting to realizing they have a role to play in advocating for policies that could bring local newsrooms the dollars they need to survive.
“In the local journalism world, we are not super-duper experts at the political process,” Rebuild’s director of policy Matt Pearce told me. “The political arena is a different world from the one that we share with each other at conferences, in our trade publications.”
Pearce, who joined Rebuild last year after many years as a reporter and labor organizer at the Los Angeles Times, has experienced the steep learning curve of the political arena firsthand. Suspecting some busy Nieman Lab readers might value a crash course, I called Pearce in June to get his 10,000-foot view on some of the most important recent developments in local news policy and what he’s learned from his work with Rebuild. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.
They have [also] seen that other states, like New Jersey and Illinois, have made early efforts to do positive interventions in local news. [That makes legislators feel like] they’re not doing something super exotic or controversial. I think that’s part of what you’re seeing in this snowballing of political interest to do something. There are [now] proofs of concept out there that help make the case for them conceptually.
I think that’s very important, just raising expectations for what’s possible politically for the local news world — because our expectations are really very low after many decades of inertia. The sector broadly was so profitable for so long that the nature of the crisis was different in previous eras.
