Fighting for the Future of Journalism

Local journalism is disappearing around the country — but at a time of heightened threat, it’s more essential than ever to ensure that people have the news they need to stay informed.

Free Press’ Future of Journalism team is kicking off 2025 by working on the ground with journalists and communities in key target locations, building the civic-media field’s capacity to engage in policy debates, proposing bold policy ideas that prioritize communities’ information needs, and defending press freedom.

We’re excited to launch:

• New networks for organizing around local-journalism policy debates in California, the Great Lakes, the Mid-Atlantic region and the Northeast
• A Media Power Collaborative policy agenda that will serve as a tool for groups organizing to strengthen local journalism and treat local news as the public good it is
• A reparative-journalism curriculum to accompany our video series for journalism educators and reporter-training programs
• A research project that features best practices for civic journalism and trainings to inspire newsrooms to better serve communities of color 
• A community-led code of ethics to reduce media harm and improve public-safety coverage in Philadelphia
• Collaborations with Free Press’ Digital Democracy & Civil Rights team to educate the field about threats to press freedom and actions newsrooms can take to combat disinformation

In 2024, we proved we are well positioned to lead the fight to sustain local news and the growing civic-media field. We solidified our efforts to engage journalism practitioners, philanthropists and legislators and grew our network of supporters who are ready to take action in their local communities.

Here’s a look at some of the work we did on the Future of Journalism team.

Educating the public about local-news policy

As threats to democracy mounted — and as commercial models continued to struggle — 2024 saw a surge of interest from lawmakers eager to support local news. To keep up with all the action happening across the country, Free Press launched a policy tracker housed on the Media Power Collaborative’s website, which provides an at-a-glance view of legislative measures at the state level. State lawmakers are exploring a broad variety of possible solutions, from tax credits to fellowship programs to taxes on the immense revenues of tech platforms. Major funders also took notice of the importance of policy change, with the Press Forward initiative laying out its core principles when it comes to supporting local news. 

Free Press Action staff rode this wave of activity by meeting with lawmakers, coordinating with stakeholders and allies, and providing policy analysis and testimony. In January, Journalism Program Manager Alex Frandsen met with Wisconsin State Rep. Jimmy Anderson and spoke at a press conference in support of an ambitious new local-news package. In June, Journalism Program Manager Qing Saville gave remarks at a press conference in support of SB 1327, California legislation that would have imposed a small tax on the revenues of tech platforms and redistributed the money to local journalism in the state. Throughout the year, Free Press staff wrote publicly about the dangers of centering corporate media giants in policy debates and made the case for community-centered policymaking.

Meanwhile, the Media Power Collaborative continued to grow. The MPC community gathered seven times as a full group in 2024, holding programming on a broad variety of topics — including a “State of the Union on Local News Policy” and an International Labor Day event on the intersection between labor and community needs. And a working group of 10 MPC members collaborated on a policy agenda for the group. The agenda is slated for a public launch in early 2025, and lays out a set of community-rooted values to guide legislative interventions for local news.

Last but not least, Free Press grew its local-news policy work with the hire of two new staff members: Sarah Freeman-Woolpert was brought on board as our national field director, and Rafael Muñoz-Echavarria joined as our Great Lakes campaign manager.

Organizing educational events and setting narrative strategy

In 2024, Free Press’ Future of Journalism staff organized impactful educational events, deployed to conferences and created engaging multimedia products that provided training and education for practitioners.

In Philadelphia, staff organized a cohort of media practitioners to transform public-safety coverage, with offerings including grief-care programming and education about harm reduction. The cohort is now in the process of creating a new code of ethics for covering public safety. In New Jersey, we supported the development of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium’s strategic plan, distributed over $50,000 in small grants to our NJ Community Media Collaborative members for public-health media projects, and hosted an environmental-journalism event with our partners at the Center for Cooperative Media and the NJ League of Conservation Voters.

In the run-up to the 2024 general election, we produced two Democracy Is resources for journalists:  “How Newsrooms Can Address Election-Related Disinformation” and “Old & New Lies in 2024: How Newsrooms Can Build Trust and Debunk Election Lies for Voters”. We also held an online training, “Anticipating Election Lies Before & After Election Day”, which educated journalists about how to combat election-related disinformation.

We took our popular education on the road, participating in two events related to the book launch for Antiracist Journalism. We also presented at the SRCCON Conference with the session “Civic Media and Latinx Audiences: How to Reach Latinxs and Meet Their Civic Media Information Needs”.

Over the past two years, Reparative Journalism Program Manager Diamond Hardiman has been researching how to apply a reparations model to the field of journalism in service of a future of media reparations. This has culminated in the Reparative Journalism Video Series, a visually beautiful roadmap of what’s both required and possible when we center reparative processes in journalism. The Free Press News Voices team has informed and managed this project, with the support and scholarship of Media 2070 members.

The first video, “A Journey Toward Reparative Journalism,” dives into the legacy of harm in the field of journalism and sits with how the subjugation of Black and Indigenous folks is central to the roots of journalism. The second video, “What Journalists Can Learn from Global Repair Movements,” looks at the healing qualities of the South Africa Truth Commissions, the Turtle Island Landback movement and the Black American reparations movement. The video highlights what reparative practices journalists can incorporate into their reporting. The third and latest video, “Reparative Journalism: The Healing Power of Storytelling,” features two Black journalists who discuss how they practice reparative journalism — and how these practices facilitate individual, communal and societal-level healing.

Watch the third video and stay tuned for our reparative-journalism curriculum.

Developing pioneering research projects

Free Press is a leading contributor to the field of knowledge about media and journalism. In 2024, Free Press launched two research projects that deepened our understanding of the practitioners and consumers of news content.

In the first research project, Free Press released a poll surveying public attitudes about media and technology in an election year. The comprehensive survey shows that Americans believe the current media system is failing to meet the civic needs of a functioning democracy.

The poll also found that participants were highly concerned about privacy and their ability to access reliable and trustworthy information on local, national and global affairs. The findings showed that as distrust in mainstream media rises and local journalism continues to collapse, people are increasingly turning to social media for information and finding disinformation instead. Free Press also conducted the poll in Spanish. The results show that Spanish speakers in the United States are even more likely than others to feel they do not have enough independent news sources to make informed voting decisions.

For the second project, the Future of Journalism team is researching case studies of effective civic-media models and sharing best practices with the field. Many civic-media innovations have emerged at the grassroots level but they need to be documented, evaluated and elevated to attract support, inspire replication and strengthen the emerging civic-media field.

Our project is cross-pollinating best practices and successful models among civic-media practitioners and encouraging investments that will expand the nation’s civic-media ecosystem and support local news and a healthy democracy. The results of the project will be published the summer of 2025, and our staff will appear at various journalism conferences to share the findings next year.

Advocating for student journalists

In honor of World Press Freedom Day, Free Press paid homage to all the brave and fierce student journalists who have reported on historic university protests under repressive conditions. Their journalism proved essential as pro-divestment demonstrations and Gaza solidarity encampments grew on college campuses across the United States and in other countries in the spring of 2024. Student journalists have done amazing reporting on these protests and shown how important it is to have their voices represented in the media.

Watch Vanessa Maria Graber’s Instagram shoutout to these students, and read our colleague Tim Karr’s blog post delving into the outrageous attacks on protesters and free expression on campuses across the country.

Join us in making an impact in 2025

Over the past decade, Free Press has promoted a bold vision for local news and won big victories, including securing and sustaining landmark public funding in New Jersey, organizing in dozens of communities across several states, working with community-led startups to fill local-news gaps, collaborating with local leaders and training hundreds of journalists on how to better cover their communities. Most critically, Free Press has helped bring communities’ needs to the center of conversations about the future of local news.

We hope you’ll  continue to support these efforts, join with us in these fights for local journalism and press freedom, and take action in your local community. Stay tuned for more updates from the Future of Journalism team and please connect with us if you want to learn more about any of our projects.

Help support our work to transform local journalism and defend press freedom: Donate today.