Press Forward, the philanthropic coalition of more than 90 funders that has vowed to grant at least $500 million to local news over five years, recently announced the winners of its latest grant cycle, an “open call on infrastructure.” Aiming to strengthen the unsexy-yet-essential backend of small, community newsrooms, the funder gave $22.7 million to 22 organizations and coalitions for projects “that address the urgent challenges local newsrooms face today.”
Winning projects include those working to protect a free and independent press and those providing mental health services for journalists who cover traumatic events. Others are forging new revenue streams and ways to increase audiences, or partnering with academic institutions and community reporters. As Press Forward’s July 2025 announcement about the grantees put it, new strategies are needed because so much of the local news infrastructure was built for a different era.
Local news is critical for communities and for funders, said Christina Shih, associate director of Press Forward. “Every outcome we as funders care about — education, economic development, kids — is downstream of how community is informed and how community makes decisions. Our progress in these areas really depends on people having access to local, timely news they can trust. This is why Press Forward exists.”
Press Forward sits between philanthropy and local journalism, and the 50 grant reviewers on this project came from both fields. Shih said that process itself helped strengthen those connections and proved instructive for Press Forward. “One of the beauties of having a national, open call like this is that we get to see a variety of ideas from the field and different partnerships we may not have been aware of before this opportunity.”
IP checked in with some grantees to see how they are using the money and what advice they have for other small, community newsrooms seeking support in these dicey times.
Helping Black and diverse newsrooms attract advertising dollars
BOMESI (Black Owned Media Equity & Sustainability Institute) will use most of its $750,000 grant to expand on its novel revenue generation system that allows advertisers to easily place ads across multiple platforms, and routes more dollars to small and niche outlets than the traditional pay-per-click model. The system works, in part, by larger media outlets in the network, such as Black Enterprise and All Hip Hop, sharing revenue with smaller ones, thus strengthening the ecosystem as a whole. “It’s like collective economics, or the metaphor of the rising tide lifts all boats,” said Rhonesha Byng, co-founder and chief mission officer of BOMESI. “A lot of media comes down to money, which comes from ads and how those dollars are disseminated. It’s a broken system.”
The grant will allow BOMESI to increase the number of sites using this technology and develop a custom dashboard to track performance and payment and increase transparency for advertisers. The rest of the funding will support the fifth cohort of the BOMESI Accelerator, a 12-week program that provides money, tech education and connection for a select group of publishers.
Byng and co-founder DéVon Christopher Johnson launched BOMESI in 2020 to help brands reach Black-owned media companies that lack the clout of legacy magazines like Essence or the reach of a place like Urban One, the largest Black-owned broadcasting company in the U.S. It started as a list of Black-owned media platforms but has since expanded into a more inclusive database that now numbers 310 outlets, the ad system, the Accelerator, and an annual networking event. “Following the murder of George Floyd, corporations said they needed to do better, which in the business world meant investing more in Black-owned business. Advertising and brands starting saying, ‘Oh, Black-owned media exists?’ We were like, ‘We have to make sure these pledges don’t become a fly-by-night thing,’” Byng said.
The nonprofit has received repeated grants from General Motors and one grant from the P&G Foundation in the past, but nothing at this scale. “What’s really exciting is that we’re starting to get in the door of philanthropy,” said Byng. “This is real capital that is patient capital that allows us to go deeper with the infrastructure we need to do more. I’m hoping this opens us up to conversations with other philanthropy organizations. There is so much potential to create an environment where quality journalism is actually rewarded by just flipping a few things differently with how the money flows.”
Increasing sustainability at immigrant-serving news organizations
The Immigrant News Coalition (INC), a peer-led collaboration of four news outlets and one media support organization, received $1.5 million to bolster the sustainability of immigrant-serving news organizations. “We will be testing and sharing revenue models that have proven to work for our individual newsrooms and developing case studies we can share,” said Madeleine Bair, who founded INC member El Tímpano in 2017 and has grown it from a one-woman shop to a news organization with 13 full-time staff members. It shares its reporting and engages with community members via text messaging. It also publishes stories on the El Tímpano website and through other outlets, which have included very established publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area-public media outlet KQED. But the typical listener- or reader-supported nonprofit media model hasn’t worked for El Tímpano, whose primary audience is the San Francisco Bay Area’s non-English speaking, generally very low-income Latino and Mam Mayan immigrants.
What has worked: civic partnerships. “There are agencies that really value the trust we have earned with immigrant communities and our ability to reach them,” said Bair, pointing to the local public health department, legal organizations, and statewide organizations. “They will pay us through a grant or a contract to reach them. At a time when there is so much fear in immigrant communities, no one can reach those communities as well as immigrant-facing newsrooms.”
El Tímpano previously received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, in association with Press Forward’s launch. In the past few years, it also brought in $600,000 over three years from the Skyline Foundation, $100,000 from both Next50 Initiative and Blue Shield of California Foundation, and smaller grants from the Walton Family Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, the Y & H Soda Foundation and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. Bair said it took time to gain this range of funder support and she stressed the importance of helping funders recognize the role that immigrant-serving newsrooms can play in meeting their priority issues, such as health equity.
“A lot of our funders are health focused, and health funders have long been aware of equity and the role of trusted messengers in public health,” she said. “In the same way, if your issue is housing and the people most in need of housing resources don’t have access to information about those resources in the languages they speak or the tools they use, you could fund all the resources you want, but as our reporting has found, it’s not going to reach those who need it most. There is such a need for ways to sustain these media outlets.”
Reaching immigrant influencers
Vanan Murugesan is the executive director of the Minnesota-based Sahan Journal, another INC member. Founded in 2019 to serve immigrant communities and communities of color in the state, Sahan Journal does have a successful membership plan modeled after the traditional non-profit public media approach. “All five organizations in INC care about the same things, but how we are reaching out to our audiences is somewhat different,” said Murugesan. “A lot of the challenges are similar to all nonprofit newsrooms, and then there is work that is unique to immigrant-serving newsrooms.”
Minnesota has a relatively healthy news ecosystem, but that still leaves out marginalized populations, said Murugesan. “Our founder came from a traditional news background and saw this huge market need. We highlight the issues that are impacting our immigrant communities to the change-makers and policy makers, in a way that’s authentic and trustworthy. Our goal is to elevate the discussion to what truly impacts our immigrant populations.”
As the Sahan Journal put it in its INC announcement, “America has seen a decline of immigrant facing newsrooms in recent years, with over 150 ethnic media outlets shuttering since 2020, leaving small towns as well as major cities alike with a lack of news offered in other languages.”
Murugesan said INC has a goal of supporting existing members and the wider field of immigrant-serving news outlets. “We want to learn from each other and from the broader field and share our findings. The key thing is really sustainability. Everyone is trying to figure out how to continue to serve. Collectively, when we applied to Press Forward, we all quickly agreed to focus on revenue generation. The grant has been very helpful in allowing us to kickstart this part of our work.”
Supporting the “human infrastructure” of newsrooms
The Global Center for Journalism and Trauma will use most of its $1.25 million grant to train 45 social workers and psychologists to treat journalists experiencing mental health challenges, which can arise from covering the horror show that comprises so much of the news today. This is an expansion of its Journalist Trauma Support Network (JTSN), a program that has been training qualified therapists to work specifically with trauma-impacted journalists since 2021, and offering these mental health professionals ongoing support, referrals and community.
“This grant is allowing for the expansion of the JTSN model so it can double its reach and capacity and make sure states that have been psychotherapy deserts for journalists have someone now,” said JTSN executive director Bruce Shapiro. “We presume journalists are resilient. But sometimes to stay that way they need some help.” The grant also will support newsroom trainings, which focus on self-care, peer support, managing stress and trauma on news teams, and trauma-aware reporting strategies.
Journalists are under unprecedented stress and threat, due to factors such as economic pressures, the consistent and ever-more present diet of tragedy, violence, and racism in the news, and “the attack on local journalists ratified at the highest levels of power in the country,” said Shapiro. Local newsrooms, meanwhile, are far less likely than larger outlets to have the resources to help.
How does helping traumatized reporters cope with mental health challenges count as supporting infrastructure? “Too often, when people talk about journalism infrastructure, they are thinking purely technologically or financially. But what is it that makes journalism journalism? The human infrastructure,” said Shapiro. “Ultimately, the human infrastructure of journalism is all we have.”
