Community Foundation teaming up with MacArthur Foundation for local journalism initiative

A Springfield non-profit is teaming up with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to fund an initiative designed to bolster local journalism in central Illinois.

The Community Foundation of the Land of Lincoln announced Monday during the kickoff of its two-day What's Next for the Next 10 event that they would fund Press Forward Springfield, part of a national initiative that hopes to boost local news in the city and beyond.

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John Stremsterfer, president and chief executive of the Community Foundation, said that $1 million will be set aside through the Patrick F. Coburn Press Forward Endowment Fund, named for a former publisher of The State Journal-Register who passed away in 2022.

The MacArthur Foundation also committed $1 million to the initiative.

Stremsterfer said that building a strong foundation for local news was vital to the success of the community and healthy democracy.

"What the First Amendment doesn't address is what does our democracy do when a free press business model that worked well for a couple of centuries has been turned on its head by the advent of new technologies?" Stremsterfer said. "We pivot, we adjust, we reinvent our systems. We ask, 'What's next?'"

Press Forward was initially announced in September as a national initiative of 22 unique funders who put $500 million forward to provide a new, sustainable model for local journalism, while also helping to close longstanding inequities in coverage and combat low civic engagement and the rise of misinformation.

Springfield is one of six markets being set up as an initial local site for the initiative, with Chicago, Philadelphia, Wichita, Kansas, and the states of Alaska and Minnesota being the others.

John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, said that one of the many reasons why the project is coming about is a fear that democracy as a whole may be in peril, because of the deterioration of local news sources. He pointed to the numerous collapses of local newspapers in cities big and small as a reason why the project was needed.

"We have at least 1,800 communities across this country that are now known as 'news deserts'," Palfrey said. "This is something that I think is contributing to the polarization, a lack of people voting, a lack of accountability in our government and it's something that we need to put a stop to. We need to find a way to reverse this damaging trend."

How, exactly, will Press Forward look when it's fully unveiled has not been determined. The Community Foundation is working with the American Journalism Project to find ways to build up local news in Springfield and beyond. AJP also will assist with grant-making.

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A panel discussion on the future of local news followed the announcements. Hannah Meisel, statehouse reporter for another non-profit venture, Capitol News Illinois, said the non-profit movement could be the way of the future.

"I was very skeptical of the idea that a non-profit could come in and give away their content for free to newspapers across the state," Meisel said. "I was worried that it could further accelerate the shrinking of the press corps because you're de-incentivizing these outlets from continuing to invest in their Statehouse presence.

But, over the next four years, I watched the outlet grow and become respected. I also changed my mind on non-profit news, because I began to realize that these market forces that shape these big media conglomerates, it's so much larger than me, larger than the press corps. I've come to understand that non-profit journalism is the way of the future."

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Community Foundation to fund Press Forward Springfield initiative