Philanthropies set to launch a nonprofit newsroom in Ohio
A coalition of philanthropies has announced plans to launch a nonprofit newsroom that will provide coverage of Cleveland, kicking off an effort to help fill a void left by the shrinking of news organizations in Ohio.
The donors say theirs will be one of the largest local nonprofit news startups in the country. The American Journalism Project, one of the funders, has launched three other nonprofit newsroom startups and supported 26 others across the country.
A broader effort, called the Ohio Local News Initiative, is set to establish a network of nonprofit newsrooms across the state that would share a back-office infrastructure, with each community having a newsroom to serve local needs, said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project.
To date, $5.8 million has been raised for the Cleveland newsroom from seven donors. In addition to the journalism project, the donors include the journalism funder Knight Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation, which holds $2.8 billion in assets. Berman says the journalism project is in talks to expand the initiative to other parts of the state and expects further donations.
The newsroom in Cleveland is expected to hire 25 staffers to launch by mid-2022. The donors said it will produce “original, in-depth, non-partisan reporting” that will be free to access digitally and through various content partnerships.
The newsroom will raise revenue from those partnerships, subscriptions, events and other sources, but philanthropy will continue to play a prominent role in the coming years.
The donors described their initiative as a “culmination of years of work by local community leaders to identify and determine information gaps left from declining volumes of original reporting in Northeast Ohio.”
Dale Anglin, vice president of programs at the Cleveland Foundation, says the foundation decided to fund the Cleveland newsroom to strengthen democracy building in the community.
“We’re prepared to support them,” Anglin said.
The foundation had approached the American Journalism Project about 18 months ago and asked it to gather data on how the city’s residents typically obtained news and information.
Berman said the organization reviewed the city’s local news landscape, ran focus groups and conducted surveys.
It found the same trend it has seen across the country: As the news staffs of traditional metro news organizations have dwindled in the face of advertising losses, many residents no longer have adequate information about their communities. Berman said residents wanted more information about, for example, how to access city services, among other things.
In a trend that has been repeated across the country, newspapers in Cleveland and elsewhere in Ohio have laid off many journalists in the past decade.