New JFP Campaign to Amplify the Role of Local News
Posting: Monday, September 19, 2022
Journalism Funding Partners is launching a campaign that reflects what working with dozens of family, place-based and cause-focused funders has taught us in the past year about supporting local journalism.
Namely: Do not call it supporting local journalism. Call it what non-journalists call it.
Non-journalists call it clean air and clean water. They call it education. They call it diversity and inclusivity. They call it the arts. They call it an accountable government. They call it public safety. They call it economic mobility. They call it the prevention of elder abuse. And so on.
Journalists call those things beats. But if you’re the executive director of a community foundation, you call these areas signs of a healthy community.
Through this lens, local journalism is a means to an end, not its own end. Daily, nonpartisan, fact-based local coverage of any of these health-of-a-community topics raises awareness of those topics. It makes global issues local and puts personal issues into a community context.
This echoes advice I received from my friend and mentor, Debra Jacobs, the President and CEO of The Patterson Foundation. Ms. Jacobs not only runs one of the largest foundations in Florida, she also is a thought leader in the national foundation space.
I’d contacted her before joining JFP, to ask her advice about getting foundations to fund local news organizations. And she said: “Don’t call it local journalism. No one cares about that except local journalists.”
Instead, she encouraged me to talk about what local journalism can accomplish on behalf of what funders really care about.
And, by extension, what all human beings care about.
JFP’s new campaign – beginning today and set to run through the end of 2022 – amplifies this message clearly and factually on what makes our communities livable.
If you care about education, you care about local news.
If you care about the environment, you care about local news.
If you care about the arts, you care about local news.
And so on.
The campaign begins today with a focus on the five rights protected in the First Amendment, in support of JFP partner the Freedom Forum and specifically its First Amendment Festival, to be held Saturday, Sept. 24, at Discovery Park in Nashville. Free tickets are available here.
These social cards, created by JFP Communications and Administrative Coordinator Marc Fiol, each carry a QR code that directs users to an opportunity to support JFP’s mission. They also will be shared with JFP partners, who can customize the QR code to direct users to locally based giving opportunities.
But more importantly, we hope the campaign raises awareness that local news is an integral part of a healthy, functioning community – the awareness that we’re all local. And we’re all in this together.
Onward.
About JFP: The mission of Journalism Funding Partners is to strengthen the depth, diversity and sustainability of local news by building and shepherding relationships between funders and local news organizations. JFP is a recognized nonprofit that acts as fiscal sponsor, allowing foundations and individual funders to contribute directly to local news, regardless of the news organization’s business model. JFP manages the funds feeding numerous news initiatives, including more than a dozen Climate reporters in the Southeast, an Equity Desk at The Sacramento Bee, an Education and Economic Mobility Desk in California’s Central Valley, the Investigative Fund of The Miami Herald and for Inclusivity and Investigative funds at the Associated Press.
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Media Contact: Rusty Coats, Executive Director | rusty@jfp-local.org | (813) 277-8959
