Local News Initiative of Southern Arizona

The Local News initiative for Southern Arizona was created to help strengthen local journalism in our community and fill critical gaps in local news and information.

A group of civic leaders joined with the community foundation to launch the initiative in November 2023. They worked nearly a year together to address concerns about the steady decline in local news coverage and local journalists reporting on Tucson, Pima County, and parts of Southern Arizona.

The initiative raises public awareness about the impact of the loss of local news in our community and the local solutions and opportunities to address it. The goal is to build philanthropic support for a new pooled fund so that we can start the first cycle of grantmaking in early 2024 to hire more local journalists to increase local news coverage about and for our community.

Research shows that the loss of local news can have a negative impact on civic engagement and government accountability in a community. Studies find lower voter turnout, increases in government corruption, lower bond ratings without reporters scrutinizing local budgets, and increased political polarization.

The Local News Initiative for Southern Arizona will invest in the future of local news and robust local reporting that serves all communities in the formats that best serve them.

The decline in local news has spawned a wave of innovation and opportunities around the country and here in Southern Arizona. There has been a rise in journalists, entrepreneurs, public media newsrooms, and community leaders creating startup nonprofit newsrooms, local online news organizations, family-owned newspapers expanding their reach and investing in the future, mergers between local public media broadcast organizations and local newspapers, collaborative reporting projects and new for-profit models that serve communities with independent, nonpartisan journalism and provide essential news and information.

Rebuilding a future for local news offers an opportunity for the next generation of news organizations to do more community listening and provide more inclusive and equitable coverage for and with communities that have been historically marginalized, underrepresented, and, in some cases – misrepresented in the news.