Strengthening Local Journalism

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 together for nearly a year 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 host grantmaking to hire more local journalists to increase local news coverage about and for our community.

The Impact of the Local News Crisis in the U.S.

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 Opportunity

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.

About Press Forward Southern Arizona

Press Forward Locals are a network of chapters across the country where funders bring new donors and foundations together to expand resources for local news. These chapters are an opportunity for funders to create place-based initiatives, driven by the specific information needs of their communities.

The Community Foundation for Southern Arizona is excited to lead Press Forward Southern Arizona and build upon our efforts to support local news and information in the region.

About Press Forward

Press Forward is a national movement to strengthen our democracy by revitalizing local news and information.

The steady and significant decline in the availability of reliable, fact-based local news across the country is connected to growing threats to democracy, increasing polarization, and the spread of disinformation. At the same time, over a decade of investment in journalism experimentation and transformation have produced new models and solutions that are ready to scale, and a new generation of leaders prepared to reinvent and revitalize the field. Press Forward partners are moving from individual grantmaking strategies to a shared vision and coordinated action.

Press Forward is a national coalition investing more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news, and scale the infrastructure the sector needs to thrive. Join the movement at pressforward.news.