Stop thinking of Press Forward as a single program

I’ve been beating the drum among public media leaders for over a year: You need to understand what’s happening with Press Forward, the $500 million effort to remake local news. So it was heartening — and frustrating — to see dozens of public media leaders show up when three Press Forward leaders appeared at a webinar presented by the consultancy Public Media Company and Current in early July.

The talking points and presentation slides were enlightening. But, as is often the case, you could also glean plenty of insight from the chatbox. The questions and comments there were…alarming.

Some simply showed a lack of attention. There were many “Hey, I didn’t know I could have applied!” for a recently closed RFP to give $100,000 each to at least 100 different organizations. (Folks, there were literally dozens of announcements, news articles, webinars and even free coaching sessions. If you didn’t know, that’s your problem.)

More subtly, though, the chat showed that most people think of Press Forward as a single organization — a monolith. It isn’t; if you don’t understand that, you won’t raise any money from it.

Press Forward has at least three distinctly different programs, and two have dozens of potential funders giving away money. The biggest takeaway for public media fundraisers is that you have to figure out which of these potential funders is a good match for your organization.

Press Forward breaks those funders into three buckets (and, frankly, uses somewhat opaque phrasing to describe them):

• “Aligned” funders who are making their own grant-making decisions but do so sharing the same goals and values as everyone else involved in Press Forward
• The “pooled” fund of smaller funders who lack the staff to give away money directly — so instead, they’ve chipped into a central pool
• Local chapters seeking to raise (and give away) money in their local communities

Much of the attention so far has been focused on the “pooled” fund because it issued the first high-profile call for grant submissions and will give away at least $10 million. But that’s actually the smallest pool of money.

The biggest, by far, is the aligned pool. As Press Forward Director Dale Anglin noted, that’s roughly $400 million of the money pledged to date (and most of that — perhaps as much as $300 million — is coming from just two funders: the Knight and MacArthur foundations).

The funders themselves give that money away — not Anglin’s small central team.

To my knowledge, there’s no complete list of which of the 60+ Press Forward funders are in that group. However, Anglin highlighted already-announced grants by Knight, MacArthur, the Henry Luce Foundation, Skyline Foundation and the Scripps Howard Fund.

(A note to my friends at Press Forward: Even for close observers, it’s unclear which foundations are in which bucket. That makes it difficult for grant seekers to know who they should open conversations with. Doubtless, it leads to time-wasting inquiries to some pooled-fund foundations. Anglin talked about bringing more transparency to the process. Defining who’s in which fund would be a helpful first step.)

The point: If you want to tap the biggest pot of Press Forward money, you must ask those aligned funders — not wait for some magical RFP to rain money down on you.

Moreover, the webinar presenters clarified that Press Forward is about solving the long-term sustainability challenges of local news. (They were too polite to say it this way, so I will: They care a whole lot less about plugging a gaping hole in your current local news budget, which was the subtext of many of the questions I saw in the chat.)

“A lot of what we still look at and care about is sustainability,” said Jim Brady, Knight’s vice president of journalism. “Knight sees this as an effort where the funds that go out over the next five years have to create a momentum that goes way beyond those five years.”

Brady, Anglin and Silvia Rivera of MacArthur emphasized that the best projects would do more than shore up local news in a particular market. They’ll create lessons and tools that others can emulate.

For public media in particular, the best opportunities could be in fostering collaborations — yes, like the recently announced regional New England News Collaborative  — but also in local collaborations that could unite local digital newsrooms, universities and legacy public broadcasters.

“Who else is at that table? If it’s just public media, you’re probably not serving everybody that needs to be served,” noted Anglin.

Rivera, who spent more than a decade in public media, noted that organizations must resist the temptation to create something new without understanding what is already in place. "If something already exists, then, we should talk about what we can strengthen or do to help.”

Part of that awareness also revolves around understanding what coverage communities have lost, especially as legacy print organizations have slashed beats covering topics like business, the arts, immigrant communities and other specialized topics.

“One of the valid criticisms of the digital local news ecosystem is there’s so much investigative (reporting), and not enough just day-to-day ‘How do I live my life in X City?’” said Brady. “I think the investigative work is obviously critical, but it has to exist in a broader tent.” That includes topics like arts and culture, business, local sports and other content that builds habits.

That’s where understanding the diffuse nature of Press Forward becomes essential.

If a station wanted to delve deeply into, say, health care, it could assess potential community partners and create a plan for deep (and cross-platform) content. Then, approach a combination of local philanthropies (perhaps one that’s part of a Press Forward local chapter) and a national Press Forward funder who’s interested in health care (like KFF, the former Kaiser Family Foundation).

If you’re in the Midwest, craft a pitch that fits the Joyce Foundation. Do you see a need for education and workforce development? Try Lumina. And so on.

Yes, this requires more creativity than simply cranking out the CPB Community Service Grant renewal paperwork. But it’s also what the Press Forward funders have consistently asked for over the past year. Don’t just bring them an outstretched palm; bring big ideas for solving specific community problems.

Our predecessors did that in the 60s and 70s. They convened conversations, fostered communities and built movements around early childhood education and civil, nuanced discussion of complex topics.

It’s time to do it again in a different millennium and use other tools.

Tom Davidson is the Donald P. Bellisario professor of the practice in media entrepreneurship at Penn State University. He is a longtime journalist who has held business and leadership roles at Tribune Company, PBS Digital and Gannett. He can be reached at tgd@tgdavidson.com