News From Your Neighborhood, Brought to You by the State of New Jersey

Like publications in the rest of the country, New Jersey’s suburban newspapers pulled back as their business model vaporized, leaving fewer reporters to dig into local scandals or dispatch to neighborhood events. Tiny outfits like The Village Green, which covers two North Jersey towns, have sought to fill the void.

The website recently featured articles about a coming vote on installing a four-way stop sign in South Orange and an update on an overnight police chase. Mary Mann, one of The Village Green’s two editors, juggles writing stories with running the website, working from her kitchen counter when she is not at meetings or protests.

“I would love for us to have more county coverage,” Mann said, adding to her wish list more reporting on public schools, affordable housing and how state funds are spent. “We’re chief cook and bottle washer here,” she added. “There’s no end to the stories that we could get to.” Now, she is looking for help from an unlikely source: the state of New Jersey.

The state’s lawmakers have embarked on a novel experiment to address a local news crisis: putting up millions of dollars in the state’s most recent budget to pay for community journalism. While public television and radio stations have long received government funds, news media experts like Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute say they have not heard of any other efforts on this scale, with a state helping to pay for reporting projects among a range of news media, including for-profit outlets.

Many digital outlets are chasing a broader national audience, and in New Jersey as across the country, organizations that traditionally covered stories at the community level have been depleted by years of cuts in staffing and resources. The latest reminder of the tumult came just last week as The Daily News, one of New York’s storied tabloids, shed half its staff.

Journalists and public officials described New Jersey’s undertaking as once unthinkable, raising ethical concerns and stirring fears of government intrusion. Yet there has been little outcry, underscoring for many local journalism’s precarious position and a growing willingness to experiment.

“I think times have changed,” said Louis D. Greenwald, a Democrat and majority leader of the state Assembly. “I think it’s one of the smartest investments that government can make to protect our democracy and our rights.”

The legislation sets aside $5 million from the sale of old public television licenses, creating a nonprofit consortium that would fund reporting projects and bolster civic engagement.

“It’s not about saving journalism in New Jersey,” said Mike Rispoli, state director for the Free Press Action Fund, an advocacy group that was a leading proponent of the legislation. “It’s about making sure our communities are engaged and informed.”

The effort has come at a moment of instability, but also invention, for the news media. National news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post have attracted a surge of new readers since President Donald Trump’s election, even as he has persisted in his attacks on journalists. (The momentum has trickled downward: The Village Green gained 100 new subscribers after the presidential election, a not insignificant sum, Mann said.) Yet evidence of the dismal landscape for many local news organizations abounds. Journalists at The Denver Post rebelled in the newspaper’s pages against its hedge-fund owner over continuous cuts, and the mass layoffs at The Daily News alarmed elected officials and longtime readers, highlighting how a once-mighty voice in New York, still drawing attention with its splashy front-page headlines critical of the Trump administration, was reeling.

Journalists have had to get creative to countervail the forces that have undermined the industry, like the erosion of print advertising and pressure from corporate overseers to prioritize profits ahead of maintaining coverage. Wealthy patrons have stepped in and nonprofits and public radio stations have sought to fill holes.

Given the dire situation, government funding has become an increasingly reasonable solution, said McBride, a senior vice president at Poynter, a nonprofit focused on journalism education and democracy.

“There is deep, deep need across much of the country for local public-service journalism,” McBride said. “Information is hard to come by. I have a theory that if you don’t see media writing about your life that you can trust, it’s very hard to trust any media.”

Still, government involvement in journalism raises concerns about public officials potentially working to sway news coverage or interfere with damaging reporting. Even though the legislation includes what proponents argue are safeguards against such intrusion, experts said maintaining a healthy distance will be a critical element in judging the consortium’s success.

Critics contend that it is not the government’s role to fund journalism and questioned whether the consortium was an effective use of public money. “It just didn’t seem like an appropriate expenditure of $5 million without more detail and more explanation,” said Jon M. Bramnick, the Republican leader in the Assembly. The crisis in the news media has been acutely felt in New Jersey, where the press corps covering the state government in Trenton has withered and larger newspapers in the region have reduced their staffs and their coverage.

“We need to do something,” said Joe Amditis, an associate director for the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, one of the schools involved in the effort. “We just can’t sit around and expect it to get better.”

Under the bill establishing the journalism consortium, grants will be handed out by a board of directors made up of appointees by the governor and Legislature, as well as representatives from state universities, community groups, the news media and the technology industry. Prospective projects would require collaboration with one of several state universities, and applicants would have to show how their work would benefit a community. The consortium will place an emphasis on projects aimed at low-income or minority communities, or areas that have been especially undercovered by news organizations. Proponents initially sought $100 million from the more than $330 million that New Jersey made from auctioning the licenses of two public broadcasting stations last year. But that figure was eventually whittled down to $5 million. Some have questioned whether that will be enough to make a difference, given the costs of reporting as well as staffing the consortium, which will also seek grants and donations.

The closest model is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports television and radio outlets at a national level, but the initiative in New Jersey has a more expansive mandate. “We saw this as a re-imagining of what public-interest media looks like,” Rispoli said, adding that that effort also seeks to improve media literacy and counter the influence of social media in disseminating unreliable or false information.

Proponents hope that the initiative can serve as a model to other states, but McBride and others have cautioned that it was a political feat that will likely be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Public broadcasting has been a frequent target of conservatives who have sought to cut taxpayer funding and leveled accusations of liberal bias. (Both houses of the state Legislature are controlled by Democrats, and the legislation to create the consortium, whose funding was approved in the recently passed budget, is awaiting the signature of the governor, Philip D. Murphy, also a Democrat.)

Some say one journalistic bright spot in New Jersey is an emerging ecosystem of smaller organizations spread across the state, covering communities at a granular level. Many of them grew out of Patch, an ambitious investment by AOL several years ago in hyperlocal news, starting websites in hundreds of communities across the country and in dozens in New Jersey. (AOL has since handed over its majority stake in Patch, which has been scaled back considerably.)

These independent sites are experimenting with different funding models and strategies to cover their communities, and there has been optimism that the consortium could help them, whether paying for reporting, creating opportunities to work with other organizations on bigger projects or offering resources to help them grow.

“People want to know that their experiences are counted,” Matt Skoufalos, the editor and founder of NJPen.com, said of the importance of his site to readers in the suburbs of Camden County, near Philadelphia. “I think it’s going to do some good,” he said of the state’s effort. “Even if it fails, I think it will teach people some important lessons. Even if it doesn’t work here, it might work somewhere else because we were brave enough to try it.”