ANNO: Year Two

It has been well over a year since 17 publications around the US formed the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets to focus on “pushing journalism funders to give more money to news nonprofits, give it directly to those organizations, and disburse it in the form of larger general operating grants rather than smaller, less effective, project grants.”

Upon launch in August 2023, ANNO continued the work its activists had already started months prior: contacting national foundations with journalism portfolios and asking them to reform the way they awarded grants to the nonprofit community news sector—which describes mainly digital-only outlets founded in the last 15 years to serve areas that are losing legacy print newspapers.

There are now 44 ANNO member-outlets and several allied organizations we’ve dubbed “Friends of ANNO” that comprise an impressive braintrust of some of the most experienced journalists in the news industry.

We stay in constant touch via our main email list, discuss and debate relevant issues of the day, and offer each other mutual aid and solidarity as best we can given our lack of resources. 

As ANNO’s founder, I designed the new formation as a horizontal, democratic network with “no dues, no staff, no board, and no office," so I think that’s all to the good—having said from the outset if this network does nothing more than provide a space where nonprofit publishers and allies can speak their mind, then the effort will have been worth it.

“... those who said that ANNO member-outlets speaking our minds about ongoing inequity toward smaller, poorer, less ‘connected’ news organizations in the nonprofit world would be punished for our candor were wrong.”

But, one might well ask, have we succeeded in getting journalism funders to give more money to our sector and disburse that money equally to all independent grassroots nonprofit community news organizations at the local and regional levels?

To the first part of that question, I think it’s reasonable to assume we helped encourage funders to give more money to our sector this year. To the second part, we absolutely did not convince them to fund all nonprofit community news organizations at the local and regional levels on an ongoing basis.

ANNO member-outlets ultimately met with 10 major national funders by fall of last year, Those meetings, while congenial, have resulted in few concrete improvements to date beyond opening useful communication channels.

Then in February, ANNO stunned the nonprofit wing of the news industry by publishing a joint letter asking Press Forward—which has quickly become the dominant force in nonprofit journalism funding by organizing over 100 foundations nationwide to date into a consortium—to donate “$100,000 per actively-producing local nonprofit newsroom every year” for its projected five-year lifespan. “Excluding public media and operations that have 15 or more regular staff,” the letter stated, “we believe … that there are about 400 such organizations that would fit into this category … bringing the total requested to about $40 million per year for at least the next five years.” Or, as mentioned in subsequent conversations with funders, over $80 million per year if all the for-profit digital community news operations were to be funded, too.

ANNO also got some excellent press coverage that month—which immediately led to the new network doubling in size, followed by months of slow growth since.

Then a few ANNO publishers, myself included, got some face time with Dale Anglin, the then-recently-hired executive director of Press Forward, at a Boston conference in April—which I think was important. In addition, there was some communication between our activists and John Palfrey, the president of the MacArthur Foundation, one of the two main movers of Press Forward along with the Knight Foundation). But there was no perceptible forward motion on either the ask in our February letter or the previous general ask in the original letter to funders that led to ANNO’s founding.

That said, there have been some signs and portents that the existence of ANNO has had some positive effect in pushing journalism funders incrementally toward the kind of reform we support. 

I can, of course, prove little. But the main examples I’ve been pointing to in discussions with peers are:

1) The belief among some member-outlets that public pressure from ANNO had something to do with Press Forward’s April announcement of the round of funding aimed at smaller grassroots news organizations with annual budgets under $1 million. Though originally aimed at providing 100 publications with $100,000 each over two years, 205 publications were ultimately funded (59% of which were for-profits and only 41% of which were nonprofits like ANNO member-outlets). So not the $40 million plus for 400 plus community nonprofit groups for each of the next five years that we asked for, but not nothing either, and,

2) Some interesting numbers I crunched once Press Forward announced the recipients of that first tranche of funding on October 16, 2024. Comparing the performance of ANNO member-outlets to member-outlets of two other much better funded and larger national coalitions of news organizations (with some overlap, since quite a few ANNO member-outlets are also members of one or both), I note that, according to its INNovation newsletter of October 18, 2024, 71 out of the 475 member-outlets that the Institute for Nonprofit News was claiming around the time of Press Forward announcement got the grant. I further observe that, according to the LION Publishers newsletter of October 17, 2024, 85 out of the “575+” member-outlets that Local Independent Online News Publishers was claiming around the time of the Press Forward announcement got the grant. Meaning that 14.9% of INN member-outlets got the money, 14.8% of LION member-outlets got it, while 12 ANNO member-outlets were funded out of its 43 member outlets at the time—that is, fully 27.9% of ANNO member-outlets got Press Forward grants to INN’s and LION’s lower percentages.

And what do I make of such inference and information? That the squeaky wheels definitely seem to have gotten the grease in this case. 

Therefore, those who said that ANNO member-outlets speaking our minds about ongoing inequity toward smaller, poorer, less “connected” news organizations in the nonprofit world would be punished for our candor were wrong.

To the contrary, I take the results of the first major wave of Press Forward grants as evidence that ANNO member-outlets’ requests for reform and redress in the journalism funding space are being heard.

Many of my fellow ANNO activists and I thus feel validated by the solid performance of ANNO member-outlets in the recent grant round and will likely seek ways to work more closely with the funders consortium. It is, however, difficult for us to accept the hard fact that almost three-quarters of ANNO member-outlets did not get nice grants in October—coupled with the reality that the journalism funders are still not moving toward funding the entire nonprofit community news sector (let alone the entire community news sector including for-profits). 

So, ANNO will simply have to find new and creative ways to apply more public pressure on Press Forward and other journalism funders networks to work with us on a strategy to float all (news) boats in the interest of democracy. Preferably before the sector collapses to the point where it becomes irrelevant. A fate that the annual State of Local News Report from the Medill School at Northwestern indicates is, unfortunately, not outside the realm of possibility.

Regardless, ANNO’s second year is shaping up to be an exciting one. ANNO publishers helped elect one of our own, Corinne Colbert of the Athens County Independent in Ohio, to the INN board of directors as this article went to press. Which means that the voices of smaller nonprofits will now have an ally in the leadership of a larger coalition that many of us have thought has not always kept our best interests in mind—a problem which led directly to our establishing ANNO in the first place … although, I, for one, have observed some positive changes at INN since Karen Rundlet took over as its executive director and CEO last year.

All that said, I would be remiss if I did not close with an ANNO recruitment pitch: so, I am pleased to invite independent nonprofit news outlets to join our grassroots trade association and help us figure out how we can all survive and thrive in one of the worst eras for the free press in American history. For-profit independents should drop us a line, too, since we’re thinking about starting a commercial division or spinoff. Solidarity.

Jason Pramas is executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of its news outlet HorizonMass. He is the founder of the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets and can be reached at info@anno.news.

This article was simultaneously published in the ANNOtator and in Local News Blues. News outlets interested in reprinting it may contact the author at the email above.

Copyright 2024 Jason Pramas. Edited by Chris Faraone of BINJ and Joanna Detz of ecoRI News.