Here comes the pain again.

By Alice Dreger

Press Forward has now notified the winners and losers of the $100,000 open-call grants for local news outlets. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard this news. They’ve gagged the winners for a while. I can only presume the logic behind this includes some hope that, by the time the winners publicly break out the party hats, noisemakers, and confetti, the losers may have gotten over some of their sting. 

But you know what? It's still gonna sting. 

The losers are going to look around and have perfectly legitimate questions about why certain organizations were chosen over them. And, in all likelihood, no one is going to answer those questions. I expect Press Forward won’t even share the scoring with applicants, so applicants won’t be able to compare how they fared in the eyes of the unnamed judges who used the rubric some applicants got to see in advance and others didn’t.

My heart is heavy as I hear from folks who got the “no,” even as I’m happy for friends who landed a “yes.” I remember how many times I was told “no” while I was running East Lansing Info for a decade, and how eventually I just gave up applying for anything that wasn’t a sure thing. Avoiding the rejection is part of how I kept myself going.

People will tell you, “You can’t win it if you’re not in it!” But the truth is that not “winning” time after time after time costs. It costs you time, energy, and hope every time you apply for one of these things. Receiving a rejection amounts to more than learning you’re not going to get the funds you need. It represents an external body telling you you’re not good enough.

I was generally convinced I was good enough; the fact that I kept an entire city’s serious daily news operation going on about $200,000 a year with no grants beyond NewsMatch suggested I was good enough. But it still hurt and dragged me down every time I got another rejection. I kept wondering why I should bother killing myself when there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t even really a goddamned tunnel—that I was digging through a mountain with a spoon.

You’d think after ten years of it—and after walking away from it a year ago—I would have the vision to see what I’d been caught in. But a close colleague said something to me a month or so ago that startled me, because it captured the insanity of what I had been living through without realizing it. He said it in conversation about another small independent upstart trying to find a way forward economically, chasing grants. I’m paraphrasing him here:

When you set yourself up as a nonprofit dependent on grants, you basically set yourself up for a life of begging rich people for pennies.

I had thought of myself as a generally class-conscious person—and to be clear, I’m not pretending to be badly off. My spouse and I have done well enough that we count as upper middle-class. (It’s why I could afford to work for nothing or next-to-nothing for so many years.)

But what my colleague said made me realize how many of us basically find ourselves acting like Oliver Twist, begging for more gruel. The funders go on and on about the nobility, the necessity, the centrality of local news in American democratic life. Then they chuck us a few dimes, if that, and go back to their bacon-wrapped shrimp parties.

You know who is not hurting? The people who work for the Knight Foundation. The people who work for the MacArthur Foundation. The people who work for INN and LION. And Google. They sit on their climate-controlled thrones and feel for you. They loved that story you brought about the poor people being slowly poisoned by the power plant looming over them! That was awesome! They ate up that series about failure of food and medicine deliveries to Native American communities! It made them feel like witnesses. If you’re in a swing state and you lean blue, they think it’s swell that you’re educating voters and helping to get out the vote. 

Meanwhile, you could run an entire operation on what they pay one of their people.

The conversation with my colleague made me recognize something. When I finally did decide to stop chasing grants—which I did entirely out of ego exhaustion—I liberated myself from this toxic dependency. Ironically, I also ended up doing what all the advisors tell us to do: I deeply engaged my audience in our work. That was the only way I was going to keep the operation funded.

A lot came from using that approach: a satisfying feeling of integrity; smarter news, because we were being informed by our readers far more often; endless conflict of interest management. I’m not going to pretend it was an easy way to keep the economy of news production going. It was incredibly labor-intensive, and I never really got a minute off. 

But at least I didn’t feel like I had to be quiet about the bullshit of all these rich people sprinkling little sums of money while they cause us pain and use us to feel so good about themselves.

Freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose. 

For those of you who have to get up tomorrow and deliver the news, again, having been told, again, you’re not good enough, let me just remind you: 

Well, you didn’t come to this because of somebody telling you you were good enough. Everybody has always told you you’re a pain in the ass who can’t let go.

So don’t let go. Not yet, anyway. Go do what you came for: Get the truth, and make people see it. Remember who you’re helping.

Alice Dreger is a journalist, historian, and the publisher of Local News Blues. She founded East Lansing Info, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news service, and ran the operation for about 10 years. (She is presently managing editor for Heterodox Academy, but the views presented here do not represent that organization.) Read more at the Local News Blues’ contributors page.