Our Roadmap for Change.

Our associations have come together with a shared purpose and vision to secure funding that will fast-track innovation and provide targeted funds to independently-owned news organizations with fewer than 50 employees – especially those that serve historically underrepresented voices. 

This investment will give much needed relief to critical local news publishers, while providing transformative capacity-building and supporting outlets that are collectively read by tens of millions of readers.

Our envisioned program allows for growth, transformation, and collaboration across the industry. In doing so, we can positively impact diverse communities through the strengthening and modernizing of the local, community-focused publications that serve them.

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Help Our Publishers Build a Foundation for Digital Sustainability

With the support of the Google News Initiative, FELN launched Transformation Tech, an intensive program designed to equip publishers with top-flight coaching and curricula to aid their transition from print to digital revenue streams. Each publisher admitted into the program launches a revenue or growth experiment with the assistance of industry experts and will receive resources to help them build their tech stack, grow their digital audiences or adapt their print-focused sales skills to new digital products. Each graduate will be awarded a $20,000 grant to fund their digital transformation plans.

Milestones:

  • By 2025, FELN will graduate 240 publishers from Transformation Tech.

  • At least 60% of publishers will identify as people of color.

  • More than $4.5 million in grants dispersed through our partnership with the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation.

  • Launch the Transformation Tech Alumni Network to offer continued support and training to publishers.

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Grow Equity and Solve Long-Standing Problems

News Navigators is a pilot program offered by the Fund for Equity in Local News to address a critical challenge that local, independent legacy publishers face, particularly in BIPOC communities — the lack of trusted coaches and consultants who can guide them through their technology and revenue challenges on the way to digital publishing revenues that help their publications become more sustainable.

News Navigators addresses that challenge by training and certifying coaches and consultants from our publishers’ communities to steep them in the best practices for digital publishing. We give those coaches tools to audit publishers’ tech stacks and perform hands-on technical work to improve them. And we seek to nurture the coaches’ relationships with our growing ecosystem of providers that offer critical services to local publishers.

Goals:

  • Train and certify News Navigators (coaches and consultants, a majority who identify as BIPOC) to provide publishers with the best advice and learnings to accelerate their digital transformations while increasing the diversity of coaches in the journalism ecosystem.

  • Pair publishers from AAN, NAHP and NNPA with a News Navigator to receive a comprehensive tech stack audit and financial benchmarks.

  • Enroll publishers in focused coaching with News Navigators to discover the gaps in their digital and technical operations, receive onboarding support in transitioning to trusted ecosystem vendors and fix common, specific technical problems.

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Inspire Collaboration and Provide Ongoing Support

As the Fund for Equity in Local News achieves its goals of helping more publishers achieve their digital transformations to become sustainable to their local communities, we’ll work to connect our publishers to the independent local news ecosystem and assemble more resources to help these publishers navigate entrepreneurship, grow their businesses and serve their communities.

Long-term goals:

  • Create affinity groups to encourage cross-collaboration between publishers from different associations.

  • Forge partnerships with other journalism associations representing other identity-focused community media publishers.

  • Launch more on-demand and cohort-based learning opportunities to support organizational growth, financial planning and leadership best practices.

  • Serve as a “hub” to connect our 500 FELN publishers to ecosystem opportunities, vendors and programming.