Donors pledge half a billion dollars to boost the struggling local news industry

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The MacArthur Foundation is leading a group of donors who have pledge $500 million to help the struggling local news industry

NEW YORK — The MacArthur Foundation is leading a group of donors that have pledged $500 million to help the struggling local news industry, hoping to seed outlets that can make up for those that have closed or been hollowed out over the past two decades.

While led by a $150 million donation by the journalism-focused Knight Foundation, the Press Forward initiative is focusing on the importance of news in communities and is bringing in funders whose primary mission hasn't necessarily been journalism.

“This is hugely important, both practically and symbolically,” said Tim Franklin, director of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill journalism school.

The Carnegie Corp., the Democracy Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and MacArthur are among a group of 20 initial funders. (The Associated Press receives grant funding from several sources for some journalism coverage, as well.)

Philanthropies that recognize the need to strengthen democracy are beginning to see that progress on many different issues depends on the public's understanding of facts, said John Palfrey, MacArthur Foundation president.

Driven largely by a collapse in advertising markets, the number of newspapers in the United States dropped from 8,891 in 2005 to 6,377 last year, according to a Northwestern study. Papers are continuing to close at a rate of two a week, Franklin said. Many that survive, particularly in larger markets, are shells of themselves. The estimated 75,000 journalists who worked at newspapers in 2005 was down to 31,000 last year.

While there are many experimental efforts