- Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

We're talking media leadership with someone who lives it every day.

She is Dale Anglin, who is Director of Press Forward.

And as the website is up, Dale will tell us what it is.

Dale, thank you for joining us.

- Thank you very much for being here.

- Talk about Press Forward, it's an important initiative.

- Press Forward is a donor collaborative.

We're now over 90 foundations in the country who are raising money and building awareness about the need for local news.

News is, in journalism, in local context, are incredibly important for our public safety, for our democracy, for understanding your neighbors.

And in the past, philanthropy was not needed to support news, but now it is as revenue streams have changed.

And so we are guiding a group of over 90 funders and chapters in the country to help people understand the need for that, how to raise money for that, and then how to deploy those funds and ways to support outlets.

- So as we listen to Dale, by way of background, you can look at our programming.

You know who we are, we're a 501c3, which means we're a nonprofit, Dale has a background in philanthropy for many years, and previously was connected to two foundations in actually Victoria Foundation in New Jersey, in New Jersey, a major philanthropic organization.

Also a New Community Corporation in Newark and the Community Foundation of New Jersey, another on the board for years there.

That is another philanthropic organization.

Basically, Dale, this is what I like to do, engage people, interview people, but why am I spending 60 to 70% of my time raising money?

Is that just the way it has to be?

- Okay, unfortunately, yes right now.

If you were a typical news outlet in the past, frankly, you were usually in a for-profit.

And so you had ad revenue, and frankly, ad revenue, it fueled the news media system for the last 100 years.

- That's right.

- And with the internet and many other things, by the way, I'm not just blaming the internet.

Sometimes, news outlets in the past didn't really reinvest in themselves in order to keep up.

And so on the end, we are at the place now, where something like 80% of the former ad revenue went to other sources.

And so what's left for for-profit and nonprofit entities in this space is you've gotta find other ways to fund yourself.

There are now lots of examples around the country, whether you're a nonprofit or for-profit.

By the way, we are agnostic.

We believe you need both in the news business, although those for-profits are not always very profitable.

But there are ways to raise money, to diversify your revenue.

That's what we talk about all the time.

Ads, and memberships, and supports, and events, and donations from big and small donors.

But the bottom line is you do have to spend your time figuring out how to raise those revenue sources, cultivate those donors, and that is the type of business that you were not in 25 years ago.

- How important, Dale, from your perspective, is it for media organizations, news organizations, organizations like ours who do public policy to be truly independent, while we're dependent upon resources, private dollars, philanthropic dollars, corporate foundation dollars, and for public broadcasting, some of that is government money.

How the heck do we- - Yeah, yeah, I know.

It's not an easy mix, but there are lots of now hundreds of years old ethical standards in journalism about how you report news, when you do that, how you talk about your sources or not.

And frankly, we are trying to make sure that as many outlets as possible understand, and we we're making sure that foundations and donors understand those ethical standards are there for a reason, and we have to maintain those and, in fact, strengthen them in some cases.

And we'd have to train up, frankly, the public, on understanding when you are doing that original local nonpartisan reporting and when you're getting opinion pieces that could be partisan in some different ways, right?

- Why is that important, Dale?

Sorry for interrupting.

- Because we...

I tell people one thing that the American public still agrees on, there's not much these days, is original, local, trusted reporting.

We need local news for public safety reasons.

When you had hurricanes in North Carolina and fires in California, we needed to understand where to go, or where not to go, or what was happening.

We live in a community for a reason.

We wanna know what's happening in that community, be it sports at the school, or our mayor, what's happening with our mayor, or just what's good happening with our neighbors down the street.

We have chapters, half of our chapters are in, quote, red states.

When I go into those states, there is no debate about the need for local original reporting.

Everybody wants it.

The question is how to pay for it now, now that ad revenue is not the only source of income.

And we have lots of examples around the country where people are finding multiple... We're in an experimental revitalization stage, basically, for the news industry.

It was funded one way and ran one way for 100 years or more.

It is now shifted, there's no question of the shift.

The question is: What does it look like when we come out of this?

And we, in philanthropy, are trying to help outlets and other foundations understand that they have a role to play in this revitalization.

- Recently, I was up on the campus of my alma mater.

I did my undergraduate work at Montclair State University.

Montclair State University of New Jersey is one of many institutions of higher learning.

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rowan University, Kean University, and Rutgers University, part of a consortium.

And the academic piece, the higher ed piece, is one of the entities in that consortium, the New Jersey.

I wanna get this right, Dale.

The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, we're putting up the website right now.

That is an organization that works in partnership with Press Forward, the Press Forward Initiative.

Explain what that consortium is and why it's so important to everything we've been talking about for 10 minutes or so.

- So New Jersey, we have something called chapters in Press Forward.

We have 36 chapters now in about 29 states and growing.

And New Jersey is one of our first chapters, one of our best chapters, and frankly one of our most organized chapters because they have been doing this work to work together.

What we tell people is, if you have a...

If you need to revitalize an ecosystem, you need all sorts of partners at the table.

And so chapters start with foundations.

So the New Jersey Community Foundation helps start this one, and Montclair State Foundation actually helps start it.

But we also just take lots of other stakeholders, universities, libraries, all of them around a table, helping to think through what should your...

Frankly, what does your current news ecosystem look like?

Does it have everything in it that you want?

Probably not.

Are all communities covered in the ways they want?

Probably not.

And how might you change, grow, adjust what you have.

And so it turns out, for example, with New Jersey, there was a lot of news in the north part of Jersey.

I lived there for 20 years.

My husband taught at Rutgers.

But there's not a lot of news in the south part of Jersey.

- That's right.

- The very far south of Jersey, right?

So they're spending concentrated time doing that.

But I will just say New Jersey has been at this for quite a while.

They started before Press Forward even was a thought.

So we have been following their lead sometimes on things that they're doing, the way they have put their consortium together, the way they have concentrated their dollars on parts of the state at different times.

You can't do everything all at once.

The way they have spent a lot of time.

I love what they do, going into community and talking to them about: How do you get news?

What would you like?

What would you like to see better?

And then deciding what to do, it's not an on high, I'm gonna tell you how you watch your news.

It's what do you think you need, and how do you think we can work together to make that happen?

They have been masters at that and we love them for that.

- So, devil's advocate question, okay?

So, someone might say, "You know what?

Adubato, why are you doing this media leadership thing?"

Like, what?

I'll consume the information I want to consume on the social media platform that I like, the algorithms there.

They know who I am, they know what I wanna read, and what I read tells me, "I'm right."

- Yeah, yeah.

- What's the problem with that?

From a large-scale, representative democracy, the health of our representative democracy point of view, not so esoteric, pretty real stuff.

Please, Dale.

- Yeah, it just turns out that I use the term that when our country was founded, we now use the term citizen and we call it a noun.

I call it a verb.

It turns out that to keep our democracy or our republic, you have to citizen.

And to citizen, you have to understand the world that you live in.

You have to understand your elected officials.

You have to understand issues that are happening, good, bad or whatever, and then you decide where you fit on those issues.

To understand all of that information and make sense of it, that's what news has done for us in the past.

We now have lots of information, but it turns out some of that information coming through whatever social media platform you like or dislike is partisan or it is a person's opinion.

It is not just the facts.

And the algorithms, unfortunately, don't help with that, right?

They feed you what you think you want, but it turns out when we had newspapers in the past, you might be reading a part of the newspaper that you liked, but you got exposed to parts of the newspaper you didn't like.

Or you might add, read an article that you might normally not have read, but because it was adjacent to the one that you liked, you read it.

Now, we don't have that.

- Yeah.

- It's all divided in a way that is not helpful.

It turns out, when you talk to people on the ground, there's lots of experiments around this.

When you ask them about national issues, they immediately get into arguments.

And that was, by the way, before the last administration.

That was just in general.

When you talk to them about local issues, it's a very different conversation.

Yeah, well, I know that person.

Yeah, of course I know that they did X, Y, and Z. I like that, even though I may disagree with them or be of a different party than them.

We have to figure out ways to continue to engage our civic side of our life.

And that is incredibly important, it turns out, for our big D Democracy.

And so we have to have local news.

The question is: What's the best way to have it and how to solve and how to support it?

- To Dale's point, please go on our website, steveadubato.org, and look at the previous interview we did with Dr. Eddie Glaude at Princeton and his book "We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For."

And it strikes me that I know the term citizen is being used by Dale Anglin.

But citizen leader.

- Citizen leader.

- We're leaders, we're the citizens- - We are.

- We've been looking for.

- We created the country.

So many different things that people read in history books are citizen leaders led, or created, or came up with the idea.

In order to do that, you have to be knowledgeable about things that are happening in the world, and in our US, and in our communities.

And that's what we're trying to make sure we preserve and make it... And I tell people we wanna build it back, but we wanna build it back better.

- Dale, let me ask you this.

You have New Jersey roots, I talked about it before that previously.

- Yeah.

- Associate Director for Programs at the Victoria Foundation; Director of Resource Development, New Community Corporation in Newark, a terrific not-for-profit.

Making a difference on the ground with people, particularly in the Central Ward of the city of Newark every day.

And also Community Foundation of New Jersey, Hans Dekker and the great team over there.

I mean, how the heck do you wind up leading Press Forward?

How does that happen?

- So actually, it starts in Jersey.

When I'm working at the Victoria Foundation, I worked mostly on education, and children, and family issues.

There were some things happening in the city in 2010.

I will not name the name of- - Well, hold on, the city would be Brick City.

- The city would be Brick City.

- I knew right away when you said this.

See, only certain people will say the city and not think we're talking about Manhattan.

I knew you meant Newark right away, go ahead, go ahead.

- Well, in Brick City, there was some things happening around education there, big.

And we had lost our last education reporter.

And he was gonna go off and do great things, let me be clear, and I gave him literally a small grant, I think less than $20,000 to say, "Could you still cover Newark (Dale laughing) so that we can get some basic news, so parents understand when things are changing with their school systems?"

And out of that then came a bigger grant.

Now, Chalkbeat is there.

It is a news outlet that focuses exclusively on education.

I'm really proud that that was my last grant before I left Newark and it's still there.

And frankly, I kind of got the bug about why important... Why news and information, no matter what thing, what strategy you have in philanthropy, you'd be supporting the arts, or climate change, or economic development.

But how do you know what's happening in that space if you don't have good news and information?

So when I get to Cleveland and I joined the Cleveland Foundation, we started a journey.

We didn't also fund news.

We started a journey thinking about what could we do differently in Cleveland around news.

I ended up helping start something called Signal, which is our online news outlet for the state.

It's in four cities now.

We helped create something called The Buckeye Flame, which is the only in Ohio statewide, LGBTQ newspaper newsletter.

We helped bring, with leadership of another foundation here, the Gun Foundation, something called The Marshall Project, which focuses is on criminal justice reform.

And so you just... We were able to create a portfolio of outlets here that did not exist before.

And frankly, the legacy media, which was great, we have a great public media here, but it wasn't enough.

It wasn't satisfying everybody, right?

We did the research to show that.

And I did that for about five or six years in addition to a lot of other things.

And so when this Press Forward opportunity came up about a year ago, it combined things that I really liked.

It was news and information on a broad scale.

I'd run a lot of donor collaboratives at this point.

I ran our COVID Fund in Cleveland and in the Cuyahoga County for a number of years.

Unfortunately, we had to do that.

And so it just combined things that made sense to me.

And so what I tell everybody now is of our 90 foundations, 2/3 of them had never funded news before or had barely funded news before.

And they definitely didn't have a strategy around journalism.

Everybody starts there 'cause philanthropy didn't have to fund it in the past.

What we do is make the case for news that no matter what you fund, news should be the second thing you're funding.

You should include it as a part of your strategy.

So if you are an arts funder or an economic development funder, make sure you're funding something in news in those spaces because how else do you understand what's happening in that place?

- Yeah, and you know what?

I feel like I'm standing next to Dale in the choir right now because there are so many...

Listen, this isn't crying the blues about raising money.

- I know, I know.

- It's just what it is.

But there are foundations we've dealt with over the years.

We'll say things like, "We, quote, don't fund media."

- I know.

- And we'll say, "Okay, but we only fund organizations that have direct impact on people."

And we'll say, "Yeah, but..." - You do.

- We can help amplify and raise a public awareness around those issues.

No, it's only direct.

And I think to myself, what Dale is saying is of course you fund the organization that's on the ground making a difference.

But highlighting those issues and those organizations making a difference is important.

I'm off my soapbox.

One to 10, Dale, the work you're doing right now, the level of passion that you feel for making a difference at Press Forward as it relates to particularly local media, is one to 10.

- An 11.

- Okay.

(Steve laughing) - I just...

I'm in the middle of an incredible opportunity and time, when it turns out I described local news almost like water.

We always thought it was gonna be there and we never asked where it came from.

And it turns out it's not always gonna be there.

And in fact, it's gone in some places and everybody wants it back.

And so how do we figure out a way to bring it back?

And one last thing I'll say is that I don't compare us against national media.

It turns out there's layers in the media.

You need national, you need local.

In fact, something like 3/4 of national stories originate locally.

We need these layers of... You need social media now, right?

But if you look at social media, they're often amplifying things that they read in local media.

- That's right.

- So, it's a base, but we have to have it as the base.

- And we also need our friends at NJ Spotlight News every night in New Jersey.

Check them out, they're doing important work.

I cannot thank you enough.

Dale Anglin is the Director of Press Forward.

Their website has been up.

Also, the website for the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium.

Check that work out as well.

We are not... the enemy of the people.

- No, - We're just trying to do our job every day.

Thank you, Dale.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

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