Local news needs more than another round of predictions about declining advertising, shrinking staffs and expanding news deserts. According to Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, it needs a different way of thinking about the value of local information and the infrastructure required to sustain it.
Murray has spent her career as a reporter, digital news leader and top editor. Today, she works with entrepreneurs, local publishers, funders and institutions trying to strengthen New Jersey’s local-news ecosystem. Her work also offers a practical example for other states considering how public policy, philanthropy and collaboration could support local journalism without compromising editorial independence.
Collaboration begins with recognizing duplication
Murray traces her belief in collaboration to her days at the Detroit Free Press. Detroit was one of the country’s last two-newspaper towns, with the Free Press and The Detroit News competing intensely while operating under a joint operating agreement that combined business functions.
“I saw the business side working together and collaborating,” Murray said. “But the newsrooms competed heavily, and competition is not a bad thing, and competition is a great thing. And it’s a great thing in journalism, but there’s a lot of areas where it’s just not needed, totally not needed.”
She recalled the annual auto show, where both newspapers dispatched essentially identical teams of reporters, photographers and videographers to cover the same new-car announcements. The resulting work could be valuable, particularly when it involved analysis or specialized reporting, but Murray said the duplication was impossible to ignore.
“Our company was paying for two entire sets of reporters, photographers, videographers to literally do kind of the same thing,” she said. “There was so much duplication. And I saw that again and again and again at the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News.”
That experience led Murray to a central question: Are news organizations always serving their audiences when they compete, or are there areas where collaboration would create more value for the communities they cover? In an industry under economic pressure, the answer may increasingly involve finding ways to share resources without losing the editorial independence or healthy competitive instincts that make journalism better.
Treating local information as a public good
New Jersey’s model grew out of the collapse of the traditional local-news business model. Murray said her center was launched in 2012 after years of layoffs at major news organizations, initially to help entrepreneurs build new local news businesses.
Over time, that work helped produce a larger conversation about what local news needed to survive. Philanthropy was part of the answer, but Murray and others believed the state should recognize access to reliable information as something more than a commercial product.
“Our coalition really looks at local news as a public good,” Murray said. “Access to information is a public good and should be funded like that, like roads and bridges and utilities.”
The result was the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, created through legislation in 2018. It is an independent nonprofit grantmaking body that receives state and private money and regrants it to support the local-news ecosystem. Murray’s center works alongside the consortium by providing training, convenings, grant-application assistance and business-model support.
“We needed stable funding,” Murray said. “And like the rest of the country, we have some philanthropic support. There were some foundations and some major donors giving money to local news, but we needed something bigger than that.”
The model is not a replacement for advertising or commercial local media. In fact, Murray pushed back on the notion that advertising is no longer important. New Jersey has many small news organizations, and she said the majority of their revenue still comes from advertising. But the state’s approach recognizes that a healthy information ecosystem may require multiple sources of support, including philanthropy, policy and local commercial revenue.
Guardrails matter as much as funding
Any public-support model raises an immediate question: Can government funding coexist with independent journalism? Murray said editorial independence was a concern from the beginning, particularly among news organizations considering whether to apply for grants.
“We don’t want to take state money if the state’s going to tell us what to do or interfere in our work,” she said. “And I will say that we’ve got five, six years of grantmaking under the consortium’s belt now, and this has never happened.”
The consortium’s safeguards include an independent and diverse 16-member governing board, language in the legislation prohibiting state editorial interference, and grant contracts that also explicitly bar interference. Murray said the board does not direct grantees’ editorial work, and grantees interact with consortium staff rather than board members.
“It is stipulated in the legislation that created the consortium that there is no editorial interference allowed by the state,” Murray said. “Additionally, every grant contract specifies that there is no editorial interference at all allowed by the consortium.”
Murray believes the concept can be replicated elsewhere, with one significant change. New Jersey’s support has come through annual appropriations, creating uncertainty and requiring advocates to lobby for funding each year. A more durable model, she said, would establish stable funding through legislation, a dedicated revenue source or an investment of one-time public windfalls.
“If you’re going to replicate this, it’s got to be a secure, stable form of funding that’s legislated in,” Murray said. “I would not advocate that any other state do this through an annual appropriation.”
Listening to communities and local businesses
Murray remains optimistic because she sees entrepreneurs and community-minded people pursuing new ways to serve local audiences. But she also believes journalists launching local news businesses must listen to local businesses as closely as they listen to readers.
“Most of the 400-ish news organizations in the state have revenues of $500,000 or less,” Murray said. “And actually, a majority of those have revenues of $250,000 or less. And the majority of that revenue comes from advertising.”
She pointed to Red Bank Green, where local leaders heard from businesses seeking a faster and more effective way to promote daily specials, deals and coupons. That feedback led to a new advertising product designed around a specific local need.
“It’s just as important to listen to your local business community on what you could do for them and then develop products to meet that,” Murray said. “They do it because they care about their local community. They’re passionate about local democracy, and they want to make a difference.”
For Murray, that combination of community commitment, experimentation and new voices is the reason local news still has a future, even if it looks different from the industry that came before it.
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