Fireside chat between Rebuilding News CEO Steve Waldman, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman, URL Media CEO S. Mitra Kalita and NCRC CDF Executive Director Mac McNeil at the 2025 Just Economy Conference. They discussed reinvesting in local news.
Panelists:
Steve Waldman, CEO, Rebuilding News
Joe Goldman, President, Democracy Fund
S. Mitra Kalita, CEO, URL Media
Moderator:
Mac McNeil, CDF Executive Director, NCRC
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
McNeil
One of the things that we really need to talk about is the importance of local media and local news across the country. And I have some experts here with me, so I’m going to turn it over to them for quick introductions to talk about the organization, and then we’re really going to get into some deep discussions of why this is so important. So Steve, take it away.
Waldman
Hi, great to be here. Thank you. Steve Waldman, I’m the president of something called Rebuild Local News, which is a coalition of about 45 different national and local organizations that work to strengthen local news through public policy.
Goldman
Hi everybody. My name is Joe Goldman. I’m the president of the an organization called the Democracy Fund. We’re a private foundation that works to create a more inclusive, multiracial democracy.
Kalita
Hi everyone. It’s lovely to be with you this morning. My name is Mitra Kalita. I’m the Cofounder and CEO of URL Media that stands for uplift, respect and love. We’re a coalition of 35 Black and Brown media organizations around the country. We share advertising content, and we run a training and recruitment arm. And I also run Epicenter NYC as the publisher. We’re a news outlet in Queens that was formed in the pandemic.
McNeil
Excellent. So thank you all for being here. So I want to start out today speaking with you, Steve, so in this current environment, how endangered is local media, today?
Waldman
We’re in the midst of a nationwide collapse of local media. It’s really profound, severe and rapid. There’s been about a two-thirds decline in the number of reporters across the country in about two decades, an 82% drop in revenue for newspaper advertising. 1,000s of communities have no local news source at all, and those that do have local news sources, you know where new terms have been invented. One of the new terms is ghost newspapers. These are newspapers that are publishing, but they’re not really covering the community. So even in areas where you have, you know, publications, they’re probably doing less, you know, aggressive or substantial coverage. And this is has devastation. This is comes from the the number of factors, but mostly the ad dollars went to the internet and then consolidation and purchase it by hedge funds exacerbated all those so it’s a nationwide problem, but it is particularly severe in low-income communities. It hits harder. It hits harder there, and it affects the ability for people to get both basic information about their lives and healthcare choices and immigration news, but then in the more current context, getting news about what’s happening from the Trump administration and things like that. There are some many hopeful signs too, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, but the context is there’s a real struggle right now that is harming communities. This isn’t just about the jobs for journalists. This is about really undermining the ability of communities to solve their problems.
McNeil
Thank you, sir. You know it’s scary. It really is a scary time when we think about, you know, how media is being controlled. And you know, we never thought that in this country we’d be at this juncture. And so I agree it’s extremely a dangerous situation right now. And Mitra, I’d like to go to you for the next question. And how is local media actively combating fear in targeted communities?
Kalita
It’s a really good question right now. So I think there’s the coverage of the climate of fear, which actually national media have done a good job of capturing. On the local news front, I think it’s important for us, and this is really all of us in this room to think about the protection of our people, right? And so local news, ethnic media, community media, certainly, we’re operating in a climate of fear, but on something, let’s say, like the immigration issue, right? For an outlet like mine in Queens, we’ve been working with communities for years who are in legal limbo, right? And so I think it’s important to kind of nod, and I see, I see folks in the room who are very much a part of the solutions on the ground here. And we cover this, certainly, there is a climate of fear, and there’s a hysteria right now, but there’s also the very real need for us to protect, to help. We’re in service of our communities. And I think for all of us, right, this is obviously what we look at from a coverage perspective, in service of our communities. But this information layer has never felt more important, and so I think there’s two ways people in this room can kind of partner with us on that. One, is there an information layer in everything that we are trying to convey, right? Whether that’s a banking program or legal aid or but this idea of, how are we going to let communities know about this, whether it’s distribution on Instagram or language or I mean, this is where I think local news partners with many organizations like yours. The second is what we are doing individually to support our local media. And you know, this isn’t really something we talk about, but countries that are marching towards authoritarianism, there’s the chilling effect on the press, which I think has also been captured right now. But there’s also the financial devastation of the press, right? And so what you’re seeing in terms of whether that’s DEI dollars, that a URL media, you know, is once upon a time, you know, we were getting, and now we’re not getting, or it’s federal health dollars that used to trickle into health agencies in our hospital systems and resulted in ad dollars for us, or it’s, you know, city deals that were just in again, and that is not coincidental, and so the financial support of our institutions feels as important to cover what’s happening right now and really continue to be in service of our communities.
McNeil
So thank you, Mitra, and you brought up a good point about the financial support. And when I think about it, you know, I think of it as a tool of combating, you know, what’s going on right now. So Joe, I’d like to ask you, like, how is philanthropy prioritizing local media?
Goldman
Yeah, it’s a great question. So the democracy fund joined a new campaign last year called press forward that was launched by the MacArthur and Knight foundations. It’s a really important effort in which philanthropies from around the country have pooled more than a half billion dollars in commitments to support local news. And this is a pretty unprecedented campaign, something that we’ve not seen before, and we’ve been really excited to be part of. I think philanthropy has come together behind this kind of campaign, because, you know, on one hand, we see the remarkable damage that the crisis in local journalism creates for our communities and for our democracy, right? Like what the what the research says is that when you have strong local news, you have higher rates of voting and participation in community life. You have lower levels of polarization and and corruption and waste, and you have a greater sense of efficacy and community, right? And so having strong local journalism matters for the things that philanthropy cares about. And at the same time, you know what philanthropy likes to see is, right, the intersection between a problem that really matters, and solutions that we know can work. And what has happened over the course of the last decade is a remarkable amount of experimentation around the country about kind of how to make a non-commercial form of local news work, nonprofit journalism. And we now know, after a decade of experimentation that these models actually can function. They can really serve communities and and grow in remarkable and dynamic ways. And so for us, having a compelling problem and a solution we know that works, really sets the stage for philanthropy to be able to step in and help to scale scale solutions. So I think it’s been a really good and important moment for for the field.
McNeil
Thank you. Thank you, sir and Mitra. I had the honor of being at the National Press foundation awards, and I saw you win an award for URL media, you and Sarah Lomax. And both of you made some very bold statements in a room full of high profile people, and it was around the Diversity Equity and Inclusion. So how is local media actually dealing with the requests to stay away from the conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion?
Kalita
Thank you, Mac. I mean we, first of all, we use the word diversity. I mean, I think that was considered when that’s considered revolutionary. You know, we’re we’re kind of not on our firmest footing, right? I just want to put that out there. And so the remarks that Mac is referring to, I think that it is incumbent upon us who believe to use the words, but also to be specific about what we mean, right? And in many cases, for outlets like made diversity, for outlets like ours, you know, diversity is our audience, and so while we are in legal compliance with this moment, and I think you know many of our partners and funders and clients and advertisers and the media organizations we work with, you know they have to be following the law. That being said, I can’t scrub my identity off of a website, right? I wake up in the morning, and this is the way I look. And I’m sure, again, I’m looking at this room, and you know exactly what I mean. And so we serve who we serve. We’re very proud of who we serve. And so the specifics that I think about right now are to not fall for kind of DEI as this blanket, you know, doing away with, right? We are a multiracial democracy. This country, for better or worse, really does seem to believe in consumption, and a big part of our markets are diverse markets. And so you’re seeing what’s happening with the companies that are kind of buckling and saying, Oh, we don’t really believe in that. And it’s like, well, then we don’t have to shop there, right? We don’t have to do business with you. And so I do think that there is an ecosystem almost being built, which is, we’ve believed in this since the founding of URL, right? We support Black and Brown businesses. There’s a reason that, you know, when you come to our events, they tend to be at Black restaurants that have a history in their communities, right? We know this history is what we are built upon. If there was ever a moment to lean into that diversity and the richness of that of that diversity, it’s this moment.
McNeil
Thank you. Thank you very much. And you know this is an important conversation. It is an extremely important conversation in the environment that we’re in right now. One thing that I want to say before we yield the stage to Congresswoman Waters, is that the strength of NCRC is that it’s a community of multiple organizations, industries that are coming together for one purpose, and that’s to improve community. And so that is the strength of NCRC. And so Steve, really quickly, I know you and I are working on something that’s extremely important. Can you talk a little bit about the pilot that we’re talking through?
Waldman
Yeah, one of the problems is this business model collapse, and we need to be doing much more creative thinking about the financing aspect of building up community news organizations, which themselves are often small businesses. So we are working, Mitra’s organization, mine and NCRC on a pilot lending vehicle for small media in Black and Hispanic communities to basically get to economic sustainability. It’s really about economic sustainability, because we will not have either good coverage or independence and strength without economic stability. And this is a really first in the nation, really important experiment, because I think if it works, it’s something that we can replicate all across the country.
McNeil
Well, thank you, sir.
