Can Treating Journalism Like Public Infrastructure Fix Our Broken Media?

In September 2025, when ICE agents began rolling through Chicago neighborhoods as part of an operation the Department of Homeland Security called Operation Midway Blitz, the city’s residents needed someone to tell them what was happening. Not federal officials, who would refuse to disclose who was being arrested or why. Not the White House, whose press releases ran the propaganda, not the receipts. Just a reporter willing to stand outside a courthouse, count the unmarked vehicles, and write down what she saw.

Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom that covers neighborhoods most legacy outlets ignore, had four reporters shot with pepper balls and tear-gassed by federal agents at a Broadview detention facility. It joined other Chicago news organizations in suing the Department of Homeland Security over First Amendment violations. They put up “know your rights” guides, launched a WhatsApp channel for ICE updates, partnered with other Chicago newsrooms to track sightings on Signal. Their analysis of federal ICE data eventually showed that more than 60 percent of ICE arrests in Illinois did not involve a criminal charge or conviction.

Some of that work, Block Club co-founder and publisher Shamus Toomey told me, was paid for by the state of Illinois. Not directly—Illinois doesn’t tell newsrooms what to cover, and you should be glad it doesn’t. But in 2024, the state passed a refundable tax credit that gives qualifying newsrooms $15,000 per local journalist on staff, capped at $150,000. Block Club got the maximum. The money didn’t transform their journalism, but it paid for the freelance hire, the second intern… the extras a story of this scale demanded. “When the ICE immigration enforcement really ramped up in Chicago,” Toomey said, “we had the additional resources to put more people out on the street, to maybe hire a freelance reporter to be out there.”

That tax credit is one of the most transformative funding models happening in American journalism right now, and almost nobody is talking about its potential to help address the issues with today’s news business.

Journalism’s Broken Funding Model

The collapse of American journalism, and how it’s funded, has been a long time coming. For most of the 20th century, local newspapers ran on print advertising—classifieds, grocery inserts, car dealerships, real estate listings. That revenue subsidized the actual reporting. Then Craigslist took the classifieds starting in the late 1990s, swiftly followed by Google and Facebook thereafter. Newspaper print ad revenue collapsed by 92 percent from 2000 to 2023, from $73.2 billion to $6 billion, while Google and Meta together took in more than half of all U.S. digital ad spending through most of the past decade.The pivot-to-digital theory said publishers could rebuild on web traffic, subscriptions, and the ad dollars that came with both. That theory depended on Big Tech sending readers to news sites. In 2022, Meta started deprioritizing news on Facebook, where many publishers had built their entire audience strategy. Google followed by rolling out AI-generated summaries that answer queries directly in search results. According to Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report, the top 100 U.S. newspapers have lost more than 45 percent of their pageviews in four years. Simply, the audience that was supposed to fund the rebuild is being routed around the news entirely.

Philanthropy stepped in to plug some of the gap. It built ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, and it funded a national network of nonprofit local newsrooms. But foundation money can’t scale to fill a multi-billion-dollar revenue hole, and most of it flows to a handful of big-name outlets in major markets. The small-town papers covering the actual news deserts don’t have grant-writing staff or institutional connections to compete for it.

The old business model is gone. The digital replacement had been hollowed out by the platforms it depended on. The philanthropy backstop only reached so far. A 2025 study from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack found that the U.S. has lost 75 percent of its local journalists per capita since 2002. More than a thousand counties no longer have the equivalent of a single, full-time, local reporter.

The obvious policy, which has largely failed, has been to try to make Big Tech pay up. The federal Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) has been introduced repeatedly since 2021 and never made into law. Canada passed its Online News Act in 2023 to force the platforms to compensate publishers; Meta responded by blocking news entirely on Facebook and Instagram in Canada. California tried its own version. From July through September 2024, Google spent $10.7 million lobbying state officials. That made it the single biggest spender in Sacramento that quarter, ahead of typical heavyweights like the petroleum and hospital lobbies. Lawmakers eventually scrapped the bill for a voluntary deal with Google that, by January 2026, had been cut roughly in half when both Newsom and Google walked back their commitments.

Matt Pearce, who runs policy at Rebuild Local News and was president of the NewsGuild local in Los Angeles during the California fight, watched it happen up close. “They were running TV ads opposing the legislation during the Olympics,” he told me. “So we’re talking about real politics.”

The federal picture has gotten worse since. In July 2025, Trump signed a rescissions package that clawed back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB itself voted to dissolve in January 2026 after a 58-year run as the conduit for federal funding to public media. Stations in rural and tribal areas are now weighing whether they can stay on the air.

If federal action is dead and Big Tech can outspend any state legislature that comes for it, what’s actually working? The answer turns out to be states investing their own money on local journalism.

Local Governments Funding Local News

While Congress sat on the JCPA and California’s bill got steamrolled, six state legislatures have spent the past five years building a different model: programs that put public dollars to work supporting local reporters. According to Rebuild Local News’s inaugural annual report, those six states have channeled more than $129 million in public funding to local reporters from 2020 through 2025. Another $74 million is projected for 2026, and 15 more states have proposals in motion.

The models vary. New Jersey was first. The state legislature created the Civic Information Consortium in 2018; the first grants went out in 2021. An independent board awards grants in partnership with six public universities, and state law explicitly bars editorial control by the state or the universities. Total grantmaking has now topped $12 million. New York went bigger and more recent. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a $30 million annual newspaper and broadcast jobs tax credit into law in 2024, a $90 million commitment over three years. Applications finally opened in February 2026. Most recently, in March 2026, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed SB151. The bill establishes a $15,000-per-journalist tax credit and, in a national first, a separate credit for the printers that physically produce local newspapers. California funds a fellowship program at University of California, Berkeley, recently renewed for another $15 million. Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota have bills in motion.

Pearce called these efforts “one of the few places… where you’re seeing proactive forward progress rather than this kind of unrelenting story of everything getting harder.”

And then there’s Illinois.

At Block Club, a 42-person operation with more than 30 qualified journalists, the $150,000 funds what otherwise wouldn’t have happened. The marginal new reporter. The second summer intern when there are two strong applicants instead of one. The freelance reporter at Broadview during the ICE enforcement, when Block Club needed more bodies on the street than its full-time staff could spare. “It’s given us a lot of just the ability to say yes for things above and beyond what we normally could do,” Toomey told me. When the second-year application portal opened at midnight in late January, Toomey was on it like he was buying concert tickets. “I had that same rush,” he said.

This is what the Local Journalism Sustainability Act does, multiplied across the state. Illinois passed the law in 2024 and started disbursing money in 2025: $5 million a year over five years, $15,000 in refundable credits per qualified journalist retained, $10,000 for each new hire, capped at $150,000 per outlet. Rebuild Local News’s implementation analysis of state data shows that in the first year more than $4 million was awarded to 55 news organizations operating more than 120 newspapers, broadcasters, and digital sites. None of the money went to Gannett, Alden Global Capital, or any other major media chain.

Tim Franklin, who co-leads Northwestern Medill’s State of Local News Report and serves on the bipartisan Illinois Local Journalism Task Force that helped shape the bill, told me he had two main worries going in. One was that the money would concentrate in Chicagoland. The other was that the conglomerates would absorb most of it. Neither happened. About half the funding went to outlets outside Chicagoland, where the crisis is sharpest: between 2024 and 2025, Illinois went from five news deserts to nine. “While there have been some kinks for sure,” Franklin said, “this is actually working better than I thought it was going to work.”

The tax credit is one piece of a wider Illinois package, shepherded by State Sen. Steve Stadelman, a former 25-year TV news anchor at Rockford’s WTVO Channel 17. The Strengthening Community Media Act, in effect since January 2025, requires Illinois media companies to give 120 days’ notice before selling. The notice goes to employees, the county, the state’s economic development agency, and any in-state nonprofit that might want to buy. The point is to give a local owner a chance to bid before a chain moves in. SB213, signed in 2025, requires state agencies to disclose where their advertising budgets go, with the first annual report due in October 2026. His Illinois Journalism Preservation Act has not yet advanced.

One funding change won’t save local news alone

None of this is enough on its own, however, and not enough to reinvigorate an entire industry.

Five million dollars a year in Illinois is real money for the outlets that get it, but it doesn’t reverse a 75 percent collapse in local journalists since 2002. “We are, in some ways, living in the version of this that doesn’t work,” Pearce told me. “The United States has the most market-centric and kind of privatized version of a local information ecosystem in the world. We’re living the failure right now.”

Then there’s the ownership problem. Tax credits keep journalists employed at whatever newsrooms still exist, but they don’t stop a hedge fund from buying a community paper and gutting it. Illinois’s sale-notice law, an attempt at what’s known in the industry as a “replanting” strategy, is the closest tool to an ownership intervention. But it’s only a year old, and Franklin told me it’s too early to know whether it’ll work. An early test last fall, when a newspaper publisher in central and southern Illinois sold eight of its Illinois papers to a Kentucky-based company, raised real questions about how it’ll be enforced.

And there’s an equity gap. Payroll-based credits favor newsrooms with traditional W-2 staff. Freelance-heavy outlets, ethnic media, and independent creators get less benefit per dollar than an outlet the size of Block Club does. Grant-based models like New Jersey’s are better suited to fill that gap.

“I don’t think it’s a silver bullet,” Toomey said, “but it is another piece of the puzzle.” He didn’t think government funding could solve the whole thing anyway. “Ultimately, you need to have a news organization that people want to read and find it valuable.” That’s the strongest version of the argument, and the most honest one. State tax credits buy some newsrooms time. Building readership takes longer.

Pearce’s cleanest argument is the Hollywood one: Many states already pay millions in tax credits to film and TV production companies that shoot there. It’s received bipartisan support. Nobody calls it socialism. “Many states in the U.S. have already established that they are willing to subsidize local media production because they think it’s important in their state,” Pearce told me, “just as long as it’s not for community news.”

Rebuild’s long-term goal is to funnel roughly a billion dollars a year to newsrooms across the nation, comparable to what Georgia alone now pays out for film and TV production. The country just hasn’t decided that journalism holding local governments accountable deserves the same public investment as the next superhero movie filming in Atlanta.

Part of why this is a hard sell is that Americans got used to news being free. Broadcast TV and radio came over public airwaves at no charge because broadcasters had to serve the public interest to keep their licenses. Congress has subsidized newspaper postage since 1792. Public broadcasting covered what commercial outlets wouldn’t, until Trump and Congress killed its funding last summer. Big Tech ate the ad market. Now readers see paywalls, AI summaries, and an industry that can’t afford its own reporters. The question “why my money, why now?” is fair. But the rebuild doesn’t happen without people calling state legislators, paying for subscriptions, treating local reporting as worth funding.

Pearce knows progress will be slow and unglamorous. Every iteration of these models requires its own local coalition (typically some mix of state press association, journalist union, civic funders, and individual publishers). The NewsGuild fight at the Los Angeles Times took more than a year to win recognition at one workplace, then several years more before other Southwest newsrooms joined. “There’s no major change that is likely to come with one law,” he said. “Success to me is going to look like a snowball of a lot of experimentation in a lot of different places.”

While Congress is paralyzed and Google and Meta still outmaneuver any state that tries to make them pay, six states have figured out how to put public money behind local reporters. The model exists. The first-year data is in. The question is what happens next.