New Jersey nonprofit that funds local news awaits state support

From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know.

A New Jersey nonprofit that funds dozens of local news organizations is still waiting to learn whether it will receive state funding this year, raising concerns that some outlets could close.

The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is an independent nonprofit organization established by the state in 2018 to strengthen local journalism and civic information in communities across the Garden State. It awards grants to 50 news groups, including hyperlocal digital news sites, investigative reporting projects, local newspapers, foreign-language media and citizen and youth journalism programs.

Last year, the consortium received $2.5 million from the state, but executive director Lisa Sahulka said so far this year, there has been no word about how much support, if any, will be given. She said if the state does not approve funding for the consortium soon, some local news entities will go out of business.

“Our news organizations reach one in four New Jersey residents; they receive a million visitors to their websites a month,” she said.

Sahulka said New Jersey has one of the lowest ratios of reporters to residents in the country and that the consortium targets communities with little or no news coverage.

“We know that certain communities, minority communities are more likely not be able to fund their media outlets,” Sahulka said.

Craig Richards, publisher of the Hammonton Gazette, said his newspaper covers community news, politics and sports, reaching about 6,000 people every week.

“Larger papers don’t cover our council, our kids, so we’ve got a strong reach in that direction,” he said.

Richards said funding from the consortium allows his company to hire stringers, mostly students, and publish some articles in Spanish.

“A big part of our community, about 26%, 27% of the Hammonton area is Spanish-speaking,” he said. “News and information in their language helps them.”

He said sponsorship and advertising have tightened because circulation at many smaller newspapers has declined, and support for them is vital.

“Community newspapers are the hub of local journalism and many of them need help. They let people know information and share ideas and that draws people closer together,” Richards said. “If we want to hold New Jersey together, the best way to do that is communication, and that means local journalists doing local stories.”

New Jersey state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, D-Somerset, is sponsoring two bills that would provide funding for the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium.

“My goal is to create a stable source of funding,” he said. “The importance of local news coverage in New Jersey cannot be overstated.”

One measure, passed by a Senate committee earlier this month, would require state agencies and departments to spend 30% of their advertising budgets in local newspapers and other local news organizations.

“The state spends millions of dollars on advertising, and so it just seems appropriate that some of that money should be put into our local organizations,” he said.

Zwicker is sponsoring another bill that, if approved, would direct the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority to conduct annual film tax credit auctions, valued at $20 million, and dedicate the proceeds to fund support for the consortium and public broadcasting.

He said coverage of news in communities across the state is important.

“Whether that is a town council meeting, or sports teams at the high schools, or anything else,” Zwicker said. “That’s just a piece of the fabric of information at a time when the federal government has been attacking the national news organizations.”

Sahulka said that less news coverage results in fewer community members understanding local issues, lower voter turnout in elections, and potentially increased loneliness.

“I think it creates mistrust of the government generally,” she said.

She noted that without local journalism, people rely on social media to get their news.

“It leads to an environment that we do not want in New Jersey, this is an environment where people are misinformed, this is an environment where people don’t trust local government, an environment where people are less civically engaged or less likely to vote,” Sahulka said.

She said the decrease in news coverage is a national problem.

“I would say it’s more acute in New Jersey right, but it’s not only in New Jersey,” she said. “We have funded 2,000 interns with the hope that they will want to be reporters, we need to build our media outlet capacity.”

“We want people to receive trustworthy information that informs them. We don’t want them to go to social media to confirm biases that they already have,” she said.

Zwicker said he is hopeful that funding for the consortium will soon be approved either through his pending legislation or by a budget resolution before the state spending plan is formally adopted, which is expected to happen before July 1.

When asked whether any funding for the consortium was planned, a spokesman for the governor said in a brief statement, “We won’t have that final information for a bit.”