New Jersey Civic Information Consortium

About the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium

The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is the nation’s first publicly-funded nonprofit organization providing startup and early stage funding for local news outlets and projects. 

NJCIC was founded in 2018 through bipartisan legislative support and public and foundation funding. The Consortium has awarded nearly $9 million in grants to reinvigorate New Jersey’s news and information landscape, seeking to address underserved communities, foster innovation, and emphasize trust in the transformative power of public and private funding for local journalism.

About the Case Study

Authored by Dickson L. Louie, a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Board of Directors of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and Marisa Porto, Knight Chair of Local News and Sustainability at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the study provides key insights, takeaways, and recommendations for states and organizations seeking to rebuild local news ecosystems and strengthen democracy. 

“Our case study highlights not just the successes of the Consortium but also the lessons we’ve learned in reimagining what local news and civic engagement can achieve,” said Consortium Board Chair and Interim Executive Director, Chris Daggett. “Through partnerships, innovative approaches, and a focus on community impact, we are showing how publicly funded initiatives can address critical public service needs while strengthening democracy.”

The case study also provides recommendations to build on the Consortium’s success, including strengthening university partnerships, expanding training opportunities, fostering collaboration with legacy media, and developing grantee financial sustainability.

“As local news outlets, nationwide, continue to disappear at an alarming rate, giving rise to news deserts, misinformation, and disinformation, the New Jersey model offers a possible response for other states,” said Louie. “Rather than bemoan this loss, a group of dedicated individuals decided to be proactive about it. Taking a bipartisan approach, they worked with the State Legislature to create the Consortium that now systematically supports start-ups and early-stage local news outlets throughout New Jersey, especially in underrepresented communities. In the history of the United States, public-private partnerships have helped find innovative solutions to problems in science, society, and commerce. Why not now with local news, with funding by both the public and private sectors?”

Executive Summary

This paper examines the creation, role and impact of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCIC or, the Consortium), a non-profit entity established by state statute in August 2018 to combat the decline of local news and civic engagement in the state. It was written for NJCIC and from its perspective and does not address the overall impact of their work. Impact is the subject of a separate report completed last year, entitled “2024 Impact Report,” by Hanna Siemaszko and Sarah Stonbely.

The report also includes profiles of four Consortium grantees, to give readers a more in-depth look both at the focus of the Consortium’s grantmaking and the impact of individual grants.

New Jersey is the first state to use state-appropriated funds to address the local news crisis and the rise of news deserts and misinformation by supporting news startup, early-stage, and more established products/outlets that seek to rebuild the community information network and grow the local news ecosystem. Along with Texas, New Jersey has lost the most newspaper journalists in the United States since 2005, when measured on a per capita, population growth-adjusted basis.

After massive layoffs at several local legacy New Jersey newspapers, Free Press, a media advocacy group, with the support of several foundations, initiated an effort in 2016 to reimagine the future of local news in the state. Advocates proposed using funds from the auction of two state-held public television licenses to create an endowment for civic and news startups.

Initial efforts failed after most of the auction money was used to close a state budget gap. However, with strong grassroots support, Free Press successfully lobbied legislators to establish the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. In 2018, the bill was passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy. The state originally allocated $500,000 to the organization in 2020, but each year has added more funding, which now totals $13.5 million since its inception. The organization has added to its state funding with the help primarily of foundations.

The Consortium is governed by a bipartisan 16-member board that includes representatives appointed by the governor (2), the legislative leaders of each party in the state assembly and state senate (4), six member state colleges and universities (6), and the public at large, appointed by the board (4). Its mission is to act as an incubator for local news outlets and fund initiatives that strengthen local journalism, foster civic engagement, and serve the information needs of underserved communities.

By 2024, the Consortium awarded nearly $9 million in grants to almost 60 projects across New Jersey, from rural Warren County to urban Trenton and the coastal town of Atlantic City. With a staff of four, the Consortium is led by long-time local news champion, board chair and interim director Chris Daggett. 

The Consortium works in close coordination with the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, which has developed New Jersey News Commons to monitor and bring together the state’s local news ecosystem for collaboration, training, and tech and advisory support. The Consortium’s work is also supported by outside service providers such as Blue Engine Collaborative and the Documenters program of City Bureau.

The Consortium has supplemented its state appropriations with more than $2 million in foundation funding, some of which came after its designation as a local chapter of Press Forward, a national effort led by MacArthur Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Democracy Fund, that has raised more than $500 million in support of local news in the United States.

Today, the lessons learned from NJCIC’s early years can serve as a model for states that seek to address the local news crisis and increase civic engagement. While other states have passed legislation—for example, tax incentives, fellowship programs, and placement of state advertising dollars—to help local news, New Jersey is the only state that has developed a start-up and early stage, comprehensive, and systematic business model approach through direct financial support.

This paper concludes by identifying 12 key lessons for states to consider as they examine the Consortium’s work, including its success in building partnerships, fostering bipartisan support, and promoting entrepreneurship in underserved communities. Additionally, the paper offers 10 recommendations, from enhancing brand awareness, to leveraging journalism training and developing partnerships with local media, to ensure the future of local news and civic engagement in the Garden State.

Key Lessons

1. Take a systematic, multi-phase approach to develop new enterprises. 
2. Build strategic partnerships and collaborations with key government agencies, civic partnerships, foundations, and academic institutions. 
3. Seek bipartisan support from key state lawmakers and local grassroots community initiatives. 
4. Encourage entrepreneurship to help discover new voices from different communities and generate grassroots support. 
5. Promote civic engagement and encourage public trust by providing accurate, relevant, timely and trustworthy news on local issues and by hosting candidate forums, publishing voter guides and translated coverage of stories for broader accessibility. 
6. Empower underserved communities to meet the evolving needs of communities that exist in news deserts and experience a lack of trust in legacy news media. 
7. Ensure local ownership and hires and build trust in news by ensuring owners are also community stakeholders. 
8. Build a pipeline of journalists engaged in local news by providing support to “organizations that train students, professionals, and community members to produce news and civic information.”
9. Encourage private philanthropy by building a network of private foundations to diversify funding. 
10. Commit to independence in operations by ensuring decisions on grants are made independent of any political official or group and are rooted in a mission to grow trustworthy and community-based news. 
11. Break from the mindset of legacy media by engaging with community members, encouraging innovative business models, using new digital tools and engaging with grassroots organizations. 
12. Re-invest in local communities by helping news organizations re-engage in roles as economic drivers and resource hubs within their communities. 

Recommendations

1. Build brand awareness through co-branding with grantees, increased press mentions, local forums and events. 
2. Increase the focus on sustainability by ensuring grantees develop sustainability plans and assigning business coaching. 
3. Develop deeper university partnerships to ensure a pipeline of trained and qualified journalists, interns and fellows and match student journalists with local news operations. 
4. Support best practices through an infrastructure of collaboration between grantees and media outlets. 
5. Take advantage of national journalism training opportunities to provide education to grantees from national journalism training organizations that provide frameworks, resources, or free trainings that can help grantees grow. 
6. Collaborate with legacy media and in-state news hubs to help increase audiences for NJCIC grantees and reduce news production costs.  
7. Focus on metrics and impact with standardized and rigorous impact-reporting integrated with analytics and competitive market analysis.
8. Champion reimagined local news and civic engagement as a social enterprise by using state-appropriated funds to directly build local news outlets and increase civic engagement. 
9. Advocate for press freedom by advocating for Freedom of Information Act and sunshine laws, especially in the wake of decreasing government transparency and lack of access to public information. 
10. Strengthen the NJCIC team by expanding staff.