We are pleased to announce that Tiny News Collective has received a transformative grant of $2.275 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to boost our internal infrastructure and the services we provide to community-based media entrepreneurs. This historic grant is designed to nourish the seeding of grassroots media-making and news entrepreneurship and will allow TNC to provide catalytic funding to Collective members to support their growth and sustainability.

The grant is part of MacArthur’s latest $20 million commitment in grants to revitalize local news, part of its “Local News Big Bet” announced last year that will invest $150 million in new grantmaking to local news over five years as part of Press Forward.

“Our grantmaking supports a range of organizations working to strengthen nascent and emerging local news ecosystems and their leaders, who innovate in these spaces, with tools, resources, and funding,” said Silvia Rivera, MacArthur’s director of local news. “These investments are part of a collective effort to ensure that local communities have steady access to reliable and trustworthy information.”

The funding will allow TNC to enhance our comprehensive support system for news founders, including leadership development, legal aid, back-office services and micro-grants. Tiny News’ members comprise a national network of startup and hyperlocal news organizations that are diversifying news ownership, filling information gaps in communities that have been neglected or harmed by conventional media, and making news entrepreneurship accessible to founders who bring a range of professional, education, socioeconomic and lived experiences and a deep commitment to their communities to their enterprises. 

TNC will use the funding to:

1. Provide micro-grants to TNC members to help them develop their leadership skills and build their capacity. The funds will also be used to provide assistance for members’ immediate startup needs and spark collaborative innovation among members. Nearly a third of the MacArthur funding will be re-granted to founders. This investment from MacArthur will help us seed the TNC Spark Fund that supports professional development and networking that will knit these entrepreneurs more closely together with the journalism field and with their communities.
2. Build TNC’s infrastructure and capacity to support our growing community of members while continuing to lean into the mutual aid ethos that makes TNC distinct. With more capacity, we can intentionally grow our geographic scope and build local clusters of indie publishers, with an emphasis on underserved markets. We believe this will help transform infrastructure in the journalism field both on the local and national level. 
3. Partner with other journalism support organizations (JSOs) and experts in journalism and civic engagement to provide more services to our members. We believe there needs to be a continuum of support, with multiple pathways for founders to find out what works best for their business and communities. 

“We are so grateful for this investment into the work we do at Tiny News Collective to support early-stage news founders,” said Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, executive director of TNC. “These entrepreneurs play a critical role in replanting local news and information outlets in communities across the country, and they are an essential part of the future of local news.”

This support will allow TNC to expand and enhance what we can offer to entrepreneurs in their earliest stages of forming and becoming trusted sources of information and connection for their communities. As our network grows, the opportunity for deeper collaboration and shared learning increases. The experimentation that happens within the Collective will provide a model for the rest of the industry to address its historic inequity.

Together with our members, TNC will learn more about the evolving challenges and opportunities that news entrepreneurs face and will share those insights with the field at large to help build a better understanding of this fragile-yet-indispensable part of the industry.