If you’re running a small local news outlet right now, it can feel like help is everywhere — and nowhere at once.

Over the past decade, the network of organizations designed to support local journalism has exploded. Funders have mobilized. Intermediaries have emerged to train, mentor and regrant. Consultants now specialize in everything from audience development to business modeling.

This growth signals progress. It reflects philanthropy’s long-overdue recognition that local journalism is vital civic infrastructure. But for many small and startup outlets — especially those serving communities of color, immigrants and rural regions — this new ecosystem can feel less like a support system and more like a maze.

The irony is painful: Even as the field of “journalism support organizations” grows more sophisticated, many of the outlets it serves are barely surviving.

A system built to help that still leaves people behind

In theory, the system should work: Funders supply resources; intermediaries channel them efficiently; publishers gain training, networks and financial resilience.

In practice, the incentives and structures often fail to reach the people doing the hardest, most essential work.

• An Indigenous publisher who spent years in mentorship and capacity-building programs told me she had to put her newsroom on hiatus after taking a full-time job to pay bills and care for her children.
• A Black publisher — an active participant in multiple revenue labs and funder-sponsored audits — went on food stamps last week.
• Another publisher said that despite participating in both a university-based advertising lab and a philanthropic revenue initiative, she’s preparing to step down as a full-time publisher to find a higher-paying job. Burnout, exhaustion and financial strain have made the work unsustainable.

These aren’t isolated anecdotes. They expose a pattern: a system designed to teach sustainability without actually funding it.

The good map problem

The growing list of journalism support organizations is impressive. The new Journalism Support Exchange — JSX in short — , launching this fall with Press Forward’s backing, will provide a searchable directory of hundreds of groups offering help with everything from technology to legal advice. It joins tools like LION Publishers’ directory of Journalism Support Organizations and the Institute for Nonprofit News’ resources for nonprofits.

These efforts matter. But a map, no matter how detailed, can’t help publishers if they don’t have gas in the tank — or if the directions all lead to more unpaid labor in the name of “capacity building.”

Many community-rooted publishers don’t speak the language of philanthropy. They don’t have development staff or the time to decipher what counts as “technical assistance,” “capacity building” or “organizational readiness.” They’re running newsrooms and side hustles simultaneously. For them, the ecosystem’s complexity can feel less empowering and more exhausting.

What they need most isn’t another map — it’s a compass: guidance that helps them know which kind of support fits their stage of growth, and real investment that acknowledges their labor and time as valuable.

The missing middle: coordination and capital

The tension between funders and local outlets isn’t just cultural — it’s structural.

Funders tend to think in terms of programmatic investment: supporting training, research, or collaborative projects that can be evaluated and scaled. But what many publishers actually need is operational capital — the ability to pay themselves, hire staff and survive long enough to build those capacities.

Intermediary organizations like The Pivot Fund, Tiny News Collective, Listening Post Collective, and others were created to close that gap — to identify and support community-trusted outlets that larger funders can’t easily reach. But even among intermediaries, there’s duplication and competition. Each is competing for the same philanthropic dollars, often to fund overlapping forms of training or regranting.

As a result, small publishers bounce from cohort to cohort, program to program, collecting certificates and slide decks, but not enough resources to build sustainable newsrooms.

The system, in short, rewards activity over outcomes. It measures outputs — labs completed, partnerships formed — but not whether publishers can still afford to publish.

A call for coordination and courage

Rebuilding local news shouldn’t be a race for proximity to funders. It should be a coordinated effort to strengthen the communities that journalism exists to serve.

Funders can help by rewarding collaboration, not competition, among intermediaries. That means encouraging organizations to share data, cross-refer grantees and articulate clearly where each fits along the support continuum — from early incubation to long-term growth.

It also means embracing the unglamorous work of direct investment. There’s no sustainability without stability. And there’s no stability without money that pays for people’s time, care and creativity.

If philanthropy is serious about saving local news, it must fund what publishers actually need, not just what looks strategic in a grant report.

Finding the way forward

The local news field has never had more energy or infrastructure — and that’s cause for optimism. But the distance between the people making the decisions and the people doing the work remains wide.

We don’t just need more programs, directories or labs. We need alignment — a shared understanding that training and support only matter if they translate into livable wages, operational stability and community impact.

The future of local news depends not on how many resources we can map, but on how many newsrooms can truly sustain themselves once they find them.

Because a strong map only matters if everyone can afford to stay on the road.