The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has awarded a $3.6 million, three-year grant to the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern to expand the University’s work to strengthen local news and scholastic journalism in Illinois.
The grant provides funding for Medill to create a shared services hub that offers expert help and infrastructure support to news outlets in the Chicago region. The grant also will allow Medill to continue its efforts to bolster coverage of state government, propel the practice of solutions journalism and improve high school media programs.
The new hub, which will expand the Medill Local News Accelerator, will work directly with local news organizations in the Chicago area on critical needs like consumer research, audience strategy, product development, revenue diversification and legal services.
The hub is an outgrowth of Medill’s Metro Media Lab and Local News Accelerator programs, also funded by McCormick. Under those programs, Medill has been working with Chicago-area news outlets since 2020 on projects to help fortify the region’s local news ecosystem and improve coverage of matters relevant to its residents. Those programs have supported more than two dozen news organizations in the region serving more than 5 million Illinoisians.
“We’re grateful to the McCormick Foundation for its continued investment, and for its confidence in us to help grow original, reliable local news and information at this critical moment,” said Charles Whitaker, dean of Medill. “This new shared services hub will help us provide much-needed resources to Chicago area news outlets. And it will allow them to spend more time focusing on what they do best — providing valuable journalism that helps residents be more informed about local matters that affect their daily lives.”
Timothy P. Knight, president and CEO of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, said this grant supports a core mission of the foundation’s grant making.
“We invest in journalism to promote informed civic engagement and ensure government accountability,” he said. “We are enthusiastic that our continuing partnership with Medill advances this goal by strengthening local coverage of city and state government and improving newsroom sustainability.”
The new grant will support the ongoing work of the Medill Illinois News Bureau, which was launched last fall in partnership with the nonprofit outlet Capitol News Illinois. Under this program, Medill students provide coverage of state government news from Springfield and Chicago in collaboration with CNI, and their stories are distributed to 700 news outlets in Illinois and surrounding states. Since its launch, more than 20 graduate and undergraduate Statehouse Fellows have generated dozens of stories.
The Medill Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub, one of five universities nationwide affiliated with the Solutions Journalism Network, is providing training for newsrooms and colleges on the practice of solutions journalism. The Hub includes more than 50 partner news organizations and colleges across the Midwest. As part of building a community of practice, the Hub works directly with Chicago-area newsrooms on specific projects in solutions journalism, which explores reporting of responses to communities’ most vexing systemic problems.
McCormick’s grant also supports the ongoing work of Medill’s Teach for Chicago Journalism Program, which for the past five years has been helping Chicago-area high schools to bolster scholastic journalism through educational programs for students and teachers. Medill also has created a module for the College Board’s Advance Placement seminar course that incorporates journalism and media literacy. The module is being used in more than dozen high schools around the country.
All these programs are intended to help improve a local news ecosystem that is undergoing historic changes.
The Medill State of Local News Project has found that about 2.5 newspapers close in the U.S. every week and more than 50 million people live in counties with little to no access to local news. Medill research shows that Illinois has lost 45% of its newspapers in the last 20 years and 54% of its newspaper jobs in just the last decade. The state has five news desert counties and 40 others with only one remaining local news source. Combined, that equals 44% of all Illinois counties with limited access to local news.
The Chicago news landscape is healthier than many others around the country. The region counts well more than 100 local newspapers, digital-only sites, ethnic media and broadcast news outlets. Many of those outlets, however, are relatively small operations that need expertise and audience research to thrive over the long term, Whitaker said.
Medill launched its Local News Initiative in April 2018 as a research and development program to provide new insights about trends in local news and to work directly with news organizations to bolster sustainability. It’s supported by grants from major foundations, corporate contributors and individual donors.
