North Carolina emerges as a leader in collaborative, resilient local news

In the Asheville area, flooding ruined the River Arts District and Biltmore Village, isolating the city, causing landslides, destroying homes and crippling infrastructure. Radio was one of the only functioning channels for news; to get information, some neighbors huddled around a single car radio for updates. Marshall said the WFAE reporter met residents who said he was the first person they’d seen from outside their community since the storm.

The collaboration was so natural, Marshall said, with news outlets already used to working together, so that when the disaster hit, “it was just another muscle we were exercising.” She noted that “there’s a spirit of service and generosity that just pervades the North Carolina media ecosystem. When the moment comes, we all show up, not as competitors but as partners making sure our communities have what they need.”

A lot of that collaborative spirit and news infrastructure can be traced back to 2017, when the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund was launched after conversations among North Carolina and national funders including Democracy Fund over concerns about civic participation, community connection and the health of local democracy. At the time, only two funders in North Carolina supported journalism or media directly. Those conversations led to the formation of a pooled fund to strengthen the state’s news ecosystem.

Lizzy Hazeltine, the director of the Fund, traces its early impact to the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in 2018, which led to relief grants for community organizations alongside newsrooms. “When the pandemic hit [in 2020], these same organizations had built enough trust with the people they served and with each other to be useful to each other when there was an emergency,” she said. “These organizations were filling a really critical, core information gap and doing it in a way that reached people where they were.”

These events clarified shared interests among funders and demonstrated how news and information systems intersect with issues such as health, education and economic mobility. As more funders saw the power of this leverage point, the coalition grew, eventually expanding from just two philanthropic organizations to 18.

For decades, Knight Foundation has been supporting local news, along with arts and community revitalization, in Charlotte (which is also a Knight city) and the rest of North Carolina. Recently, Knight has invested in local news infrastructure including Press Forward Charlotte via the Fund, NC Local and the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative (CJC) — along with the expansion of The Assembly, a statewide for-profit newsroom, through the Knight Growth Challenge Fund. Knight also helps support the Local Journalism Researchers Workshop, an interdisciplinary convening of researchers addressing the local news crisis, hosted by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Fund has focused on long-term systems thinking to guide the North Carolina news ecosystem’s growth and strength. The fund plays a “low-altitude intermediary role,” according to Hazeltine, connecting funders and field leaders, making grants to encourage learning and helping to align efforts statewide. “The Fund has learned the most when we’ve made grants, listened and watched patiently for what could emerge, and did it again,” she said. So systems change came from iterative cycles of funding, reflection and adaptation.

Over the last eight years, North Carolina’s local news and information ecosystem has undergone a measurable transformation, developing a far more interconnected network of community partners, newsrooms and philanthropic leaders. Catalyzed by successive crises such as Hurricane Florence, COVID-19 and most recently Hurricane Helene and immigration raids in Charlotte, the ecosystem has demonstrated growing resilience and adaptability.

The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund is now the home of Press Forward Charlotte and Press Forward North Carolina (part of the Press Forward coalition of funders supporting local news), bringing even more resources and local funders to the table. The fund and these chapters have now invested more than $6 million in local news and information in the state over the past eight years, and MacArthur Foundation has joined in with an investment of $1.2 million over three years.

That support has reached outside of the largest cities and into rural and Spanish-speaking communities, who often are lacking in trustworthy sources of local news. One great example of that is the expansion of The Assembly, whose network now includes partnerships with publications that cover Greensboro, Fayetteville, Wilmington and the rural “border belt” area near South Carolina. This model increases the number of on-the-ground reporters in areas that historically have had far fewer news resources, according to Kyle Villemain, founder and CEO of The Assembly.

“That strategy of helping a thousand flowers bloom, for lack of a better term, across the state, does mean that when a thing happens that’s unexpected, there’s a higher likelihood of there being a local outlet with firsthand knowledge,” he said. This strengthens North Carolina’s resilience and improves rural coverage during high-stakes moments, with larger statewide news organizations like The Assembly able to quickly rally around and amplify local reporters.

North Carolina’s experience shows that rebuilding local news doesn’t happen through a single intervention or institution, but through a culture of shared purpose sustained over time. What started as a modest effort to strengthen local news systems has grown into a statewide network of newsrooms, funders, universities and grassroots groups that treat collaboration as second nature. The state offers a roadmap for how a diverse, locally rooted news ecosystem can thrive, ensuring that all residents have access to the information they need to navigate crises, participate in civic life and feel connected.

Mark Glaser is a communications consultant for Knight Foundation, Press Forward, Tiny News Collective and The Lenfest Institute, and was the founder and executive editor of MediaShift.org. He was formerly the director of business and program development for the New Mexico Local News Fund. He runs the Wind Power Media consultancy out of Santa Fe.