Press Forward’s ‘strategic priorities’ to support local news in Washington | The Free Press Initiative

Published 1:00 pm Tuesday, April 14, 2026

It’s April, so perhaps it’s time for some inside baseball.

On Wednesday, I invited Kaarin Austin, the new director of Press Forward’s Washington chapter, to The Seattle Times for a tour and conversation about what her group may do to support local journalism in the state.

Austin shared the group’s vision and what it’s aiming to do this year. She generously fielded my opinionated questions and commiserated over the state of local news, especially in Tacoma, where she lives.

Press Forward is a coalition of national philanthropies that in 2023 pledged $500 million over five years to “reverse the dramatic decline in local news that has coincided with an increasingly divided America and weakening trust in institutions.”

It’s also building a network of state affiliates to raise funding locally and provide grants.

Washington’s chapter is based at the Whatcom Community Foundation in Bellingham. It’s partnering with other regional foundations that contributed $5,000 to $30,000 apiece to launch the program. So far this “council” has raised just under $400,000.

“I would love to bring in a million dollars by the end of the year and I’m hopeful that that can happen,” Austin said. “We’ll see.”

Austin started in January. Previously she was director of philanthropy at public-radio station KNKX. Before that she was director of gift planning at Pacific Lutheran University.

A Spokane native, Austin grew up in a house that subscribed to The Spokesman-Review and remembers sitting on her father’s lap as they read the newspaper.

She still subscribes to the Spokesman, plus The News Tribune, The New York Times and community publications in Tacoma. Her morning routine includes doing The New York Times games while listening to KNKX.

Those things all seem to make her eminently qualified to lead this new organization.

Austin also seems prepared to work through the initiative’s growing pains and the unfortunate tensions in “save journalism” circles now that big money’s up for grabs.

Growing pains include questions about whether the initiative spends too much on an array of nonprofits formed to support the industry, creating bureaucratic superstructure.

Tensions include competition for donations, since many local outlets are doing their own fundraising and there are longstanding, nonprofit news-support organizations.

“There has to be this rising-tide-lifts-all-ships mentality,” Austin said.

There’s also pressure from ideological factions wanting to steer grants away from for-profit news outlets. That’s counterproductive since for-profit outlets produce nearly all the trusted, local journalism that Press Forward is trying to revitalize — especially in rural and suburban areas most at risk.

Some are also pushing Press Forward to fund quasi-journalistic nonprofits, including progressive-leaning organizations that don’t have traditional journalism standards. They’ve tried to reframe the issue as one of “civic news and information” to broaden eligibility.

I’m a little concerned that Washington’s chapter is going there, in part because it’s calling itself the “Washington News Fund” — dropping “Press” from its title.

Austin said the name was chosen because Press Forward started as a five-year project and “we want to be around longer than that.”

“The council in Washington decided that they wanted to partner with journalists but themselves be a community activator and fund, essentially, so they wanted to identify as a fund,” she said.

Whatever it’s called, I’m grateful for the support of these foundations and those who fund them. It shows people understand the importance of local journalism and the urgent need to sustain it.

Austin noted that local news is a new focus for philanthropy.

“You have your big foundations that have been doing this for a long, long, long time — the Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation — but local news and information being seen as a priority for philanthropy as a whole is really new,” she said. “And so the philanthropists are trying to figure out how to best show up in this space.”

I hope they learn how much the local journalism crisis is an economic issue for the roughly 5,400 newspapers providing the vast majority of local news coverage, online and in print.

When their business model was disrupted, they merged, closed or shrank, creating news deserts in more than half of U.S. counties. Many of the survivors have stabilized but with smaller newsrooms and reduced distribution.

Get their flywheel going again and the problem is largely solved. Help them become sustainable, serve more people and do more to inform communities. That requires more journalists and investment in operations. Grants are making this happen in places.

Grants are also needed to support nonprofit outlets, including startups and traditional outlets that convert to nonprofit status. There are perhaps 500 to 700 of these, some doing top-tier journalism. Relatively few are replanting news deserts, though. Most are in cities with other news sources.

Then there are more than 500 nonprofits seeking grants to support the industry, including 120 national organizations that sought Press Forward grants in 2024.

A for-profit group received the Washington fund’s first large grant before Austin was hired.

It gave $75,000 to support the Washington State News Alliance, a project led by Anika Anand, Sarah Gustavus Lim and Linda Shaw. They started a local-news newsletter in 2025 and had ties to the Press Forward national organization. The funding is going through Commoner, a consulting company co-founded by Anand.

They’re using the money to expand their “Fresh Ground” newsletter, create a steering committee and host a conference in May. The alliance intends to “coordinate people, funding, and resources in support of a strong, equitable local news ecosystem in Washington.”

“This is our boots on the ground approach, the subject matter experts,” Austin said. “We’re asking the Washington State News Alliance and their steering committee … to be those eyes and ears on the ground for us.”

The fund, meanwhile, plans to give around $100,000 in grants by May.

“We’re calling those our founding grants,” Austin said. “I would call them proof of concept, or showing what our theory of change is … those will be a signal to both newsrooms and other funders (that) this is the type of thing we’re investing in.”

Asked what they’ll fund, Austin described the fund’s four “strategic priorities” that mirror Press Forward’s. They include policy work, though not directly funding political groups; sustainability, including business models; and organizational infrastructure, such as back-office systems.

The fourth priority is equity, “making sure that all Washingtonians have access to local news and information that’s relevant to them and maybe comes in the language that they need it in.”

That’s all great, as long as it results in more journalists in newsrooms producing trusted local news, holding officials accountable, informing the public and strengthening communities and democracy.

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.