Creating a news oasis
How Mike Rispoli of News Voices is changing the New Jersey news desert
Mike Rispoli didn’t have much to work with two years ago when he decided he wanted to create a campaign to publicly fund local news in the state of New Jersey. To be frank, he didn’t have anything to work with at all.
Nothing like this had ever been done before. No where else in the United States had universities, politicians and a non-profit organization come together to create, support and pass a bill allocating funds towards local journalism. And yet, in two years time, Rispoli and his organization News Voices had done just that.
“Because I’m from New Jersey, I had a big chip on my shoulder and I made it my singular focus and mission for the past two years to run a grassroots campaign to prove all the experts wrong. It was a grassroots campaign to strengthen local news in the state and it was pushed by the people of New Jersey, not by lawmakers or media,” Rispoli said passionately over a cup of coffee. “We deeply understood that there was a lot of disfaction around local news in the state and that people were hungry for new ideas.”
A native to the Garden State and former journalist, Rispoli had witnessed it first-hand. Following the loss of the New Jersey News Network (NJN) in 2011 and the outbreak of news across the state after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it was clear the state was lacking a common thread across its counties. The communication network simply wasn’t there.
Yet, among other overbearing issues plaguing the state, Rispoli was impressed with the number of people who came out and supported this issue. Not only did people come out for the ten community forums leading up to the bills introduction, but they saw it through up until it was officially passed the summer of 2018.
“It was a really significant accomplishment to get people interested in the future of news in New Jersey and to take action in support of something and to come up with an idea and get a bill introduced, have it passed, have some money allocated,” Rispoli said. “When we started this campaign, no one thought it was gonna happen.”
As local news outlets continued to close or were forced to shut down across the state, Rispoli called upon public funding as a resource for the financial issues many local outlets crumble under. Following the sale of several of New Jersey’s television licenses, Rispoli and the other campaigners of News Voices utilized the moment to launch their bill into what seemed like a financially sound possibility.
“We viewed this as an opportunity to also begin to have a national conversation of what's the role of public funding to solve the local news crisis in states around the country,” Rispoli said. “It’s happening everywhere, its not getting better anytime soon.
“I think the writing’s on the wall that things need to change and if you hold on to the belief that you can staff an entire newsroom through Ad (advertisement) dollars and subscriptions, it's just not realistic anymore.”
Proposed summary of the Civic Information Consortium Bill passed 8/24/18.
Now the first of its kind ever signed into law, the consortium faces a consistent lack of funding and therefore an uncertain fate for what’s to come next.
“The state doesn’t have a lot of money. The reality is that a lot of things that deserve money get money, but not as much money as they should,” Rispoli said. “Even though it has been frustrating to see the funding for the consortium come and go, I also know that it is due to larger forces than we have control over.”
The control may be out of Rispoli’s hands, but the frustration surrounding the ‘rollercoaster’ that is New Jersey’s budget has only increased over time. The quick action that was taken to sign the bill into law is not something to be ignored, yet the process that has followed may only appear to be smooth sailing from the outside.
“It’s very unfortunate because on the one hand, Gov. Murphy was on the homepage of CNN hailing NJ as a leader for the future of local news and in a lot of ways, a lot of states are looking to this state as a model, but the state has yet to do the things that are necessary in order for it to be functioning,” Rispoli said. “We are committed to making it work, but there’s still a lot left to be written about the consortium.”
Without the proper funding to get things in motion, Rispoli fears members and potential participants of the consortium are losing interest and fervor for the cause they initially came out in numbers for.
“It has absolutely slowed down the process of it, Rispoli said. “It’s hard to convince the forming board and the universities to allocate their time and resources to getting this thing set up if they feel that the state isn’t actually committed to it.”
Should the consortium receive its proper funding from government in the future, Rispoli made clear he has no personal opinion as to how the money should be allocated. While the consortium allows anyone to apply for a grant to exercise journalistic practices, he hopes that funding is directed towards marginalized communities facing issues with their local news resources.
“I don't have any particular idea about how the money should be spent,” Rispoli said. “I think we’ve been very explicit from the beginning and it's in the legislation that this money needs to be targeted to communities of color, migrant communities, world communities, news deserts in the state.
“Studies show the negative impact in communities when local news disappears: fewer people vote, fewer people volunteer, fewer people run for public office. Communities with no local newspaper receive fewer political dollars, polarization and partisan increases. The effects are real on engagement and a functioning democracy if journalism is not there. It’s too important for us to just let the market figure it out.”
Rispoli cited the importance of communication between a community and its news leaders as a potential cure for creating a connection to people and the resources they need. Through the consortium, grantees will be provided assistance from universities to optimize their approved projects. As the pieces slowly begin to fall into place, universities have taken the beginning steps to ensure their voices are heard on the board committee.
“The universities have to work in collaboration with people who are going to lead the projects in their communities and provide support,” Rispoli said. “Since the law passed, universities have been working together to figure out what the infrastructure of the consortium is going to be, how they’re going to work together. Some board appointments have been made, but it still isn’t fully formed yet.”
Amongst the advocacy for publicly funded local journalism, Rispoli conceded that while there are some who have questioned their practices, most of the apprehension comes from inside the industry.
“The skepticism that we received was more from journalists and comes from newsrooms who don’t understand the value of working closely with community members or think incorrectly that it interferes with their independence or are unwilling to change how they cover a community or determine what’s newsworthy.”
Despite minimal doubt from the media, Rispoli assured that the overall feedback from community members has been optimistic.
“The response has been overwhelmingly positive from people,” Rispoli siad. “These are stories that are told about a community that have an impact on who moves to that community or who choses to send their children to school there or what businesses come to town or what development happens. Those stories have a significant impact on people's lives and people get that.
“Many communities don’t feel like their experiences are reflected in their local news coverage of where they live and are hungry to do something about it.”
Although many people may not associate their local journalism outlets directly with the assessment of their hometowns and communities, Rispoli was adamant that those same people see this coverage everyday and want the opportunity to have a say in how they are portrayed to the world.
“In a lot of places, the future of local journalism isn’t very high up on people’s list, understandably so,” Rispoli said.
“This isn’t about journalism, this is about the needs of people to have information that informs them, that’s actionable that allows for them to be civically engaged and people care about that. People care deeply about the narratives of their communities and what people think about their community and how their stories are told and what stories are told and whose stories are told.”
News Voices and Free Press were instrumental in creating the groundwork for the campaign that later became the Civic Consortium Bill, but they were not written into the bill as board members and therefore do not have a say in potential allocation of grant money.
“I can’t say for certain what our role will be moving forward,” Rispoli said. “We’re going to work alongside the consortium once it’s up and running, but our foremost concern is that it’s effective and that it’s meeting people’s needs.”
While their concerns do still lie with the success and future of the consortium, for the time being, Rispoli and News Voices are letting their child learn and grow on its own as they attend to other matters.
“The consortium is an incredible priority for us but there’s only so much that we can do on it and the universities and the board needs to figure out how it’s going to work,” Rispoli said. “We’re going to be involved in that process but they also need to take on all of those roles and need government to meet the funding obligations that they’ve committed twice now to the consortium to build.”
News Voices may be shifting its focus to its other projects across the state as well as its satellites in North Carolina and Philadelphia, but it is by no means forgetting what they started. The New Jersey native made very clear that he’s not yet finished ensuring the legacy of the consortium.
“I don’t view it as us stepping back, but our role has changed because our role was to work alongside the people of New Jersey to help change policy to better meet their needs and we were able to run a campaign in order to do that,” Rispoli said.
“Now that there’s no campaign to run, the role that we play is trying to make the consortium as successful as possible both from a priority level, making sure that it works and funds good projects and has the right objectives to ensure that there’s money there. But we’re not in the driver's seat anymore.”