They Can Pay. We Just Haven’t Built Something Worth Paying For.
We’ve been telling ourselves poor communities can’t afford local news. The data says otherwise. So does the mirror.
Recently, I found myself on one of those conference Zooms every media professional loves, talking tactics with an old coworker about funding local news. We were discussing how to restart coverage in working-class communities — communities that the media industry so charmingly likes to think of as “information deserts.” My colleague paused and sighed. “Look,” they said. “Don’t kid yourself. These kinds of poor neighborhoods aren’t ever going to be able to have self-sustaining publications. The only way something survives there is through philanthropy.”
It was said with real compassion. And I agreed. And nodded, and moved on.
I’ve hated myself ever since.
Think about how that logic sounds. If a household can barely afford their rent, they sure as hell aren’t going to spend $15 a month on a news outlet. So poor news coverage must come from philanthropy. Poor neighborhoods simply can’t afford to pay for their own local news. That’s just math.
Except it’s not. It’s lazy, classist nonsense. We say this stuff to each other in meetings and laugh it off. But every time we do, we’re permitting a harmful bias to become industry dogma.
Here’s something we don’t say in meetings but should: poor communities aren’t too poor to build their own civic infrastructure. Hell, they’re doing it every day. News doesn’t have a poverty problem. News has a utility problem.
Every time we say a neighborhood couldn’t possibly support local news, what we’re actually saying is: we built something they don’t value enough to pay for. That’s it.
A Quick Disclaimer: Backstory & Strategy is a personal, independent publication. The views, analysis, and commentary expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent the official position, strategy, or endorsement of the American Press Institute, its leadership, or its board. This is my personal space for analyzing the media landscape, testing new frameworks, and thinking out loud.
The Data We Ignore
One way to prove that point: let’s talk about how poor communities actually do spend money.
There’s a belief floating around wealthier journalism circles that people only give to organizations wealthier than themselves. If you run the numbers, you’d quickly discover that’s simply not true.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a landmark report titled “How America Gives,” diving into charitable contributions by ZIP code and income bracket nationwide. Families making $50,000 to $75,000 a year donated 7.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity. Families making over $100,000 a year donated 4.2 percent. As household income increased, the percentage donated to charity decreased. Giving had an inverse relationship with wealth.
That tracks globally, too. The Charities Aid Foundation’s 2025 World Giving Report surveyed more than 50,000 people across 101 countries. Low-income nations gave an average of 1.45 percent of their annual household income to charity. Higher-income nations gave 0.70 percent.
Wealth does not drive giving, CAF CEO Neil Heslop noted in the report. What drives it is perceived need. We give where we perceive those closest to us to be most in need.
That’s what we’re missing when we insist poor communities can’t pay for local news. When people don’t open their wallets for local journalism, it’s not because they can’t afford it. It’s because they don’t see it as a necessity.
The Last Mile: Why Journalism Support is Failing its Own Standards
A Quick Disclaimer: The following thoughts are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs my perspective on the industry’s chall…
The Product We’re Actually Selling
Stop and think about how poor people already spend their money. Church. Rental insurance. Kids’ sports leagues. Haircuts. Lunch. Coffee on the way to work. Phone plans. Dog food. Things they perceive as required to survive another day.
Local news is nowhere on that list. Not because they can’t afford it. Because we haven’t made the case that it belongs there.
Go listen to any local weekday morning drive-time radio show targeting working-class families. You don’t hear hosts saying “hey, support democracy, it’s cool.” You don’t hear them bragging about how their newsletter will look on the coffee table. They’re answering calls. Taking pledges. They’re selling utility. That’s what product really means.
Take your typical legacy media pitch: “We are the Fourth Estate. Please fund us, because democracy depends on our oversight.” Now compare that to: “We are your tool for understanding and navigating this city.” The former talks at you about dry policy debates and crime blotter you’ll glance at and forget. The latter treats you like you’re reading to solve a problem.
For an affluent consumer with disposable income, the legacy pitch works fine. Paying for a news subscription feels like a low-friction civic donation. A badge of honor. For a working-class family on a tight budget, any financial contribution is a tactical decision. The local media property has to compete directly with utility bills and immediate family needs. “Support democracy” doesn’t win that competition.
When a newsroom operates with a true product mindset, it understands that its medium is just a delivery vehicle for a public utility. It solves what we call the Last Mile problem — taking complex, fragmented information from city halls, school boards, and corporate offices and translating it into something actionable that people can actually use.
For print, this looks like a paper designed for maximum daily use rather than coffee-table leisure — crammed with job fairs, transit changes, and community resources that can be clipped and saved. For radio, it means turning the airwaves over to localized community programming and call-in hours where residents get real-time answers to real local problems. For broadcast television, it means shifting the lens away from parachuting into a neighborhood to document its trauma for suburban viewers, and toward resource-driven segments that explain how to access city services or protect workers from predatory housing practices.
When you solve the Last Mile problem for a community, you stop being a luxury item. You become as vital as electricity or clean water.
Proof That It Works
Because it can be built. When local newsrooms prioritize subscriber utility above all else, people pay what they can to get it.
El Diario NY has served predominantly working-class, immigrant communities across New York’s outer boroughs for over a century, tracing its roots to La Prensa, founded in 1913. It didn’t build its legacy on elite philanthropic circles. It built on high-circulating single-copy print sales, neighborhood classifieds, and small-business advertising. El Diario functioned as an indispensable manual for navigating a new country — essential information on employment, housing, legal services. It was paid for because it was used.
Sahan Journal in Minnesota is the modern version of that story. Founded in 2019 to chronicle the state’s immigrant communities and communities of color, Sahan built its model on a hybrid of philanthropic support and aggressive community membership. They treat working-class East African, Hmong, and Latino residents with dignity and focus on asset-based reporting rather than just documenting crime or crisis. A solo operation grew to a 23-person newsroom in under six years, earning genuine community trust alongside the grant dollars.
eldiario.es in Spain (no relation to the New York publication) and Daily Maverick in South Africa built their memberships around solidarity instead of transaction. You weren’t buying a monthly newsletter. You were investing in the fight so others could access it too. When eldiario.es offered zero-cost membership to readers who couldn’t pay, their paying member count skyrocketed past 60,000 — and for the first time in their operational existence, reader revenue surpassed advertising. Daily Maverick’s Maverick Insider program has grown to more than 32,000 voluntary paying members who contribute monthly to keep the publication free for all South Africans.
Want proof poor communities will support local news if given a financially sustainable option? Look no further than solidarity membership models that weren’t designed for wealthy audiences first.
The Overhead Delusion
There’s a second, quieter design flaw here, and it has less to do with the audience’s wallets and more to do with our own internal expectations.
When a media executive looks at a working-class ZIP code and says the community can’t support local news, they usually mean something more specific. They mean the community can’t support the bloated legacy cost-structure management is trying to force onto it.
The traditional media blueprint was built on 20th-century advertising monopolies. That massive river of revenue let newsrooms build incredibly heavy structures — expensive commercial real estate, multi-layered management, specialized siloed desks, proprietary enterprise tech stacks. When modern founders or legacy executives pivot to serve a lower-income community, they often unconsciously bring that same blueprint with them. They design an organization that requires $1.5 million a year just to keep the lights on. They shoot for Y and Z. Then they realize the local marketplace can only reliably generate $400,000 — the community’s actual economic baseline, or X — and they throw up their hands.
Market failure.
It isn’t a market failure. It’s a burn-rate failure.
If the collective economic capacity of that community tops out at $400,000, your newsroom needs to be designed to break even at $320,000. Build your entire budget around the actual revenue reality on the ground — then scale up if your product earns it. An operation running on $400,000 a year isn’t an impoverished newsroom. It is a right-sized public utility.
Right-sizing means making radical, intentional choices about what you are not going to do. Ditch the prestige overhead — no downtown office when a distributed team works fine, no enterprise software stack when WhatsApp loops and SMS alerts handle distribution. Ditch the mandate to cover everything. You can’t be a general-interest metropolitan daily on a lean budget. Focus exclusively on high-utility, Last Mile information — how the city budget impacts local childcare, wage enforcement, neighborhood transit. Do less. But make what you do completely indispensable.
Revenue Mix, Mission Drift
When I started building the business model for LehighValleyNews.com, I did it backward—like a lot of people. I started with the expense side: I knew what we needed to accomplish our mission, and how many journalists, editors, videographers, and producers it would take. I also knew the tech infra…
The Funder’s Blind Spot
The overhead delusion doesn’t start in the newsroom. It often arrives with the check.
When a foundation or major donor enters a working-class community with a mandate to invest in local news, they rarely start from scratch. They arrive carrying a mental model — shaped by years of funding larger, more visible operations — of what a credible news organization looks like. Real office. Recognizable staff structure. Development director. Audience engagement team. Editorial calendar with ambitious goals.
That model didn’t come from nowhere. It worked somewhere. The mistake is assuming it translates cleanly into a neighborhood where the entire annual addressable market is $400,000.
Bigger, in this context, isn’t a strategy. It’s a liability.
How do we build sustainable local newsrooms in poor communities if every foundation insists on launching with a $500,000 budget? Some foundation sees a low-income neighborhood with high rates of news avoidance. They secure the funding to launch a nonprofit newsroom. They take six to twelve months to develop a product poorer families don’t buy. Then they look around wondering why the family making $40,000 a year will hand over a dollar or two for a single-copy utility paper at the corner store — a tactical, immediate transaction that solves a problem today — but won’t commit to $20 a month for a digital membership that asks them to think about next year. It’s not a mystery. They built a luxury subscription model for an audience that runs on tactical transactions.
When funders condition support on organizational scale rather than community fit, they inadvertently enshrine the same deficit thinking they’re trying to dismantle. They fund the operation into existence, celebrate the launch, and quietly watch it collapse when the grant cycle ends. The community — which was never consulted about whether this was the organization it actually needed — gets blamed for the failure. The model moves on to the next ZIP code.
A more honest question, before any dollar is committed: what is the actual economic ceiling of this community’s support? What does a right-sized operation look like if it breaks even at 80 percent of that ceiling? Are we funding this organization to grow into our expectations, or to serve into theirs?
Enough, designed intentionally, is a complete strategy. A $380,000 newsroom that is solvent, focused, and genuinely embedded in its community is not a consolation prize. It is the goal. The obsession with scale — with turning every local news investment into a regional powerhouse — is a funder pathology, not a community need. The most consequential thing a funder can do in a working-class community isn’t to import a proven model. It’s to resist that instinct, sit with the community’s actual baseline, and build something designed to last inside those numbers from day one.
That’s not settling. That’s respect.
Shifting the Blame
The uncomfortable truth is that the “this community can’t support local news” narrative almost never comes from a neutral reading of market conditions. It usually surfaces after an organization has already designed itself into an impossible position. Someone built a $1.5 million newsroom for a $400,000 market. Someone hired for prestige instead of utility. Someone chose the downtown office over the distributed team, the enterprise software over the WhatsApp loop, the full programming slate over the ruthlessly focused Last Mile operation.
When the math didn’t work, the blame moved. Not to the blueprint. To the ZIP code.
That’s the quiet paternalism this whole piece started with. The assumption, dressed up in empathy, that struggling communities are the variable that needs fixing — not the organizations claiming to serve them.
If a community is tithing to their church, pooling money for mutual aid, buying single-copy papers at the corner bodega, or packing a gym to keep a local radio station alive, they are screaming their priorities at us. They have deep, historically proven capacity for collective investment. They just aren’t investing in us.
That isn’t their market failure. It is our product failure — and more specifically, a leadership failure.
Whether we are printing papers, programming airwaves, or designing digital membership loops, we have to stop treating working-class audiences like problems to be solved by outside capital. If we want them to value our work, we have to respect their intelligence, acknowledge their existing networks, right-size our operations to their economic reality, and deliver something undeniably essential to their daily lives.
Let’s stop pretending poor communities can’t pay for news. They just won’t pay for your version of it.
So let’s go build something they will.
If this piece landed, I want to hear from you. What’s the most egregious example you’ve seen of a funder or executive importing the wrong model into the wrong community? Drop it in the comments. These conversations are how the thinking gets sharper.
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