By Julian Do / ACoM
What makes a news outlet legitimate and worthy of investment? This question sits at the heart of a growing debate as California prepares to roll out its $20 million Civic Media Program. The answer may determine whether the fund becomes a blueprint for a national model or another missed opportunity to serve the communities that need it most.
California and Google have each committed $10 million to the Civic Media Fund, with the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GoBiz) tasked with crafting an equitable distribution formula. The money is aimed at bolstering a journalism industry hollowed out by shrinking newsrooms and consolidations – the downstream toll of the tech industry’s stranglehold over advertising revenue.
Before the first dollar is distributed, a divisive counter-narrative has emerged within the industry, calling for a raw journalist headcount — as the eligibility metric — that would tilt the playing field toward corporate payrolls and legacy media. Even with the GoBiz proposal to cap the headcount at 20 per outlet, the distribution would be weighted toward larger media.
Evaluating newsrooms in this manner is staggeringly inefficient. A single grant that barely covers the salary and health benefits of one legacy reporter at a major metropolitan daily represents a transformative leap in reporting capacity for an ethnic or community newsroom. A direct, modest injection of capital enables in-language, hyperlocal publishers to hire reporters with the community connections and linguistic skills necessary to bridge coverage and trust gaps across the state.
In her insightful analysis, “What counts as journalism — and who gets to decide?“, media executive Jill Manuel notes that the news industry consistently tethers itself to arcane, exclusive definitions of reporting. This rigid adherence to structural gatekeeping ignores the shifting realities of how people consume trustworthy information. What makes journalism relevant is how the news produced informs and moves its audiences.
By that measure, California’s ethnic, community, and hyperlocal media ecosystem is already doing extraordinary work.
A recent survey by American Community Media found that the network of in-language and ethnic media outlets collectively reaches 20 million of the state’s audience. Those numbers are hard to ignore and include limited-language-proficient communities in hard-to-reach areas of the state that are most in need of reliable civic information.
These outlets carry unique social capital and deep neighborhood roots. A single story from one of these outlets moves dynamically through grocery stores, churches, senior centers, community health clinics, and WhatsApp groups. Outlets like Indian Voices in San Diego, Al Enteshar in Los Angeles, the Black-owned Sacramento Observer in the state’s capital, News for Chinese in San Francisco, the Philippine News Today covering northern and southern parts of the state, Hmong Daily News in northern California, and El Latino Central Coast are the literal “last mile” of our state’s civic infrastructure.
Stories from community media explain complex changes to state medical qualifications, capture the daily give and take of immigrant communities, look at the price of tomatoes in grocery stores, and combat misinformation, making members of these very communities targets of hate and divisiveness. This is public service journalism in its most essential form.
At a time when public trust in the media has stagnated at an alarming 32% across all demographics, an unseemly public scramble over this modest, first-of-its-kind state fund sends a toxic message to the communities we serve. It signals to an already skeptical public that this critical cornerstone of democracy is crumbling from within, exposed not just by an advertising crisis, but by an internal fight over money rather than a shared mission to serve.
California’s Civic Media Program has the potential to become a national model for restoring the civic health of our country. But to get there, we must look beyond corporate headcounts and legacy prestige.
Moving forward, funding priorities must be anchored by consistent coverage of public meetings, reporting in news deserts and long-overlooked communities, and the production of actionable “news you can use” that drives civic engagement and promotes public safety.
The Civic Media Fund is not a zero-sum game where one sector’s gain is another’s loss. Instead, we must refocus entirely on the state’s public service mandate. At this critical juncture, the journalism sector must find ways to stand together—five fingers tightly clenched into a single, powerful fist—to champion all our media outlets, reporters, and production staff doing the heavy lifting on the ground, all of whom deserve a seat at the table.
Julian Do Co-Director of American Community Media and Member of the California Civic Media Program Advisory Board
