The dawn of Donald Trump’s second term signaled a shift in efforts to bolster local news with government assistance.

For several years, Congress had considered measures to provide tax credits that would help news organizations and to force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they repurpose. Despite some bipartisan support, especially for tax credits, those measures fell short, with no prospect of success under Trump and his MAGA allies.

As a result, attention has turned from Washington to state-led initiatives, which have proven to be a mixed bag.

“Our estimate is that newsrooms will get about $74 million in 2026 from state governments as a result of public policy,” said Steven Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News, an advocacy organization. That represents an increase over 2025, he told me, and about a dozen states are poised to make a serious effort on the policy front in the months ahead.

Yet the highest-profile state initiative has become something of a fiasco. Earlier this month, Tyler Katzenberger of Politico took a long look at what had gone wrong with a partnership between Google and California state officials, presenting an ugly picture of an initiative done in by budget pressures and political infighting.

“The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue,” wrote Katzenberger, adding ominously: “Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there’s no definitive timeline spelling out when they will.”

To be fair, the 2024 deal had drawn skepticism right from the start, as it represented a compromise after efforts to force Google and Facebook to provide considerably more money fell short. There were other aspects to the deal as well: a $62.5 million “AI accelerator,” which has not yet been set up, and the possibility that other tech companies such as OpenAI would participate. That hasn’t happened, either.

But what has emerged as a particularly contentious sticking point is that administration of the program has shifted from the University of California at Berkeley to the state library system and, finally, to an agency headed by longtime Democratic operative Dee Dee Myers, raising the specter of political influence. Nor does it help that Myers’ boss, Gov. Gavin Newsom, has been unwilling to commit to the state’s share of the funding in the midst of budget uncertainty, much of it stemming from Trump’s haphazard and vengeful cuts to a variety of state programs.

Failures and successes

Yet the Google mess looms large. And California is not the only state where government-led efforts to ease the local news crisis have fallen short. Consider:

• In New Jersey, a budget shortfall last summer led then-Gov. Phil Murphy and the legislature to zero out funding for NJ PBS, the state’s public television outlet. That was on top of the loss of all federal funding for public media. As a result, the station may shut down in June of this year, relegating the operation to digital-only and shrinking the distribution platform for NJ Spotlight News, a unique digital-and-broadcast collaboration that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
• In New York state, a three-year, $90 million program to help offset the cost of hiring and retaining journalists has been stuck in regulatory hell since it was approved in 2024. Originally, nonprofit and digital-only outlets were excluded, which would seem to defeat the purpose. Waldman said that negotiations have continued, and that digital will now be covered, though nonprofits are still left out. Legislation is in the works to fix that.
• In Massachusetts, unsuccessful efforts to launch a study commission to delve into the local news crisis date back to 2019, when I was among a number of advocates who testified in its favor on Beacon Hill. First, a commission was approved, never met and then expired; then, in 2024, a second, more streamlined commission failed to win legislative approval. Last summer, I spoke about possible legislation to create tax credits and other forms of assistance with aides to state Rep. Andy Vargas, House chair of the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Business. They were enthusiastic, but they warned that any legislation would most likely have to wait until 2027.

“This is a hard thing about the public policy part,” Waldman said, “because it does take time, and yet the house is on fire.”

Now, I shouldn’t focus entirely on the gloom-and-doom side of the equation. As Waldman noted, state assistance for local news will be higher in 2026 than it was in 2025. Among the most important reasons for that is a $25 million law in Illinois, passed in 2024, that provides for tax credits and other forms of assistance.

In New Jersey, despite the possible end of NJ PBS, a separate initiative known as the NJ Civic Information Consortium lived to fight another day. The consortium awards grants through an independent commission to fund individual reporting and information projects. State officials had proposed cutting all funding for the program but ended up awarding $2.5 million last summer — down from its peak of $3 million the previous year, but a substantial commitment nevertheless.

Moreover, Waldman said there are efforts in the works to pass a law in New Jersey requiring government agencies to advertise in local news outlets, similar to a law in New York City that has proved successful.

$1 billion a year

Waldman’s long-range goal is to reach $1 billion a year for local news support within 10 years. He sees public policy as one of three legs that are needed to save community journalism, along with innovations in business models and the way news is covered, and an increase in philanthropic support at the local and national levels.

As for what those public policy initiatives would look like, Waldman breaks them down into four types:

• Tax credits to reward news organizations that hire and retain journalists, as in Illinois and New York state.
• Government advertising in local outlets, as in New York City and has been proposed in New Jersey.
• Tax credits for businesses that advertise in local outlets. Such a proposal is being considered in Kansas, which Waldman said would represent a rare success for bolstering journalism in a Republican state.
• Reporting fellowships of the sort being administered by the UC Berkeley journalism school.

Waldman also speaks of the need for government assistance to be “First Amendment-friendly” — that is, indirect enough that public officials can’t use tax money to reward their supporters and punish critics. And it’s true that it’s a lot harder to wield tax credits as a political weapon than, for instance, direct assistance in the form of payments to news organizations. Yet the possibility of government interference can never be eliminated entirely.

Which is why such ideas need to be subjected to close scrutiny. Like most journalists, I’m reflexively opposed to the idea of accepting assistance from the very public officials we’re supposed to be holding to account. What is happening in California with the Google deal and in New Jersey with NJ PBS demonstrate that we need to develop our own sources of revenue to the extent that we can. Community-based philanthropy, voluntary memberships and paid or sponsored events will prove far more durable than a tax credit that could be eliminated depending on the results of the next election.

At the same time, the days of profitable local newspapers funded by advertising and reader subscriptions are well behind us. That reality is what makes the debate over public support necessary, even for journalists who are deeply uneasy about it.