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In February, the Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet based in Buffalo, broke a national story. A Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, who was nearly blind, was left outside a Tim Horton’s on a cold winter night by Border Patrol agents. Soon after, the man died. The Investigative Post covered every major development in the case, including surveillance footage that contradicted the Department of Homeland Security’s story.
In 2024, New York became the first state to commit significant resources to bolster community-focused journalism—the kind practiced by the Investigative Post. In February of that year, three dozen local news companies banded together in a successful push for a state-level reimbursable tax credit for local news outlets. But there was a wrinkle: because nonprofit publications registered as 501(c)(3)s are tax-exempt, they would be ineligible for the funding. In the coming weeks, that may change, as Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, weighs whether to budget for a measure to create a parallel grant program. Nonprofit media is “the only segment of the media industry that’s actually growing by way of employees, audience, and revenue,” Jim Heaney, the editor and executive director of the Investigative Post, told me. “We think we’re a worthy investment.”
Because this is a job creation program that is generally targeted toward taxpaying businesses in New York, nonprofits, which are tax-exempt, were left out. For John Kaehny, the executive director of Reinvent Albany, one of the groups lobbying for the measure, this is “simply a fairness issue.” If the state is going to subsidize commercial journalism, “then it should certainly subsidize nonprofit,” he said. One of the outlets involved, New York Focus, which covers state politics, has lately found itself becoming part of a story it would ordinarily be reporting on. “This is not just a small exclusion,” Akash Mehta, the publication’s cofounder and editor in chief, told me. “It’s carving out the newest, fastest-growing part of the industry.” As the “old market-based mechanisms for funding journalism break down,” Mehta said, the nonprofit model has become a “critical part of the pie.” (Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to the “State of Local News” report published last year by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, in the past two decades, almost 40 percent of all local news outlets have vanished. Implementing a nonprofit model has helped some publications buck that trend. New York State has around sixty nonprofit outlets—and, they argue, the vast majority of them serve markets where newspapers and TV stations have been downsizing.
Structuring the measure as a grant, as opposed to a refundable tax credit, would not change much for the state’s bottom line, advocates contend. Like the original program, it would be administered by New York’s Empire State Development office. The same eligibility criteria would apply: the program for commercial outlets has strict nondiscretionary guidelines; a parallel measure for nonprofits would operate in the same way. This effectively means the government would not have the ability to pick and choose which outlets it gives money to based on their coverage. “I should say that, as a matter of journalistic independence, we would be opposed to this program if we thought there was any risk of the government giving money to the outlets it favors,” Mehta told me.
Legislators—namely, Senator Jamaal T. Bailey and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz—are pushing legislation that proposes a similar plan. But their efforts are mostly symbolic. “Anything that has a state fiscal impact has to be passed in the state budget,” Diane Kennedy, the president of the New York News Publishers Association, told me.
“It is without question that for-profit news media is no more vital to our democracy than nonprofit news media and that New York State stands to benefit from the healthiness of both,” Dinowitz told me. (Bailey’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Having met with Hochul, Kennedy came away with the impression that she “understands the risk of misinformation in democracy, the role of newspapers and the role of not-for-profit newspapers and how they are a growing party of the news ecosystem all around the state.” Even so, “the reality is we don’t know what’s going to be in the budget until it’s in the budget.”
If the measure is not included in this upcoming budget, the advocates plan to try again next year—a backup option Heaney would prefer to avoid. “You know, I’ve got bills to pay this year,” he told me. “Let’s get this done.”
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