Press Forward California chapters met up in Miami during a Press Forward workshop in February. Pictured left to right: Mauricio Palma, Keiona Williamson, Priscilla Enriquez, Graciela Moran, Misty Avila, Charee L. Gillins, Paulette Brown-Hinds and Armando Carmona. Photo courtesy of JBMF.
Even as the foundation spends down, it leads the way with a local Press Forward chapter
By Mark Glaser
Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.
―Ralph Waldo Emerson
There’s an idea that every ending can also bring a new beginning. And in the case of the James B. McClatchy Foundation (JBMF), a longtime funder in California’s Central Valley, its impending wind-down in 2030 also brings the possibility for new beginnings. In journalism, that includes launching a collaborative, a Press Forward local chapter and seeding long-term sustainable infrastructure for local news into the future.
The foundation was started in 1994 by the great-grandson of 19th century newspaper editor James McClatchy at the Sacramento Bee. James B. McClatchy and his wife Susan wanted to support English learners and the First Amendment in the Central Valley, and were very concerned about migrant worker rights. In 2016, the board of the foundation voted to spend down its remaining assets, and in 2019, the foundation’s new President and CEO Priscilla Enriquez considered how to provide deeper support for journalism even as the spend-down had begun.
McClatchy Foundation has an ambitious “Sunrise Plan” for spending down its funding through 2030
“The foundation was more like a small family foundation, and had dabbled a little bit in funding journalism,” said Enriquez in a recent interview. “It had funded the Committee to Protect Journalists, First Amendment Coalition and the Institute for Media and Public Trust at Fresno State University. But then I hired Misty Avila in 2020 and we’ve gone deep into grassroots community journalism since that time.”
Misty Avila is the vice president and chief strategy officer at JBMF, and sees journalism as being rooted in civic participation. She said the foundation has taken an ecosystem approach to funding journalism.
“We recognized the need for a backbone superstructure in the Valley to preserve local journalism,” she said. “We realized that there needed to be a regional discussion of why this matters and begin to pilot experiments as journalists were losing their jobs.”
A collaborative as the backbone
The Central Valley Journalism Collaborative co-produced a candidate forum, “Debate at the State” in Modesto on October 25 last year. Photo courtesy of JBMF
In 2021, the foundation provided an initial investment of $1 million in the new Central Valley Journalism Collaborative (CVJC) to be that backbone to local journalism in the region. The CVJC has included funding journalists who help fill reporting gaps at existing newsrooms, such as a higher education reporter and podcast producer at NPR station KVPR. And more recently the Collaborative has helped launch new newsrooms to cover health-equity reporting, the growing town of Merced and, later this year, the larger town of Modesto.
Enriquez says the Collaborative has really made an impact with its reporting, helping fill in those coverage gaps that have been widening as legacy media shrinks. And the funding from JBMF has helped leverage support from other community foundations in the area.
“I think the challenge now that we’ve launched some of these digital sites is how can we knit this ecosystem together, and then level up some of the issues that are being raised,” Enriquez said. “There’s a real opportunity to do reporting on infrastructure issues like water here, and I feel like CVJC is primed to lean into that space.”
Enriquez said that community foundations sometimes think it’s very hard to fund local journalism, but she thinks it’s easy to start by funding a journalist who can cover a crucial topic and see the impact that can make. She also noted that the Merced Focus nonprofit newsroom had a very successful candidate forum ahead of the election in 2024, with 500 people showing up.
“For me the forum is more about connection in the community,” Enriquez said. “Here’s a chance for people to see these people running for Congress.”
Launching a Press Forward chapter
Before Press Forward national officially launched, back in the fall of 2023, JBMF partnered with the Inland Empire Community Foundation (IECF) on a local news summit. And last year, JBMF joined Press Forward as an aligned funder and announced it was leading a new Press Forward Central Valley chapter, while IECF announced a local chapter for the Inland Empire. Enriquez believes it’s important for these two severely under-resourced areas to get attention vs. the more resourced coastal areas of the state.
McClatchy Foundation features local news grantee Ivanhoe Sol in a video series called “Lifting Local Leaders”
“Press Forward is a nice way to leverage funders to invest in these parts of the state,” she said. “The local chapter has given us another way to get the community foundations to work together to support local news, whether that’s in Fresno or Sacramento or smaller towns in the Valley.”
Avila pointed out that Press Forward also helps people see the larger ecosystem of community news in the region, including radio, podcasts and community-created content at smaller news outlets. Avila said that the local chapter gives them a platform to tell the broader story of how the news ecosystem is connected, while leveraging the national brand of Press Forward to save time in conversations with new donors and funders.
Press Forward Central Valley is another piece of infrastructure that could live on beyond JBMF’s spend-down. The foundation has a “Sunrise Plan” that considers capacity-building, finding “anchor partners” and achieving sustainability (see graphic, above) across programs as a way of having an impact long after the foundation has sunset.
“During the spend-down, we are actually thinking about how to dismantle ourselves,” Avila said. “The instinct for foundations is to build yourself up more and be seen as an intermediary. But we don’t want to fall into that trap with Press Forward. Part of our goal with the Sunrise Plan is to invest in enduring infrastructures that will be rooted in our community, even when we’re gone.”
Enriquez sees the spend-down as a chance to consider how to ignite philanthropy in the region. She said she wanted to do more than just write a bunch of checks to clear the decks.
“The focus is around support for a multiracial democracy, centering on multilingual children, advancing the next generation of leadership, and community-powered local journalism,” Enriquez said.
That’s an ideal way to find the sunrise in a sunset.
Mark Glaser is a communications consultant for Press Forward, Knight Foundation and Tiny News Collective and was the founder and executive editor of MediaShift.org. He was formerly the director of business and program development for the New Mexico Local News Fund. He runs the Wind Power Media consultancy out of Santa Fe.