The SNPA Foundation has announced a $25,000 grant to The Post and Courier in Charleston to help stem the growth of news deserts in South Carolina and to incubate a model that can be replicated in other states.
The project, which has an annual budget of $1.25 million, aims to fill voids in local coverage with 25 additional reporters in six newsrooms around the state who will focus on investigative and enterprise journalism that covers topics such as environmental issues, education, politics, food and business.
In the next three years, the newspaper plans to incubate a cost-effective model and create a playbook of its successes and anticipated/experienced hurdles so the project can be reproduced elsewhere.
Autumn Phillips, the newspaper’s executive editor, recounts “lessons learned” from the restructuring of The Post and Courier’s newsroom:
“We shifted our beats. We wrote white papers around how to make coverage choices. We created a culture around deepening our reports and improving our narrative writing. We built a collaborative, cross-departmental system of communication aimed at understanding, engaging and growing our audience.”
These lessons, she says, will serve as the foundation for what The Post and Courier will implement in newsrooms across the state.
“A deepened understanding of how to replicate the success of one core newsroom across an entire state will be our contribution about what comes next for our industry,” she said.
PJ Browning, the publisher of The Post and Courier, also serves as the chair of the SNPA Foundation. Browning answered questions about the proposed project but recused herself from discussion about the merits of the project and voting for approval of funding.
Browning noted that The Post and Courier is prepared to forego profits for up to three years to build out this model.
“The Post and Courier’s debt-free local ownership and the willingness of our board to forego profits for three years to build something sustainable sets us up for success and the ability to experiment,” she said. “The paper is in a unique position to build and scale up and to lead the industry through what we can learn.”
For more information about the SNPA Foundation, contact Edward VanHorn, edward@snpafoundation.org.
For more information about the project to address news deserts in South Carolina, contact Autumn Phillips, aphillips@postandcourier.com.
