The Free Press Endowment

The problem

The country is losing the institution that tells a town what its own government did last night. Northwestern University's annual count found that close to 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, 136 of them in the year to October 2025 alone. 213 counties now have no local news source of any kind, and in another 1,524 counties there is exactly one. About 50 million Americans live with little or no local news. The closures fall hardest on the small and the rural, and the papers going now are the last independents: the 141-year-old Chesterton Tribune in Indiana closed in 2025.

What follows a newspaper's death is measurable. Studies of towns that lost their paper find that municipal borrowing costs rise, that fewer candidates run for local office, that voter turnout falls, and that the county's residents are less able to name their own representatives. Corruption does not increase because people become worse; it increases because nobody is at the meeting.

In 2025 the country ran the experiment on public funding and got the result. Congress rescinded $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the advance appropriation that had been approved on a bipartisan basis since 1976, and on August 1 the Corporation announced it would dissolve after nearly sixty years. Whatever one thinks of public broadcasting, the lesson is about the instrument: a press paid for by an annual vote is a press that can be ended by an annual vote, and the knowledge of that fact was a leash for the fifty years before the vote came.

The founders knew this and chose a different instrument. The Postal Service Act of 1792 carried newspapers for a cent, or a cent and a half beyond a hundred miles, at a loss covered by overcharging letters and, when necessary, by the Treasury. It was a subsidy for the press, deliberately, permanently, and without an editor in the government. It built the American newspaper. One state has rediscovered the model: New Jersey's Civic Information Consortium, created in 2018, is a nonprofit funded by the state that grants to local newsrooms by formula and at arm's length, and after the federal rescission it has become the template other states are studying.

№ 050 argued that a shareholder is owed a report. A citizen is owed a reporter.

The proposal

A Free Press Endowment: a permanent fund, seeded once and never appropriated again, whose annual payout goes to local newsrooms by a published per-county formula, administered by independent state consortia on the New Jersey model, with a statutory firewall against any editorial condition. Reporting it pays for enters the public domain after one year.

How it would work

1. An endowment, not a budget line. The fund is seeded once, on the order of $20 billion, and pays out its real return, about $800 million a year. Once seeded it needs no vote, and it can be ended only by a law that says, in its title, that it is ending the Free Press Endowment. The lesson of 2025 is that the leash is the appropriation. Remove the appropriation and the leash is gone.

1. Seeded from the injury. № 035 sends the proceeds of antitrust enforcement to the endowment. A federal court found in April 2025 that the largest advertising platform had unlawfully monopolised the market that local newspapers once lived on. Penalties and settlements from that case and its successors are the endowment's first deposit: the money returned to the party that was harmed, which was the press.

1. Paid by formula, by county. Each county receives a base grant, enough for at least one full-time reporter, plus an amount per resident. The formula is published and applies to every county alike; no official in Washington decides that one town's newsroom is more deserving than another's. A county with no outlet at all receives its grant as an offer to whoever will establish one, on the same terms.

1. Administered by the states, at arm's length. Each state's share goes to an independent consortium built on New Jersey's design: a nonprofit board of journalists, universities and the public, with no elected official on it, which distributes the county grants to qualifying newsrooms. Qualification is mechanical: a majority of output is original reporting on the county, a published corrections policy, and disclosure of ownership. Nothing about content. Nothing about politics.

1. The firewall in statute. No condition of any kind may be attached to a grant beyond the mechanical tests in item 4. No officer of the United States may communicate with the endowment about a newsroom's coverage. A grant may not be reduced, withheld or recovered on any ground related to what was published. Violation is an offence. This is the clause the Corporation for Public Broadcasting never had, and the one that would have mattered.

1. The commons. Reporting funded by the endowment enters the public domain one year after publication. A town's record of itself, paid for by a permanent public fund, belongs to the town. It also means the endowment builds, over decades, a free archive of American local history that no publisher's bankruptcy can take down.

The numbers

The seed. $20 billion, once. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received about $535 million a year; an endowment paying $800 million a year is a larger press subsidy than the country has ever run, and it is the last one it would need to vote on.

Per county. Across roughly 3,100 counties, a base grant of $150,000 plus a per-capita amount gives a county of 20,000 people about $200,000 a year and a county of a million about $3 million. Enough for a reporter in every county, and a newsroom in most.

What a newspaper's absence costs. Research on municipal bond markets after newspaper closures finds borrowing costs rise by 5 to 11 basis points, which across the roughly $4 trillion in municipal debt outstanding is real money paid every year by the towns least able to notice.

What the founders paid. The 1792 postal subsidy was, at its height, the largest single item of federal domestic expenditure. It was not controversial. It was what a republic did.

The honest objections

"A government-funded press is not a free press." The strongest objection, and 2025 is its proof. The answer is in the instrument, not in the intention: an endowment with no appropriation, a formula with no discretion, a firewall with a penalty, and state consortia with no politicians on them. The BBC is funded by a licence fee and has been fought with by every British government since 1926; it is still, by any survey, the most trusted news source in Britain. What makes a funded press unfree is a funder who can turn off the money. This proposal is built so that nobody can.

"It will prop up a business model the internet has already ended." The model that ended was advertising, which paid for the reporter as a by-product of selling cars. The reporter is the thing the town needs and the thing nobody has found a way to sell. The endowment does not fund a printing press or a delivery route. It funds the reporter at the meeting, and it is agnostic about whether the result arrives on paper, by email or on a screen.

"Who decides what counts as a newsroom, and won't that be captured?" Item 4's tests are mechanical for exactly this reason: original local reporting, a corrections policy, disclosed ownership. A partisan sheet that reports on its county passes; a national outlet with a local URL does not; a blogger who covers every council meeting does. The consortia will still make judgment calls at the margin, and they will be argued over in public, which is the point of putting them in the states and not in Washington.

"$20 billion for journalists while the deficit runs $1.8 trillion." It is seeded from antitrust proceeds, not borrowed, and № 023's rule that no borrowed dollar enters an endowment applies here. If the proceeds are slow to arrive, the endowment starts small and grows. What it does not do is appear as a line in an annual budget, which is the entire design.

"Public domain after a year will kill the paywall that keeps newsrooms alive." A year is longer than the commercial life of nearly all local reporting, and it is the price of public money. A newsroom that wants to keep its archive private may decline the grant. Most, having no archive and no paywall, will not.

Sources

• Northwestern University, Medill School, The State of Local News 2025, closures since 2005, news desert counties, single-outlet counties, population affected, localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu
• Rescissions Act of 2025, Pub. L. 119-28, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's statements of July 24 and August 1, 2025, cpb.org
• Congressional Research Service, Public Broadcasting: Background Information and Issues for Congress (R48545)
• Postal Service Act of 1792, 1 Stat. 232; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Harvard, 1995); Congressional Research Service, Postage Subsidies for Periodicals: History and Recent Developments (R40162)
• New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, P.L. 2018, c.111, and grantee reporting, njcivicinfo.org
• Gao, Lee and Murphy, "Financing dies in darkness? The impact of newspaper closures on public finance," Journal of Financial Economics 135:2 (2020)
• United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.), memorandum opinion on advertising technology, April 2025
• Proposals № 023 (The Debt Covenant); № 035 (The Antitrust Dividend); № 050 (The Shareholder's Report)