ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (July 16, 2025) – The Poynter Institute will work with partners on a project to help local news organizations preserve vital online news archives, with funding from Press Forward, a national initiative to reimagine local news.
The funding is part of Press Forward’s Open Call on Infrastructure, which is providing $22.7 million to 22 projects that address the urgent challenges local newsrooms face today.
Press Forward awarded the project’s lead, the Internet Archive, $1 million to “develop a national program that preserves vital local online news content that often goes offline when a publication ceases to exist,” according to its news release announcing the grants Wednesday. Poynter and Investigative Reporters & Editors were co-applicants for the grant and will both be a part of developing and providing training on the program.
“Local news is essential to healthy communities,” said Kristen Hare, Poynter’s director for craft and local news, who will lead Poynter’s contribution to the project. “As we’ve seen again and again, it’s also easy to erase in a digital world. This program offers a way to archive history’s first draft and a community’s collective memory.”
Whether through changes in their content management systems, new ownership or closures, newsrooms and journalists have grappled with lost archives for years. So far, most solutions have relied on individuals to preserve their work.
“As the first draft of history, local news published today will be needed by tomorrow’s journalists, scholars and everyday residents,” the Press Forward statement said. “However, no infrastructure exists to ensure the preservation and access of news published online or in digital formats. ‘Today’s News for Tomorrow’ will develop a national program that enables newsrooms and journalists to preserve their digital assets to support both immediate internal needs and communities’ future information needs.”
The money will help train 300 newsrooms and journalists who will receive Internet Archive’s web archiving, digital preservation services and training for free.
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that began in 1996 and has preserved 28 years of web content history accessible through its Wayback Machine. Its goal is to build a digital library of internet sites and make them available free to researchers, historians and the public.
Other organizations awarded money from Press Forward as part of the infrastructure effort include recipients working to protect a free and independent press, ensure newsrooms have safety protocols in place, mental health services to help reporters heal from trauma and burnout and legal resources to face challenges to their reporting. Others are strengthening newsrooms’ sustainability – tackling revenue and operations challenges so the field can thrive long-term.
The full list of recipients is available online here.
Launched in the fall of 2023, Press Forward is working to reimagine local news nationwide. Together, more than 90 funders – from local community foundations to national foundations – have invested more than $200 million in the sector, including in news outlets in every state.
For more information, visit Press Forward’s site.
Media Contact
Jennifer Orsi
Vice President, Publishing and Local News Initiatives
jorsi@poynter.org
About the Poynter Institute
The Poynter Institute is a global nonprofit working to address society’s most pressing issues by teaching journalists and journalism, covering the media and the complexities facing the industry, convening and community building, improving the capacity and sustainability of news organizations and fostering trust and reliability of information. The Institute is the gold standard in journalistic excellence and dedicated to the preservation and advancement of press freedom in democracies worldwide. Through Poynter, journalists, newsrooms, businesses, big tech corporations and citizens convene to find solutions that promote trust and transparency in news and stoke meaningful public discourse. The world’s top journalists and emerging media leaders rely on the Institute to learn new skills, adopt best practices, better serve audiences, scale operations and improve the quality of the universally shared information ecosystem.
The Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), MediaWise and PolitiFact are all members of the Poynter organization.
Support for Poynter and our entities upholds the integrity of the free press and the U.S. First Amendment and builds public confidence in journalism and media — an essential for healthy democracies. Learn more at poynter.org.
About Press Forward
Press Forward is a nationwide movement to strengthen our democracy by revitalizing local news and information. Press Forward’s growing coalition of funders has committed to invest more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news and scale infrastructure the sector needs to thrive. Press Forward is housed at The Miami Foundation. For more, visit pressforward.news.
