New Jersey Should Not Be Funding Local Journalism

“I agree that without local news, communities suffer from a dearth of necessary information, but this bill opens up way more problems than it fixes.”

Thankfully, in the months since July, not much has happened since New Jersey passed the Civic Info Bill, an effort intended to provide a boost to the beleaguered local news industry in the state. $5 million worth of taxpayer money was to be set aside and managed by a government-created non-profit for the purpose of funding select local news outlets or media startups, with a special focus on those that would be covering community news. Without this cash injection from the state, its proponents claimed that civic life in New Jersey would be badly damaged. I agree that without local news, communities suffer from a dearth of necessary information, but this bill opens up way more problems than it fixes.

I am deeply concerned with how the bill presents itself as free and non-partisan, despite having a framework that would indicate the opposite; setting a precedent based around the necessity of government-funded media—especially when it pertains to outlets such as these local ones—opens up the possibility for a future filled with journalists that can’t bite the hand that feeds them.

A crucially overlooked detail of the Civic Info Bill’s text is the composition of the created non-profit’s board of directors. Sources like CNN and The Hill reported that the board behind the selection process is simply made up of “five of the state’s universities,” which, according to the latter, are “The College of New Jersey, Montclair State University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rowan University and Rutgers University.” What they neglect to include are the four politically-appointed members—two by the governor, one by the President of the Senate, and the last by the Speaker of the Assembly—who vote towards the appointment of the remaining four, plus the board’s Executive Director.