Forward Global Summit 2025 | Dale Anglin, Press Forward

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Dale Anglin

Director

Press Forward

play_circle_outline Press Forward initiative supporting local news and journalism

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play_circle_outline Empowering Small News Outlets through Innovative Business Models and Strong Infrastructure in Journalism

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Dale Anglin, Press Forward

Dale Anglin

Director Press Forward

Exploring Press Forward's Vision for Local Journalism at Forward Global Summit 2025

Dale Anglin, director of Press Forward, joins theCUBE to discuss the evolving landscape of local journalism at the Forward Global Summit 2025. With significant challenges facing the industry, Anglin and their team leverage philanthropy to address the decline in local news outlets and the essential role they play in a functioning democracy.

In this engaging discussion, Anglin shares insights on Press Forward's mission to rejuvenate local journalism. With a bac... Read more

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Dale Anglin, Press Forward

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>> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE here in Los Angeles at the Forward Global Summit 2025. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here where the brightest minds are coming together to solve some of the world's biggest problems. We're seeing entrepreneurs, we're seeing technologists, foundation donors, and people leading the change. And one of the big topics is saving democracy and saving journalism, and really getting the news and information programs in a position to continue to be, one, viable, but also moving into the next generation. Here on theCUBE, Dale Anglin, she's the director of Press Forward, a great initiative that is changing and also solving a lot of the problems in local news and journals in general. Dale, thanks for coming on theCUBE.

Dale Anglin

>> Thank you. Nice to be with you.

>> Appreciate your time. I sat through your session yesterday, and then also the hallway conversation here at Forward Global is all about democracy. They're seeing the current situation. And the themes I'm hearing here at the show are a few things I want to get your thoughts on. One is confidence. There's a lot of low confidence on one side, and then enthusiasm on the other. Polarized obviously in the polarized environment. Community, new systems, breaking fake rules. I love that kind of session, but it's the same game, but there's new things happening. In journalism, your organization is making change there. Explain what you guys do and some of the things you're talking about here at Forward Global.

Dale Anglin

>> So Press Forward was started about a year and a half ago. We're a large donor collective. We started with 20 foundations. We're now at over 90 foundations, local and national, all focused on supporting local news. The industry has had a lot of issues over the last 20 years. We've lost reporters, we've lost outlets for all sorts of reasons. And yet we know that there's a lot of research now that shows that when you don't have local news in a city or in a region or in a state, people are less engaged with each other. They don't understand their neighbors as much. We need local news for public safety. When you've seen some of the disasters that have been happening this last year, it was very important for people to understood where to go. We need local news in order to really investigate our public officials. I love them, but they don't always do the right thing if they aren't being watched. Right? So for accountability, we needed to talk about all of the other issues that people care about, the arts, economic development, children's issues. But if you're trying to affect change in those areas, if no one is getting information about that change, then it's not helpful. Right? So local news is something that's just really important. We need it. And we had not focused as a philanthropic sector on that because they had their own ad revenue for a long time.

>> And I think it's a super big crisis. And you point out it's something in your session, red states and red state deserts.

Dale Anglin

>> Yes.

>> Explain what that is. I think it's important for people to understand the magnitude. The word desert, you think of a desert, no water, you're starving.

Dale Anglin

>> So the magnitude is we've lost something like 40,000 or 50,000 reporter roles over the last 10 to 15 years. We lose an average of one to two outlets a week. And so we've got at least 1200 counties in the United States that either have no local news or barely any local news, or sometimes they may have what we call ghost newspapers. They've been there for a while, but they have no any more original local reporting.

>> They're aggregating 18 stories.

Dale Anglin

>> They just aggregate other stuff, right? So when that happens, that happens everywhere, both in red states and blue states by the way. It happens a lot in rural areas. Frankly, it can happen in a city, in certain neighborhoods. They don't have news in their language and the way they want to get it. And one of the issues that a lot of the funders have been caring a lot about is how do you identify those places and how do you help them rebuild or reimagine what local news looks like? And it can look different ways. So one of the solutions that people are investing a lot in is using your local college or your local community college university as an asset. Train up some of the students there to understand how to do journalism. And they're not just studying their own school, they're doing journalism for the community. And we've got lots of examples where student journalists have done amazing work over the last year or two, and we're trying... We've given a lot of grants to work with a lot of colleges over the country to do that as one solution.

>> That is a huge breakthrough. So congratulations on that. And for the donors out there who are donating, hats off to you, keep it coming. The importance of the community college brings up a point that jumped out at me and just resonated. I couldn't sleep last night because of it. The role of the system, it's not just a newsroom. You think of a paper, people banging on a keyboard, getting the story out on print. Now you've got digital, your podcast. You guys bring up something that you're discovering.

Dale Anglin

>> The ecosystem.

>> The ecosystem around it. There's civic minded individuals. There's always the town loony out there, a little hyperbole, but the community all knows who it is or her. So the role of colleges is a systemic opportunity.

Dale Anglin

>> Yes, it is.

>> That feeds the market. There's other things going on.

Dale Anglin

>> Absolutely.

>> Can you share this other breakthrough?

Dale Anglin

>> This is the fun part of the job.

>> Explain.

Dale Anglin

>> In the end, we used to have a culture in the journalism industry of being very competitive. And because they were for-profit and they were competitive, they wanted to make money. Now more and more of them are nonprofit. They're learning how to collaborate together. We're never probably going to go back to the day where we had 20 newspapers in a city. You might be going to have three, right? So there's ways to figure out what should your... What we ask everybody is what should your local news ecosystem look like? What's the market right now? Do you have a lot of young people, a lot of old people? How do they want their news? Some people want it on TikTok, some people want it on WhatsApp, some people want print. The point is we try to help... We have these things called chapters within Press Forward that we've got 36 chapters in 30 states, and we're going for all 50 states. And they help set a table with lots of partners, libraries, universities, civic-minded people, people who are working in the arts to think about what's already existing, what are the gaps. There may be some communities that are not covered or some areas of the city that are not covered. And how do we work together to fill, either take what you already have and make it better, or create new things. I helped create a new thing in Cleveland, Ohio called Signal. We didn't have anything really following Cleveland, certain parts of the city. We are now in four cities in Ohio. It's really been well received.

>> And what is Signal?

Dale Anglin

>> It's a new online digital platform. They publish every day. They really focus on inner city, Akron, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and now Columbus. But the innovation is, there's one back office for all four of those newsrooms.

>> That's awesome.

Dale Anglin

>> They're customized per city. But we have one CEO, one development officer, one person helping them with platforms.

>> So you're scaling.

Dale Anglin

>> We're scaling.

>> So in your mission statement, I love your website because it was obviously the journalism piece, which is hugely important. Don't stop there. I don't want to put any kind of discount on that and mention it, but one thing that also jumped out at me on your mission was this infrastructure scale.

Dale Anglin

>> Yes, yes, yes.

>> This is huge because the new infrastructure is multimodal.

Dale Anglin

>> It is.

>> It's support. Because the deserts out there, you're creating an oasis of journalism, needs support to the home.

Dale Anglin

>> Yes. Last mile.

>> Interaction. They're out on the edge. Edge of the network, as we say in tech. So this system is a huge part of it.

Dale Anglin

>> We have to find-

>> Investing in those grants.

Dale Anglin

>> The way we describe it is, given that there's been a demise of big newspapers, we're going to have a number of smaller entities over time. How do we make sure that it's easier to start those entities and continue those entities? So that's the backbone, that's the business side, that's the tech side, the tech stack. And it turns out there are ways for you to standardize how you do that work across this country. And so we're spending a lot of time finding some of the innovators, support them, train the trainer, help them train other entities. We've got four or 500 people coming to a training in May in Philadelphia on fundraising around news. Because it turns out we've got... Actually, we still need a lot of reporters. We do need more reporters. I will just say that.

>> Yes. More reporters.

Dale Anglin

>> And we need more people on the business side of news. And so we're creating them. We're turning reporters into business people. We're recruiting non-journalists into the field to be on the business side. I was talking with someone recently and they're trying to get their business school and their journalism school, and they've been at the same university for years, but they've never worked together. We're just finding ways to build connections with unlikely players that probably should have been working together in the past, but just haven't.

>> It's also a talent game, mentioned reporters. One of your panelists mentioned mapping. Which I also like, because what she was saying was, is that that's a core thing. But that's not obvious. But it still requires talent and resource.

Dale Anglin

>> But let's understand why she did that mapping. The thing that was most important... So this is in California, Dr. Paulette Brown-Hinds, and she is a second generation publisher. She inherited the paper from her parents. She knew that they had to do something slightly different because the audience is changing where they are in Riverside County, they're in two counties. And what she did first is the most brilliant thing is she listened to her community. She went out and found, who's reading us right now? Who's our best audience? It turned out her best audience were leaders who run other things, libraries, nonprofits. There's leaders in the community. They loved her publication because it gave them a sense of all that was going on. And then she said, "So what else do you need from us?" They needed data. They needed to understand who was doing what in the space. Things go up, did they get better? Did they get worse? And they didn't have easy access to it. She just says, "Well, we could do some mapping." And it got so good. She now has two data mapping people on her staff. But the start of that is she listened to her community and she offered them a service that they couldn't get anywhere else.

>> And I think the mission that you have about infrastructure and then getting the resource to listen. Forward Global, the event here, what have you heard? Feedback, you do sessions and you're in demand. You get pulled on sidecar conversations.

Dale Anglin

>> It's been an awesome experience.

>> Tell me about some of the conversations you've had here with people.

Dale Anglin

>> They've been so good.

>> The donors, people, not donating, but want to contribute. There's a huge energy to your mission.

Dale Anglin

>> So we knew when we started Press Forward, we weren't just going to focus on staff foundations. We had to talk to donors, individual donors. Because in the end, they're going to be a part of the solution too. So we started up a partnership, a formal partnership with Forward Global that we've been now for about six months. And we give them content information about local news. They help us meet journalists, meet donors who are interested in this, who care about democracy and other things. So this is our first foray in person together. It's been fantastic. Oh my gosh. I think they're going to do this summit maybe once a quarter, monthly. First of all, people are already primed. They already care about our system. They understand local news. They've been really appreciative of the content we've been giving them about how we're doing it. I'll give a great story already. One of the donors who sat in on the session, she comes up to me this morning actually, she sat in on two sessions and she said, "No, I really want to do something now." And I said, "Okay." And she meant, "Are there places where I could give now, today or this week?" And I said, "Well, where are you?" She's in Tampa. Literally in the last hour, we have a chapter in Tampa, Florida. She sent a note to the Community Foundation CEO there, who's a fabulous woman. And she said, "I would love to get involved with Press Forward Local. Tell me how I can get involved." I mean, she just acted on it right away. We've had people say, "Please come up and let's talk about how we can figure out ways to support." And I'll just say one other thing, we are helping donors understand that there are multiple ways to give. You can join our pooled fund to Press Forward, of course. And we do the work for you. Frankly. We have the content knowledge and the expertise. But some people just wanted help on, they're doing their own grant making, but they wanted help on how do I judge outlets? How do I even... "I'm an arts funder," or "I'm an economic development funder. How do I talk to news about understanding that system or that particular industry?" So we're giving them tidbits on, these are some of the questions you should be asking. Well, this has been a great conversation.

>> We really appreciate your mission, what you do, and the donors that are donating. We have a shared mission here at SiliconANGLE Media. Final question as lunch rolls in.

Dale Anglin

>> Yes.

>> What do you hope to accomplish this year? We'll see you next time. We just joined this year. What do you hope to say next year when we chat? "Hey, I got all 50 states." What's your goal?

Dale Anglin

>> We've got several goals. We want to be in all 50 states. That's the first one. Chapters in every state. We definitely want to have raised more dollars, but to be honest, we have certain pillars. Our pillars are public policy because we see local news as a public good. And so we're working in states to get laws passed, tax credits, and all sorts of fellowships to support local news. We've got to focus on infrastructure, which we're doing now. So we want to have seen more strategic grants in those spaces. And to be honest, I want to say a year from now that we have trained up a lot more outlets on the business side, even creating structures. We're creating even possibly new classes that they could go to, certificate programs they could get. So that when they go to a funder, they've been vetted. We went through this business side class. We know how to do this. And therefore, good investment.

>> You're going to operationalize the system.

Dale Anglin

>> We're going to operationalize the system.

>> Well, congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

Dale Anglin

>> Thank you.

>> Great pleasure. And again, congratulations for the momentum and a great team.

Dale Anglin

>> Thank you.

>> We support your work.

Dale Anglin

>> And we love our partnership with Forward Global.

>> This is making a change. Local is where the action is. In a network where people are talking, it can rise right to the top. No story is too small for local journalism. And again, you never know where that next national story is going to come from. Of course, we're bringing you all the action here at Forward Global in LA. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.