Podcasts. Investigative news. Reporting about soccer, sewage, city hall and San Diego County.

These are some of the ways San Diegans will benefit from a $2 million investment in four local nonprofit news outlets and one California-wide outlet.

The newsrooms — inewsource, KPBS, NEWSWELL/Times of San Diego and Voice of San Diego — are each getting $300,000. CalMatters, which covers the state, is getting $800,000 to share data and resources with media partners in this region. The grants are split over two years.

The money comes from the Prebys Foundation, San Diego County’s largest independent private foundation, which recently announced investments in downtown real estate and arts education. The foundation also funds medical research, leadership development, and mental and physical health care access.

Why journalism? Because it matters, and it is increasingly vulnerable, said Grant Oliphant, the foundation’s CEO.

“Journalism is important for absolutely everything we fund. You know, you can’t really understand what’s happening in America today if you’re not getting this information. You can’t understand what’s happening with cuts in medical research in San Diego if you’re not getting this information,” Oliphant said.

The foundation had identified nonprofit newsrooms as a good target for investment, given that traditional newsrooms have shrunk or consolidated. The current climate made the need even more clear, he said. The grant announcement comes at a time when attacks on journalists and independent news outlets have heightened, and as public funding for PBS and NPR are expected to face steep cuts under the Trump administration.

“If we don’t have good, independent news organizations, then there really is no one holding the government or the powerful to account, or playing the role of translating very complicated, difficult information for the rest of us to learn about and understand,” Oliphant said.

Local recipients

Instead of pouring more money into one outlet, the foundation decided it was more effective to spread it among the four local newsrooms.

Scott Lewis, the editor and CEO of Voice of San Diego, founded in 2005 and an early innovator in nonprofit news space, said the money will help his outlet hire an investigative reporter to cover city hall, hire journalists to cover the arts and sports in a “conversational” way and to develop podcasts.

This investment shows that the foundation “realizes how important it is to make sure that journalists are able to continue to be able to tell stories about everything that’s happening, and reveal things that are sometimes uncomfortable, and explain how things work, so that people can be a part of the discussion about how we’re going to handle some of our biggest problems and challenges,” Lewis said.

Chris Jennewein, the editor and founder of Times of San Diego, which launched in 2014, said the money will help support expanded newsroom operations and fund coverage of key regional problems and topics readers are excited about, such as professional soccer. His newsroom recently added two full-time editors and five freelancers, and it has four paid interns every semester. Its content is free for readers and supported by a mix of advertisements and donations like this one, he added.

“With this extra funding we can double down on the in-depth reporting on major issues — accountability reporting. Things like the homeless issue, things like city government, what’s happening at the border, the sewage crisis. We’re going to be able to devote more coverage to all those things.”

Lorie Hearn, the editor and CEO of inewsource, which she founded in 2009, said the grant will help “amplify the importance of local news” at a time when public trust in the media has eroded.

“Nonprofit news, like inewsource and our fellow grantees, provide a vital service to the public, especially in these times when many people can’t agree on a set of facts, let alone trust the media. We exist not for profits, but to serve the public,” she said.

“Many people these days have conditioned themselves into thinking news is free because it’s just there, on their phones. But if you have news sources that you regularly check because you can believe and rely on them, there are real journalists behind those posts that are working hard to gather and verify facts so you can believe what you read and are not misled. And those journalists deserve to be paid for that work.”

The foundation’s investment will be used to keep building inewsource’s Documenters program, which is “a unique program that trains — and pays — everyday people to report on what happens at hundreds of public meetings that aren’t covered by the media because of lack of resources. In its first year, we’ve trained more than 300 people.”

Originally Published: April 16, 2025 at 1:33 PM PDT