STANFORD, Calif. – April 3, 2025 – Stanford University’s Big Local News has been awarded a $3.9 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to accelerate collaborative infrastructure supporting local news organizations across the United States. Big Local News will work with other journalism outlets and support organizations to build a one-stop shop for data, tools and training resources that will enable more local reporting. The aim is to avoid duplication of effort and amplify impact at the local level.

From its base at Stanford University, Big Local News gathers data, builds tools and collaborates with reporters to produce journalism that makes an impact. Its website at biglocalnews.org offers a free archiving service for journalists to store and share data.

Big Local News collects local data to discover the regional or national patterns that will yield stories with impact and goes after data sets that are hard to obtain because they’re kept in disparate, scattered locations by multiple jurisdictions. Big Local works with newsrooms to process, analyze and archive the data they collect and provides mentoring and training with partner newsrooms. Big Local News also is building an infrastructure for collecting, processing and developing news detection out of feeds of data from a variety of public records, from layoff notices to problematic local audits and local government agendas and minutes.

“According to recent research from the Pew-Knight Initiative, 85% of Americans believe local news outlets are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their community, yet only 25% of those who follow local government and politics are highly satisfied with the coverage they receive,” said Marc Lavallee, Director of Journalism at Knight Foundation. “By focusing on lowering barriers to producing accountability journalism, Big Local News helps small and medium-sized publishers address this clear public demand for more effective local government reporting.”

At a time when efforts to sustain local journalism are critical, this grant allows Big Local News to help provide resources to support local journalism and enable those outlets to nourish their own sustainability.

“We are excited to contribute to building an infrastructure in support of local news,” said Cheryl Phillips, the founder and co-director of Big Local News and a lecturer at Stanford. “Communities are better informed and engaged if local journalism thrives.”

About Knight Foundation

We are social investors who support a more effective democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once published newspapers. Learn more at kf.org.

About Big Local News

From its base at Stanford University, Big Local News gathers data, builds tools and collaborates with reporters to produce journalism that makes an impact. Its website at biglocalnews.org offers a free archiving service for journalists to store and share data.

Learn more by visiting our About page.