For the past year, Illinois has been giving local news outlets tax credits to support journalism jobs. A new report looks at how it's going

"The report, released last Thursday, is a substantive, measured look at early stats and lessons learned from the first year of Illinois' Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program, which created the country's first refundable tax credits for local news. Rebuild Local News, which "supported and helped design the original legislation," finds concrete areas for improvement and offers suggestions. But the topline numbers from its analysis demonstrate early success that strikes me as genuinely exciting."

"In its first year, the program "awarded more than $4 million in tax credits to support more than 260 local journalist jobs at 55 news entities operating more than 120 local outlets across the state: newspapers, digital news sites, broadcasters, commercial and nonprofit newsrooms alike." Local news organizations across the U.S. are in dire need of this kind of structural support to supplement the ad-hoc fumes of one-off grants."

"And these hard numbers from Illinois are a stark contrast to other state-level journalism policy efforts that have (so far) completely failed to get dollars into the hands of local newsrooms, or sausage-making that has excluded large swathes of the local news business from eligibility. The early success in Illinois indicates this policy structure has real potential to meaningfully support local newsrooms of different shapes and sizes without compromising their independence."

Illinois' Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program created the country's first refundable tax credits for local news, awarding more than $4 million to support over 260 local journalist jobs at 55 news entities operating more than 120 outlets, including newspapers, digital sites, broadcasters, and nonprofit newsrooms. The program's formula design and implementation raised no known allegations of government officials picking winners or making content-based distinctions, and beneficiaries did not include obvious "pink slime" outlets. Early results suggest a high-integrity, First Amendment-friendly subsidy design that can be scaled up to provide stable structural support beyond ad-hoc grants, contrasting with other state efforts that failed to deliver funds broadly.

Read at Nieman Lab