The New Mexico Local News Fund is supporting another round of grants to support diverse local newsrooms in the state and help them reach financial sustainability through the New Mexico Local News Accelerator. In addition to financial support, newsrooms will receive one-one-one coaching, and support from other newsroom leaders across the state through regular cohort meetings. (You can read about last year’s cohort here.)

Newsrooms will receive $6,000 in grants. Similar to last year’s program, the funds must be used to further a specific business need that supports the journalism mission of the organization. This will need to be spelled out in the application and finalized at the start of the program. There is flexibility to pivot from that idea twice during the Accelerator. We will accept 15 to 17 newsrooms into the Accelerator program, and expect it to be a more competitive application process this year. 

This year, the program will have the following features and requirements:

• The program will run for 6 months, from April through September 2024.
• It is open to any organization (for-profit or nonprofit) that focuses primarily on news, including previous Accelerator grantees. Newsrooms can be print, radio, TV or digital.
• Our cohort meetings will take place monthly over Zoom, with special guests (and cohort members) talking in-depth on important topics.
• The Local News Fund’s Mark Glaser will again be overseeing the program, but we will engage outside consultants to help keep newsrooms on track with their revenue focus. 
• Each newsroom will be required to join the monthly cohort meetings as well as one monthly check-in Zoom meeting, call or email with the program coordinator, Mark Glaser, along with relevant consultants based on topic need.
• All grantees will be eligible to join our annual Matching Campaign in December, with the Local News Fund matching up to $5,000 in donations, subscriptions or memberships sold that month.
• At the start of the program in early April, we plan to have a “Demo Day” on Zoom, with 90 minutes of demos of relevant technology for publishers. We expect Accelerator participants to attend or watch the video afterwards.

If you are interested in applying for the Accelerator program, fill out this Google form. Deadline to apply is March 8, 2024 at 6 pm Mountain Time. If you have questions about the program, please contact Mark Glaser at mark@nmlocalnews.org