Members of the Tiny News Collective are founders of news startups working to serve communities and build sustainable businesses through economic and political uncertainty and growing news needs. A well-timed, targeted boost in funding can go a long way to help them weather the challenges they face.
That’s why we are thrilled to announce our first grants from the Immediate Needs Fund, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These grants of $5,000 per outlet will help members replace lost funding, cover bookkeeping and accounting needs, meet unexpected community information needs, and more.
“The economic and political climate for start-up independent news is being stretched and strained from many different directions, and our members have experienced these challenges in an acute way this year. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, we are able to get much-needed funding to our members — quickly — at a critical time,” said Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, executive director of Tiny News Collective.
A team of media professionals served as grant reviewers, scoring applications based on a rubric we identified at the outset. The criteria included the urgency of the request and the connection of the request to meeting a community or organizational need. Many thanks to Nation Hahn, Shawn Mooring of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Anna Nirmala, Marisa Porto of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and Ashley Woods-Branch of BlueLena for their time and expertise.
“We are thankful to be in community with Tiny News and able to support the immediate needs of these newsrooms as part of our efforts to strengthen local news ecosystems,” said Silvia Rivera, Director of Local News at MacArthur Foundation. “We know that targeted funding can be a game changer for outlets working to keep their communities informed about the local issues that matter most.”
Tiny News is excited to announce the following newsroom grantees from the Immediate Needs Fund, each receiving $5,000, for a total of $75,000 granted:
We're still smiling from Historias of Resilience - our first community reading event! Check out some more scenes from our afternoon connecting with our gente, and keep an eye out for how you can participate in the next community essay series 👀 pic.twitter.com/BbTW6uUrW1
— Austin Vida (@AustinVida) July 7, 2025
“The Immediate Needs grant came at a critical moment for Austin Vida,” said Nancy Flores, the outlet’s editor and publisher. “We had just learned about losing promised funding to help support our newsroom’s first community essay reading event [see video above] and were scrambling. Thanks to this financial support, we piloted a successful and meaningful event that left attendees inspired and uplifted. This will now serve as a blueprint for future events as we grow.”
Congratulations to all our grantee newsrooms! 💖
Along with our earlier Spark Fund grants, Tiny News Collective has now regranted $87,000 to members so far this year. We will open up applications for a second round of grants from the Immediate Needs Fund in September.
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