By Erica Perel
Even small grants can have a big impact on publishers when they come at a key development or crisis point for the organization, Tiny News Collective learned from its first year directly funding members.
In 2025, Tiny News Collective began funding its member newsrooms directly, thanks to a grant it received from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that earmarked $750,000 over three years for that purpose. In the first year, TNC offered two rounds of two grant opportunities: The Spark Fund with professional development grants of up to $1,000; and the Immediate Needs Fund with grants of $5,000 to cover emerging newsroom needs. Between the two, we provided $200,000 to 41 news outlets.
At the end of the first year, and in advance of offering additional regranting opportunities in 2026 and 2027, the organization commissioned an external evaluation to make sure the program was having the intended impact. The report includes recommendations and a framework for measuring success going forward, as well as six case studies to illustrate the impact on individual newsrooms (Appendices A and B).
A few highlights:
- Nearly 80% of Spark Fund recipients reported gaining a new skill or knowledge area, and 57% said that significantly advanced their organization’s goals.
- Just 50% of those recipients had found a way to share their learnings with other TNC members, suggesting an opportunity for better knowledge sharing among members.
- Nearly 80% of Immediate Needs Fund recipients reported that a negative outcome would have occurred without the funding, and 88% reported that the funding stabilized or resolved the immediate crisis.
- 78% of Immediate Needs recipients agreed the timeline between application and disbursement was appropriate to the urgency of their need.
Beyond the topline data, we gleaned additional insights from our first year of administering the program, which drew on both the external evaluation and our understanding of how regranting fits into our broader programs and strategy.
Our members need coaching on how to make a grant budget and application pop
Many of our pre-launch and early launch organizations have plans to pursue grants and philanthropic funding but haven’t had experience flexing that muscle. TNC regranting gives them an opportunity to create a grant budget and application in a friendly, low-stakes environment.
To meet that need, we created grant application guides and walked members through them in webinars. We also met 1:1 with applicants to answer their questions and help them think through their proposals.
TNC
For the competitive Immediate Needs Grant, a panel of external reviewers read and ranked each application. That allowed the TNC team to focus on strengthening applications without a conflict of interest in the review process. We provided more coaching during the second round of Immediate Needs grants, and the evaluation report saw increased “reviewer reliability,” which measured whether different reviewers rated applications similarly.
The money was important to the recipient organizations, but the coaching should also provide new publishers with confidence to create stronger grant applications into the future.
We need to better frame how we’re positioning Immediate Needs Fund grants
TNC defined Immediate Needs Fund grants as “urgent, emergent or unexpected” financial needs due to a variety of factors, including lost revenues due to the economic or political environment, an emerging community information need or unexpected costs.
The evaluation report found that the funding sometimes acted as a bridge over a funding gap, or to continue important coverage despite a lost grant or funding source. Crucially, it also helped prevent founders from going into personal debt to invest in their publications and keep their publications afloat. That speaks to the Immediate Needs grant’s usefulness and impact, as entrepreneurship shouldn’t belong only to those with means.
However, Immediate Needs Fund as a competitive, cycle-based opportunity is different from an emergency fund, and we should be extra clear about that. Emergency grants are typically provided on a revolving non-competitive basis according to a pre-determined set of criteria. Our member organizations need those kinds of funds as well.
Additionally, Immediate Needs Fund grants are different from start-up or seed funding grants to pay for typical business expenses.
Our members need a lot of foundational expenses covered
No matter how you frame them, the grant applications showed that our members need help paying for foundational expenses. We got budget requests for various kinds of insurance, for professional services in tax accounting and compliance, for fundraising support, for software that would allow collaboration or for equipment to branch into new and needed forms of storytelling. These expenses were rarely a surprise for founders, but they were costs they just couldn’t afford. Because business loans typically are not available to news entrepreneurs, personal debt would have been the only alternative for paying for them.
That reveals a flaw in the MVP (minimum viable product) model that’s been ascendent in journalism entrepreneurship in the last 15 years: it’s fairly cheap and easy to spin up the technology needed to launch a minimally viable news website, email newsletter or social media account and start publishing to gain momentum. But that can leave founders in a punishing publishing cycle without revenue or with basic parts of their business unfinished.
Professional development encompasses more than just conferences
The Spark Fund is a noncompetitive grant of up to $1,000 that helps founders on their journey from “founder to leader” through professional development. The fund certainly supported a lot of conference travel in 2025, but the non-conference uses were creative and often very specific to each organization’s origin story or goals.
We saw requests to fund classes and courses of all kinds, from video storytelling to self-defense to fundraising and bookkeeping. Several of our organizations who are pursuing collective leadership structures requested funding for training in collective-informed accounting or HR, for example.
TNC
Professional development typically falls into the category of expenses a founder can’t afford as they build their businesses, but as the evaluation noted that the additional training helped them advance their growth or sustainability goals.
Regranting isn’t a core Tiny News Collective member service, even as we hope to grow opportunities to fund our members
Prospective members aren’t going to see funding in the list of member services TNC provides. Those services are things we can provide to all members, such as fiscal sponsorship, the Ghost CMS and access to Lawyers for Reporters. We don’t have enough grant funds to provide them to everyone who applies, and our ability to regrant depends on receiving money from larger funders. Our team has begun to write regranting opportunities into grant budgets where appropriate.
However, as the economy becomes even more uncertain and the journalism funding landscape shifts, it’s clear that small and emerging publishers, especially those working in underserved communities, need access to philanthropic funding. Even small dollars of the sort TNC has regranted can go a long way for small outlets. TNC is well-positioned to provide that money in a way that is accessible, flexible and a low-lift for everyone involved.