🔴 A $100k grant for local journalism

Today’s guest is Ambreen Ali, a journalist, teacher, and digital marketing expert running a grant-funded newsletter serving the broad South Asian community of New Jersey.

Central Desi was created by Ambreen but is not about her; today’s newsletter is less about Ambreen than the journalistic values and philosophy her work aims to deliver and propagate.

In this issue:

• 📰 A newsletter-based fellowship program for young journalists

• 💵 Grant funding is a viable model for indie newsletters

• 🏘️ Why the future of local news might be bright

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Ambreen or watch it on YouTube.

Local journalism by local journalists

One year after starting Central Desi, Ambreen Ali was ready to give up. Besides working on the newsletter, she had a full-time job and was teaching, not to mention writing as a freelancer and attending to her personal life.

In July 2022, Ambreen wrapped up a 100-day entrepreneurial journalism program at CUNY, where she’d expected “a crash course in launching a newsletter”¹ alongside a global cohort of journalists. That’s what she got; within two weeks of graduating, she launched the concept on beehiiv.

The first edition of Central Desi included a brief essay about a Marvel-produced miniseries featuring stories about Desi New Jersey, an interview with a woman who built a thriving local Facebook community, and a vision:

But, over the next 12 months, Ambreen shipped only 7 issues; sustaining the project proved harder than she’d thought. So she applied for a grant.

Grant funding for fellows

The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCIC) is a nonprofit created in 2018 “in response to the growing local news crisis impacting communities across the state’s 21 counties.”³ The grant Ambreen won for Central Desi in 2023 was one of 17 new grants that year, totaling $1.35 million (not to mention renewal grants totaling $1.51 million).

Central Desi won $81k, primarily to fund a fellowship program for young journalists. As she shared in the newsletter issue announcing the funding, Ambreen's first instinct was “to return the grant money and run.”

Funding meant accountability to a level beyond Ambreen’s lone ability. So, she hired a project manager — journalist and public relations professional Bilal Lakhani — and they got to work creating the fellowship program she’d pitched.

Central Desi’s fellowship program began accepting applications within two months of winning the grant. Each fellow would be given a $3,000 stipend over six months to write monthly articles under Ambreen and Bilal’s editorial guidance while receiving training on community journalism, how to distribute it online, and how to operate as part of an editorial team. Two months later, the first round of four fellows — all young, South Asian women journalists living in or near New Jersey — was announced.

In its first year, operated by a team of one, Central Desi only published 7 issues; in the second year, which just ended, the number of issues increased nearly sixfold. This summer, using the grant money, the team grew again, bringing in Associate Editor Teshin Pala. A media outlet is taking shape.

The future of local media in New Jersey is bright

Not two weeks before the publication of the newsletter you’re reading now, Central Desi was awarded a $100,000 renewal on its initial grant. They’ll invest in more consistent coverage and audience growth, besides launching the call for the next round of fellows in September.

This round of grants, unlike the previous, contained no new awards, only 16 grant renewals. The NJCIC press release says, “These grantees represent a diverse array of community-focused initiatives, ranging from grassroots journalism and civic engagement to youth journalism programs.”

All 16 grant awardees are niche community outlets; there’s even $25,000 for a digital journalism program at a New Jersey high school. Ambreen describes the consortium as “trying to both grow the New Jersey [media] ecosystem and diversify it.”

When she applied with Central Desi, the NJCIC had yet to fund any South Asian-focused outlets — a significant gap given that, as Ambreen notes, “New Jersey is 10% Asian, the fastest growing demographic within New Jersey is Asian people, and a big chunk of that is South Asian. “

It’s important to note that, by law, neither the NJCIC nor the State of New Jersey can have ownership in any project these particular grants fund, nor can either body editorially control any project funded by the grants. The goal is to foster an ecosystem, not to build the next monolithic media company.

Small, local media outlets like Central Desi and its fellow NJCIC grantees create shared reference points for the communities they serve, inasmuch as they’re able to connect with, reach, and even actively form those communities. As Ambreen puts it:

Teaching is its own multiplying reward

Is Central Desi on the way to becoming a sustainable business? Not exactly, but journalism of the kind Ambreen champions — deeply researched, community-oriented, and integrous — has rarely been profitable.

Success, for an outlet like Central Desi, is not about profit and only partly about growth. The goal is to serve the Desi community in New Jersey and, eventually, beyond. In one way, the newsletter is already a success: it has brought dozens of stories from, for, and about the community it serves into the world, stories that would never have been published had it not existed.

But success is even more about the people who produced those stories — the fellows:

Ambreen says the first round of fellows constantly shared feedback along these lines — that they’d never been able to tell stories about their own communities or connect with successful journalists from their own communities.

Funding is never to be taken for granted

Outside of grants, the business is not generating much revenue. Says Ambreen, “We've been focusing so much on the editorial content, but we need to think about marketing and sales.” There’s a premium membership option, but it doesn’t currently come with extra benefits; it’s more like supporting NPR or Wikipedia. She hopes to explore local advertising, too, which could serve the community in a symbiotic sense, funding the newsletter while bringing new customers to local businesses within the same community.

Ambreen does harbor dreams of the newsletter serving communities far beyond New Jersey². For now, though, she’s happy. The newsletter has grown to around 800 subscribers largely through word of mouth, people sharing issues in community with each other.

The vision is to foster a network of local newsletters serving different South Asian population centers across the States — “local newsletters feeding into all of those places and then coming up to a national publication. That’s my ultimate dream for this,” says Ambreen.

Connect with Ambreen on LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Central Desi.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossibly to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

• 📧 Ambreen’s work with business newsletter company SmartBrief

• 👓️ Media literacy is worse than ever, but schools are teaching it

• 📱 Grappling with journalistic responsibilities in a creator world

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Funding service and community-oriented newsletters through grants

Not all newsletters are well-suited for grant funding. Most probably aren’t. But there are many grants out there, awarded by many different organizations; if you’ve got a solid newsletter concept, there might be a journalism or arts grant out there that’ll afford you time and resources to properly execute it.

We already covered, above, why Central Desi won a grant — the NJCIC sought to fund a range of diverse media projects in New Jersey; Ambreen is a journalist living in New Jersey; Central Desi fills a gap in the state’s media landscape and educates journalists to do the same.

Admittedly, I’ve never written or won a grant, so I can’t give thorough advice on how to do so. But there’s no shortage of resources on writing grants.

And there’s no shortage of grant opportunities out there. A quick Google search surfaces a few lists:

• FundsforWriters compiles grants in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.

• The National Endowment for the Arts gives grants for a variety of arts, media, and research projects.

• The Mellon Foundation awards grants for arts and culture, higher learning, humanities, and public knowledge projects.

Financial success in the creator economy is a hard-fought prize, requiring a great deal of work, luck, and persistence to accrue. Grants don’t exactly represent financial freedom — the goal for so many creators — but they do represent time, an opportunity to produce great work.

You won’t win a grant with a weak project proposal. Listen to Ambreen —

• Listen to the second episode of Tasteland, our new podcast hosted by Spotlight editor Francis and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

  • This week: local media models from the Village Voice through Central Desi, Daisy talks about the 19th century origins of taste, and airport sushi … good, actually.

• For two quite different stories about local media newsletters, we recently covered:

  • Ryan Sneddon’s ad-supported daily, the Naptown Scoop (Creator Spotlight).

  • Kate Samuelson’s ad-supported weekly, Cheapskate London (Creator Spotlight).

Thank you for reading. For more, check out Ambreen’s episode of our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

Next week’s guest is Sean Devlin, a sharp media entrepreneur who has built Nice News into a profitable 800k+ subscriber product in under three years.

And if you missed last week’s issue, about how realtor Glennda Baker built a media business generating 10.8 million views per month and driving 30% of her real estate revenue, read it here.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Twitter / LinkedIn
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