Shoots of Innovation in the New Mexico News Desert

With all the challenges the news industry is facing it’s easy to get sucked into a sense of despair. Most newsrooms in New Mexico have fewer reporters, newspapers are closing, news deserts are expanding — the bad news just keeps coming.

The economic and structural challenges facing journalism are real, and through programs like the New Mexico Local News Fund’s Local Revenue Initiative we are seeking to address that. But if you peek below the surface, New Mexico is actually making progress with news startups that can help water our news deserts.

Throughout the state, community members and independent journalists have seen the need for access to information to better inform New Mexicans’ daily lives. In response they are establishing new organizations to address this gap. The strength of these new news outlets come from their diversity. Some are focused on a small geographic area, others focus on a topic or region, or address unmet language needs.

These types of publications aren’t unique to New Mexico and are increasingly being noticed and supported by national foundations. The Tiny News Collective is a new initiative to make it easier to start small local news organizations by providing everything a founder would need in one easy package. Google and LION Publishers also launched the Google News Initiative Startups Lab and a Startups Playbook as a resource for independent publications.

Here’s a brief tour of some of the news startups in New Mexico:

• Downtown Albuquerque News or DAN was founded in 2019 by Peter Rice, an experienced journalist and writer passionate about the neighborhood he has lived in since 2012. It is a daily email newsletter focused on downtown Albuquerque and adjacent neighborhoods. Peter keeps his readers informed with an eclectic mix of business, local government reporting, events, and innovative data dashboards he designed that track important trends in the area like construction permits, real estate prices, new businesses, air quality, and much more. By keeping the focus hyperlocal, it ensures that subscribers are getting local news that is always relevant to them. It runs on a paid subscription model.
• Questa Del Rio News is a traditional monthly newspaper focused on a few smaller communities in rural Northern New Mexico. What sets it apart is that it was founded by the Questa Economic Development Corporation, and has been a nonprofit since its start in 2018. At the recent Knight Media Forum one of the key takeaways was that community foundations are beginning to realize the importance of local journalism and supporting it. A source of local information like the Questa Del Rio News does more than just report; it creates a sense of cohesion and shared community identity.
• In Truth or Consequences, the Sierra County Sun was started in 2019 by a group of community members seeking to increase transparency in local government. With an eclectic board of writers, academics, former journalists, and others, they are bringing nonprofit online journalism to a county of 11,000 people. With two staff and several volunteers, they regularly report on city and county government, environmental concerns, water rights, and much more. They also provide state-wide news thanks to shared content from online outlets like Searchlight New Mexico and New Mexico In Depth.
• Just this week I met with the head of the Columbus, NM News, a brand new online news outlet in the small border town of Columbus, NM. They are still in their startup phase and figuring out exactly what their coverage will look like, how to make information available in Spanish, how to include reporting on their sister city across the border in Mexico, and much more. We’re excited to see what they come up with and to support them in any way we can as they tackle an important news desert in Southern New Mexico.

In addition to recent startups, New Mexico has some alternative media outlets that got their start years ago, filling in gaps in the news ecosystem.

Camino Real Media started seven years ago when Gerald Smola suggested to his boss at El Diario, the major newspaper of Ciudad Juárez, that they should expand into the Las Cruces market. His boss said, “why don’t you try it?” and so he did. This Southern New Mexico-focused Spanish language publication has a print and online presence and is a critical source of local news for Spanish speakers. Public officials routinely turn to Camino Real to help get the word out about government programs and opportunities. Camino Real also regularly translates news stories from other publications into Spanish for their audience. Especially during the pandemic, helping Spanish-speaking New Mexicans get access to accurate public health information is essential.

Many of these startups are only possible because of the nonprofit news ecosystem that is already in place. New Mexico In Depth, New Mexico Political Report and Searchlight New Mexico make their reporting available at no cost to other news outlets. Focusing on data, investigative reporting, and state-wide politics and policy, they do journalism that most local news outlets can’t. For smaller newsrooms, having statewide coverage to supplement their local reporting is invaluable.

We’re also starting to see investment from outside nonprofit news organizations into New Mexico and the Southwest. Capital and Main hired two veteran New Mexico journalists to report on how the fossil fuel industry is influencing climate policy here. ProPublica recently opened a Southwest reporting team which will include one New Mexico-based reporter.

At the New Mexico Local News Fund, we would love to support more news startups in New Mexico. Do you live in a community that needs more local journalism and you want to help start something new? Get in touch, and we’ll connect you to resources and information to help get you up and running.