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Rural Poverty

Understanding Community Support for Rural Nonprofits: An Ethnographic Study of Two Local Newsrooms Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley*, Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley,

News organizations across the U.S. are closing at increasing rates due to the collapse of traditional for-profit funding models. Journalism outfits in rural areas have been hit particularly hard, shuttering at higher rates than their urban counterparts (Abernathy, 2025). News outlets have turned to nonprofit funding models as an alternative (INN, 2023). However, most of the national financial support for these nonprofit organizations goes to well-resourced journalism outlets in metropolitan areas. In order to understand how rural journalism organizations can continue to exist and adapt to changing financial models in rural areas, I studied two nonprofit news organizations in New England. Drawing upon five months of ethnographic fieldwork, I sought to answer the question: how are under-resourced rural communities able to support organizations providing for their informational needs. This work answers the call for additional research into the ways rural nonprofit organizations remain operational (Leinen et al., 2025), and provides additional understanding of how rural nonprofits gain and maintain a small community’s financial support. Overall, I found that the affordances of rural community support change based on the economic realities unique to communities. While the success of both organizations relied upon unpaid and underpaid work, from a local dependency theory perspective, the survival of the organizations is deeply connected to the profitability of other businesses in the area. Financial support from a wide variety of community members in small donation amounts can come after years of establishing goodwill and personal connections, but the sustaining funds come from just a few businesses underwriting the organizations, and one or two wealthy individuals financing production. Precarity is baked into this model of financial support. The sale of a local business to a national organization or the whims of one wealthy individual can cause financial freefall.