For Rashad Mahmood,  executive director of the New Mexico Local News Fund, home to Press Forward New Mexico, advocating for local news is the most important part of his job.

That advocacy takes many forms — from conversations with legislators to convenings with community members. The work is grassroots, built one relationship at a time. 

“It’s important to have someone that’s really rooting for local news and journalism as a sector in meetings with the public and with community organizations,” Mahmood explained. “I see part of my role as reminding people that journalism still exists and is doing good things.”

Press Forward chapters work in a range of ways — from providing funding and offering training and capacity building for local newsrooms, to advocating on their behalf. Here’s how Press Forward New Mexico makes the case for local news in its state. 

Re-centering local news

 

The New Mexico Local News Fund is guided by a mission to catalyze a local news renaissance in New Mexico. One way the fund advances this mission is by showing up in spaces where journalists often aren’t. Mahmood and his colleagues represent local news at community meetings, business gatherings, funder collaboratives, and nonprofit convenings.

“I try to network as much as I can because news outlets themselves aren’t necessarily in a good position to do that, given the resource challenges that they have,” Mahmood said. 

That visibility matters at a time when many communities have seen their local news outlets shrink or vanish. Mahmood and his team see it as their responsibility to remind people that credible, independent reporting still exists — and that it plays an essential civic role.

“Local news in general is in a structural economic decline compared to where it used to be,” Mahmood said. “What gets unnoticed is the effect that that’s had on the public and their trust and faith in local news.”

Engaging the public

 

At the end of 2024, Press Forward New Mexico hosted a convening in Santa Fe on the state of local journalism. About half of the attendees were journalists, joined by representatives from foundations and nonprofits, while a third were community members with no direct ties to the field. Participants brainstormed solutions for strengthening and revitalizing local news.

“The discussions that were sparked were really helpful,” Mahmood recalled. “We had a pretty extensive discussion about the role of public policy and some of the potential conflicts of interest that might come up — like how can you structure public funding so that it’s ethical for news outlets to participate?”

In June 2025, a similar gathering in Las Cruces drew an even broader cross-section of the public, including university students and residents from colonias — rural, unincorporated communities near the U.S.-Mexico border that have historically lacked basic infrastructure.

Mahmood credited the Fund’s Southern New Mexico community partner organizations for helping to spread the word. Their outreach drew a diverse crowd, which fueled candid conversations, including how difficult it is to access reliable local information in colonias.

Public advocacy in action

 

Inspired by the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium — a publicly funded state program to strengthen local news and home to Press Forward New Jersey — the New Mexico Local News Fund began exploring legislative support in 2022.

Mahmood and then-colleague Mark Glaser began with a cold email to Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, Glaser’s state senator.

“It was literally a two-paragraph email,” Mahmood recalled. “We just said, ‘hey, we exist, we’re working to support journalism in New Mexico, and we’d love to brainstorm with you about what’s possible.’ We didn’t come in with a preconceived idea of what we wanted. We tried to be really open-ended — which I think is the right attitude when you’re starting these kinds of conversations.”

To their surprise, Wirth responded right away and invited them to meet. Mahmood and Glaser had prepared a detailed pitch about the crisis in local news — but he never got the chance to deliver it.

“Five minutes into the meeting he said, ‘Guys, you don’t need to convince me,’” Mahmood recalled. Legislators, he noted, feel the effects of diminished local news firsthand: “They are trying to get messages out to their constituents about the work they’re doing.”

While New Jersey’s model didn’t fit New Mexico’s constitutional structure, Wirth saw immediate potential in the Fund’s fellowship program at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Because it was already housed at a public institution, he suggested that securing additional state support might be feasible.

Investing in the pipeline

 

In 2023, Wirth allocated discretionary funds to the Fund’s Fellowships and Internships program. The following year, New Mexico Sen. Jeff Steinborn stepped up with additional support. And in 2025, the Fund secured $500,000 in state support through the Department of Workforce Solutions, with support from a group of legislators and the leadership of the agency. Cabinet Secretary Sarita Nair and her colleagues at Workforce Solutions championed the effort, ensuring the funds would strengthen career pathways in local journalism while aligning with the department’s broader mission of workforce development across New Mexico. The money went directly to the University of New Mexico, which runs the fellowship program, and to community colleges as part of a new community college journalism training initiative partnering with Journalism + Design. 

The program matches emerging journalists with newsrooms across the state and provides enough funding for outlets to pay competitive salaries. Since 2019, it has placed 63 journalists in 35 newsrooms across 13 cities.

This year, the program welcomed its largest and most geographically diverse cohort yet — eight fellows and 11 interns. The expansion includes cost-of-living adjustments, training stipends, new newsroom partners, and even a collaborative statewide reporting project.

Now, the Fund is reaching even further back in the pipeline by focusing on high schools. Working with UNM faculty, Press Forward New Mexico is relaunching the state’s summer journalism institute — which went dormant in 2019 — with a broadened focus on multimedia storytelling. Teachers will also be invited to participate and can apply for mini-grants to revive or launch school publications. 

“There are towns in New Mexico where the high school newspaper is the only local publication,” Mahmood noted. 

And at the community college level, the Fund has partnered with Journalism + Design at The New School to support four new Community News Transformation projects. Each college receives $67,000 and joins a two-year learning cohort, experimenting with models that blend journalism, media literacy, and community engagement. Many are based in rural areas that have long lacked consistent access to news and information.

What’s next: Tax credits, public media, and the long game

 

Looking ahead, Press Forward New Mexico’s next major policy goal is to pass a local journalism tax credit bill in the 2027 legislative session. Modeled on successful programs in New York and Illinois, the bill would allow local news outlets to apply for tax credits based on the number of journalists they employ. The New Mexico proposal included a credit of $15,000 per journalist — a transformative boost for small and mid-sized outlets.

The idea gained traction in the most recent session, making it into the budget before being stripped out with other tax credits at the last minute. For Mahmood, that near-miss underscored both the opportunity and the challenge.

The strategy now is to build broader support before reintroducing the measure. “We did it in a very kind of inside baseball way last time, which was the right call given the timeline,” Mahmood said. “But now I want to be able to say in good conscience when I’m meeting with legislators that, look, we’ve talked with all the newsrooms in the state, we’ve talked with members of the public, and there’s strong backing for this idea.”

Press Forward New Mexico’s efforts to secure public support for journalism may have helped set a broader precedent. In October 2025, following federal funding cuts for public broadcasting, the state legislature approved nearly $6 million in emergency funding to support public radio and television stations across New Mexico, including tribal stations at the greatest risk.

The state’s decision to step in and support public media highlights that investing public resources in local news — whether through fellowships, internships, or public media — is increasingly recognized as essential to the health of New Mexico’s communities. For Mahmood, these developments reinforce a long-game approach: building momentum and normalizing the idea of investing public resources in local news. 

Even with the challenges ahead, Mahmood is optimistic. ​​He believes local news still performs critical functions, “and with community trust, community investment, and a little passion, it can do those things again and grow again.”

Katie Hawkins-Gaar is a freelance writer and journalism consultant. She previously worked at CNN and the Poynter Institute and now works with a variety of journalism support organizations, including Press Forward, the News Revenue Hub, and Report for America. She lives in Atlanta with her family.