Dem media group sounds alarm on slow investment: ‘We need help'

Yahoo

14-07-2025

As Republicans closed in on passing Donald Trump's spending bill, the leader of a prominent partisan Democratic news organization sent out an urgent plea to donors.
In an email earlier this month to top donors and other Democrats obtained by Semafor, Courier Newsroom founder Tara McGowan said that the organization was running low on the funds it needed to sufficiently push out content about the spending bill, which included cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and increases in immigration enforcement and defense spending, among other provisions.
McGowan said the organization had published over 500 stories around the bill across 11 different Courier-owned outlets. But she said they were not breaking through, and after the organization's worst fundraising quarters in six years, Courier needed more funds to promote the articles across social media.
'The problem isn't the volume of the stories we are publishing — it is that without funding, we can't get these stories in front of more of the audiences we need to be reaching to increase awareness and opposition,' she said. 'We currently do not have any funding to boost our coverage of this bill to news-avoidant Americans who are not already subscribing to our newsrooms, and no new funding to increase our subscriber bases in critical competitive districts and states.'
She continued: 'As a deep believer in the need for our movement to invest in year-round, always-on media infrastructure, I hate asking for rapid response funding, but this is a crisis moment and year-round media efforts like ours are still not getting the resourcing we need to be as effective as we can be.'
She said if given the resources, Courier could provide 'scalable boosted news and/or targeted subscriber acquisition program using our coverage of this bill within hours,' and said the organization could also promote pieces reaching in districts where Republican members are opposed to Medicaid cuts and reckless spending.
'If we can raise $2M this week, we can reach 6 Million under-reached Americans across battleground states now through the next four weeks or the final votes on this bill — through boosting our news through targeted ads and through our network of local, trusted creators in our states.'McGowan's email reflects the attitude that has often made her the focus of Republican attacks and suspicion from nonpartisan journalists.
Courier is open about its partisan lens and its funding from Democratic donors. But the fundraising email does not make the point that money is needed to power meaningful journalism — rather, it's to accomplish a political end. The email also emphasizes Courier's continued reliance on a tactic that has been at the center of Democratic digital debates. Courier continues to regularly spend money promoting its articles and content in social feeds, which garners more eyeballs and audiences. But some skeptics say the practice disincentivizes the need to create content that could reach those same audiences organically.
Still, McGowan's funding difficulties reflect an experience that many in Democratic circles have had: Donors have been much slower to get back into national politics.
The slowing pace of funding reflects a confluence of factors. Some donors continue to feel bitter about the massive amounts of money spent by Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign and the Biden/Harris aligned super PAC Future Forward. Others are more hesitant to face off against an aggressive federal government and a vindictive president looking to inflict pain on his political enemies. And the money that is flowing is being sent to groups who've been targeted by the administration directly.
This presents a problem for progressive organizations hoping to redefine the party's media strategy.
Activists have been gathering regularly in places like DC, Texas, Utah, Southern California and elsewhere to discuss how Democrats and progressives lost cultural influence and how they can regain momentum. Semafor noted in February, for example, that a collection of activists and progressive media organizations met with donor advisors at the offices of the Laurene Powell Jobs-backed Emerson Collective to discuss ways in which the party could build digital infrastructure and reach new audiences.
But the sluggish giving environment has slowed some of these efforts, as new organizations have struggled to raise money and existing orgs haven't been able to expand. Articles like a May New York Times story that laid out some acronym-heavy efforts to reach men through media haven't necessarily helped.
Part of McGowan's pitch to donors is that the collapse of traditional print media in much of the country has created a news vacuum that progressive organizations need to fill.
'If we have collectively learned anything from Democrats' loss last year, please let it be that we cannot rely on the traditional media, or traditional ad spending, to educate and mobilize Americans to vote and protest in line with their own values and livelihoods,' she said in the email.In a response to Semafor's inquiry about the fundraising plea, McGowan said the organization had a 'diversified revenue strategy and a solid baseline level of support at Courier,' and had grown its audience significantly, adding 1.4 million followers on TikTok this year, and had 2 million active subscribers across its 11 products.
McGowan said while there is 'more energy and philanthropic interest in investing in year-round communications infrastructure and emerging media projects than we have previously seen on the left, that has not yet translated into meaningful investments for many proven, fast-growing, values-driven media organizations that reach non-elite Americans with news that impacts them.'
She continued: 'A culture change moment is happening right now in pro-democracy and civic philanthropy — sectors that are used to making cyclical investments in communications and media to increase voter education about what's happening in Washington — but we fear that evolution to see communications funding as a proactive and long-term investment is still moving too slowly.'