In April and May 2020, the Facebook Journalism Project gave relief funding to hundreds of U.S. local media organizations affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Local Media Association served as a partner including in distributing funds and communicating with recipients about their grant application status.
LMA received many thank-you messages from the recipients of the Facebook Journalism Project’s COVID-19 Local News Relief Fund and Community Network Grants. These are some of the heartwarming responses shared with us.
“I haven’t stopped crying since I saw this. I am so grateful to you and to Facebook! It is an amazing thing to be uplifted by others after I have spent the last 25 years uplifting others working in community journalism. My mission is to tell the stories and events of the north Houston area and we have seen a lot in the last decade — Hurricanes Ike and Harvey, devastating flooding and now this. Thank you so much. I don’t have adequate words to express my gratitude and to feel such acknowledgment of my efforts. You have brought up the journalism that is the root of all journalism – the community.”
“Oh, wow! I’m stunned. I actually waited to respond in case you sent a follow-up message saying this was a mistake. Thank you so much for this lifeline. I will work hard to take make every cent of this grant payoff to meet our goals.”
“I’m shocked and y’all made a 48-year-old man cry today.”
“I was so shocked, my head started to hurt. I had to lie down. Most importantly, I want to thank you on behalf of myself, my staff, our freelancers and most of all my communities, which so deserve the recognition and support. We are all grateful.”
“I just wanted to express our gratitude for this program and our acceptance to receive these funds. We are a small (but mighty) staff serving a fairly rural, but hard-hit (due to the international ski resort right up the road from us) community. I have had to lay off reporters and this money will help maintain our coverage of this ever-evolving situation.”
“I got your email in the middle of a 14-hour production day yesterday, so we danced around the office for a couple minutes cheering and then got back to work. But I wanted to send a heartfelt thanks to the Facebook Journalism Project, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Local Media Association for selecting us. $5,000 will make a big difference for our hyperlocal weekly newspaper, and allow us to put together some coverage that might not otherwise happen.”
“Thank you so very much! To say that we are excited would be an understatement. This comes at a wonderful time as we are aggressively working on our statewide radio network’s coverage of COVID-19. Next week, we will be reporting on how this is impacting our food chain, ag industry, and price of beef. Thanks again to all of you.”
“I am thrilled that our company has been chosen to receive this grant. More than ever our readers are looking to our newspaper, a trusted news source, to give them the latest information about the pandemic and its effect on all aspects of their lives. Unfortunately, we are still awaiting to get to the apex of the pandemic and anticipate that there will much more to report. These are very difficult times on many levels. This grant not only helps us financially but also lifts our spirits.”
“Covering this historic crisis while our ad revenue is falling is extremely challenging. But our readers are anxious to know more about COVID-19 and this money will help us hire great science reporters to keep them better informed. Once again, many thanks! This will make a huge difference for our staff, our readers and the quality of our reporting.”
“We are so excited!!!! I have to say that I am pleased to be a part of this. I have been worrying about my community for a while now. This will certainly help us spread the word. We are now the second hotspot in the state of Indiana; our numbers are growing.”
“Thank you for sharing the wonderful news. We are very excited and can’t wait to continue to make a difference within the Hispanic community in our state.”
“Wow oh wow. You don’t know what this means for our communities!”
“I’m beyond humbled and honored by this.”
“When I stepped away from ‘corporate media’ to undertake this, to say that I was in the minority in the belief that this was going to work is an understatement. The handful of team members that signed on and that stuck with me are going to be thrilled tomorrow. I cannot say (or copy/paste) ‘thank you’ enough. So I will simply say ‘Gracias.'”
“This is great news! Thank you. We look forward to growing our publication with the opportunities this funding provides.”
“Thank you so much for choosing us as one of the recipients of the Facebook Journalism COVID-19 grant! Please thank anyone and everyone associated with this project for providing us with this grant in a time of need. Words cannot express how much this will help us to continue to serve our community during these trying times.”
“I can’t say thanks enough!”
“This is the most amazing news I have received in a long, long time.”
“Thank you and all to the people involved in choosing the grant recipients for helping me preserve our outlet and prepare for the future. I can not say enough thanks.”
“On behalf of our company and all our staff, I want to thank you again for the opportunity you are giving local media news outlets to grow and better their reach to their communities, especially during these tough times. We are especially thankful to be one of the grant recipients for our current COVID-19 coverage. We have always strived to keep our community out of the shadows by providing them with truthful and relevant information.”
“Thank you so much! I started crying when I received this.”
“I can’t thank you (and Facebook) enough for this! This is the first positive thing that has happened to our newsroom since early February.”
“God bless and thank you again for giving our newsroom a little extra runway to ride this thing out.”
“Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), your email came as quite the pleasant surprise to me over the weekend. My wife and I had to read it three times for it to sink in.”
“If I do say so myself, we’ve done an outstanding job of keeping the local community informed thus far. We are on our fifth revision of the local Public Health Order, all of which we’ve reported on extensively. The community interest in our product has spiked — leading to unprecedented website traffic, and we’ve good website traffic for years (formerly averaging 11,000 unique visits a month, in a community of about 6,000, spiking in some cases to 10,000 visits a day).”
“Thank you so much! We are very grateful to the Local Media Foundation and the Facebook Journalism Project COVID-19 program.”
“What wonderful news!! Thank you so much. This funding will go a long way in helping me cover my local communities of color.”
“Thank you so much! It has been such a struggle lately, and this money will make a huge difference to our newspaper, our readers and the people we cover.”
“I can’t tell you how difficult it has been to know there are important stories we haven’t been able to report because, even with several of our laid-off staffers volunteering to work for free, we haven’t had the resources. This will immeasurably shift the work we’re able to do.”
“Thank you so much! What a wonderful way to kick off the weekend! Can’t wait to engage the editorial team to cover some additional great stories!”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! We are so thrilled. This will go a long way in increasing our coverage of COVID-19.”
“This is outstanding and will make a material impact in our coverage of the pandemic. We can’t thank the Facebook and LMA enough for offering this.”
“Wow! I can’t express how exciting it is to get this news and this support. My deepest thanks – I appreciate the avalanche of applications and the work of the reviewers.”
“Thank you so much! This has real impact on our COVID coverage and finances. I am really grateful to you and Facebook.”
“This is great news!!! And so timely….we are overwhelmed with trying to cover…so much news every minute of the day with NYC being ground zero right now.”
“OH MY GOSH!!!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH IM SO SO SO APPRECIATIVE IM CRYING THANK YOU!!!!!!!”
“This is wonderful news. And I am honoured to be able to investigate and tell the stories of refugees and newcomers in Canada as they persevere through this crisis.”
“Wow! This is amazing. I can’t say enough how much this means to a small company such as ours. We have a reporter who has been walking and standing outside of places with WiFi for a week now just so she can send text and email from her phone because our library is closed. She will be thrilled that we have the ability to help her with more tools.”
“Thank you both!!!! Again thank you for being a ray of light in these dark times…. we will make it through this together!”
“We are very grateful for all of the support from Local Media Association, Facebook, Lenfest and other partners in helping newsrooms across the nation as we work to provide content for our audiences during this pandemic.”
“A big THANK YOU to you and your entire TEAM at LMA for helping to make this happen for the paper.”
“Fantastic! Thank you so much! It is so needed right now for newspapers in small-town America!”
“That is fantastic! We are thrilled. This will go a long way in helping us make our efforts on this reporting project a reality. Thank you.”
“Thank you so much for the great news. You really have no idea how much this means to us. This disaster has taken so much from my team and me. We meet together only once a week since the shutdown, because we can’t risk having us all in one place at one time. One exposure to the virus means a mandatory court-order quarantine for all of us. We have worked straight through since it started last Monday. Most of our advertisers are shuttered and won’t be back for months because many of them are event venues. Our restaurants and retail are in peril as well, but some are open for takeout or delivery. What is scary to me is that they don’t have the money to pay us what they owe. We are making a difference in our community and we will continue to do so for as long as our reserves and credit holds out. This grant will help us go farther and give us something to celebrate in this time of sickness, fear and uncertainty. This will end and our community will recover….and they will read about it in our paper.”
“Thank you so much. This will be a big help in our efforts to cover one of the fastest growing cities in California during this trying time. I am dedicated to providing the best coverage possible and will now have some resources to get me the help I need.”
“We are grateful, relieved, elated and grateful. Very grateful. Thank you.”
“This is great news! Thanks for all your organization is doing to support local media during these challenging and extraordinary times.”
“Wow! Thank you! We’re working on boosting our web presence and this will enable us to purchase off-site computers, video cameras, software, etc. to boost our web presence. This is a huge help.”
“Oh my goodness! This is amazing. This is by about 10,000 miles the best news I’ve heard since this all broke. And that’s an understatement, if anything. I am ETERNALLY GRATEFUL! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! And, oh yeah… THANK YOU!”
“Thank you so much for this wonderful news! We are so appreciative and grateful for this opportunity; we are eager to put it to use to continue to provide quality coverage during these unprecedented times for our community.”
“Thanks so much. This will help keep our newsroom working. The second-largest newsroom in the state just announced layoffs and pay cuts, while their reporting and salaried editing teams are working 18-hour days, 7-days-per week.”
“I just can’t begin to tell you how huge this is for our team. They are doing remarkable work and have not backed up for one second in their coverage of COVID-19. This is a deal changer. Thank you!”