The Sumter Item selected to receive $100k, SC's largest Facebook Journalism Project grant

The Sumter Item will receive a $100,000 grant through the Facebook Journalism Project for local news, Facebook announced Thursday.

The Item was awarded the largest grant in South Carolina as part of the $10.3 million being awarded to 144 local newsrooms across the country through the COVID-19 Local News Relief Fund Grant Program. In South Carolina and in addition to The Item, Carolina Panorama in Columbia and El Informador in Mount Pleasant received grants through the fund. The Charleston Post and Courier also received a grant through its involvement in the Facebook Local News Accelerator program.

“This is a tremendous honor to our staff, and it’s certainly reflective of our commitment to Sumter, Clarendon and Lee counties and our dedication to our entire region as the primary news source for our area,” Sumter Item Publisher Vince Johnson said. “We’d like to thank Facebook, as well as their partners, specifically the Local Media Association and the Lenfest Institute, for prioritizing family owned news organizations directly serving individual communities.”

More than 2,000 applications for the COVID-19 Local News Relief Grant Program from newsrooms across every state in the U.S. were submitted, Facebook said. Grants ranging from $25,000 to $100,000 were awarded to help publishers continue serving communities during the coronavirus outbreak.

“Local news is part of the lifeblood of our region, but it’s not a certainty. There are many regions just like ours across the country without a local news source creating daily original content,” Johnson said. “We typically rely on advertisers and subscribers to sustain our coverage, and that’s become an increased concern through this crisis, especially with other local businesses in our communities struggling, as well. We are thrilled to receive this grant through Facebook, and we look forward to using it to produce meaningful and innovative news coverage for our communities.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has showcased the importance of local news to communities especially during crisis situations. From sharing critical, time-sensitive information on the pandemic to asking tough questions to community leaders, local news organizations play a critical role in keeping communities informed and engaged. 

“Our staff has gone above and beyond typical responsibilities throughout the crisis in covering our communities,” Sumter Item Executive Editor Kayla Green said. “It’s exciting to see that recognized on a national scale. This grant will allow us to accelerate our news coverage even more moving forward.”

For The Sumter Item, this grant comes on the heels of other national recognition for local news coverage. Editor & Publisher named The Item one of America’s “10 Newspapers That Do It Right” in 2019, and The Item was one of three finalists for the Mega Innovation Award for newspapers at the industry’s largest conference earlier this year. The Item was also selected as a participant in the UNC-Knight Foundation Table Stakes News Initiative and has been working with other newsrooms in Chapel Hill throughout the year. The Item has been family-owned for more than 125 years since its founding in 1894.

The pool of COVID-19 Local News Relief Fund Grant Program recipients is notable in that nearly four in five are family or independently owned, half are published by or for communities of color, nearly 40 percent are digitally native publishers, and just over a third are nonprofits. These grant recipients were selected through a process lead by the Local Media Association (LMA) and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and with significant contributions from the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), Local Media Consortium (LMC) and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Remaining funds will be used throughout 2020 to support projects focused on longer-term sustainability in local journalism.