TFS chosen for selective Report for America program

The Food Section from the start has had a deal with its readers. Namely, you pay for what you get.

In other words, subscription revenue directly funds the journalism that lands in your inbox each weekday. Subscribers aren’t anteing up because they want a way to express their fandom, or because subscribing earns them some kind of cultural cachet. They understand there are costs associated with producing the reportage they value, and their subscription dollars help cover them.

For instance, this newsletter is arriving via an email service provider, technology purchased with subscription revenue. A production manager, whose contract wage is underwritten by subscription revenue, will later post these words to a website kept online by subscription revenue.

So, subscriptions support The Food Section as you know it. But there’s a new way to support The Food Section as we think it could be.

Report for America

Late last year, The Food Section was one of 37 newsrooms selected to participate in Report for America’s 2025 pilot accelerator, an offshoot of its successful program designed to “bring immediate and long-term solutions to the challenges facing local news.” Since its launch in 2017, Report for America has helped 400 newsrooms raise a collective $30 million.

Many of those newsrooms are legacy operations. The current cohort includes The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Dallas Morning News, and the Associated Press. As a component of their partnership with Report for America, those outlets serve as host newsrooms for next-generation journalists. (To learn more about how Report for America works, check out 60 Minutes’ 2022 feature on the program.)

Report for America created its accelerator track because it recognized not every newsroom is financially ready to take on a full-time employee. As a press release puts it, accelerator newsrooms “will receive coaching, training, and fiscal sponsorship to help diversify revenue streams,” allowing them to “not just survive but thrive and grow,” so they’re placement-appropriate by 2026. Exciting stuff!

Fiscal sponsorship

Let’s return to ‘fiscal sponsorship’ for a moment. That’s hugely important for The Food Section, because—like the successful news organizations named above—it’s a for-profit outfit. But Report for America’s fiscal sponsorship means it can now accept philanthropic gifts.

Unlike subscription revenue, which keeps the lights on, major gifts are more like a beacon, illuminating a path forward. Tax-deductible donations fund The Food Section’s vision, rather than sustain its output.

According to my calculations, based on the number of people on The Food Section’s email list who don’t pay for the publication and how many solicitations I’ve issued over the past four years, I’ve failed at least 2,043,600 times to get readers to cough up $5. Consequently, it’s hard to guess at how many people are raring to write us a four-figure check. But the only way to find out is to ask.

Donate to The Food Section!

If you believe in The Food Section’s mission of reinvigorating original food journalism across the American South, our first-ever fundraising page is here, set up so you can give any amount you choose. Alternatively, if you’d like to speak with someone at Report for America about making a major gift, you can schedule an appointment with its Deputy Director of Local News Sustainability, Maddie Mott, by clicking here.

Subscribing to The Food Section remains the best way to support our day-to-day work. But as our fundraising page explains:

Over the coming years, we look forward to further strengthening TFS’ storytelling by opening more bureaus, cultivating fresh voices, experimenting with additional formats, and providing our contributors with the resources they need for ambitious projects, including extensive editorial support.

Help TFS tell more stories!

Will any of that happen? It’s up to you! To get us started, I’ve set a $10,000 goal: Let’s see if we can’t chip away at it.

Have a great weekend.