After years of research identifying news deserts in Brazil, the country now finally has a fund to support local journalism and help develop a more sustainable news environment.
The Fund for Journalism Support (FAJ) was officially launched on March 24, 2025, as the first Brazilian initiative to finance purely local journalism in Brazil. Up to 15 organizations will be selected, each receiving between BRL 75,000 (USD 13,000) and BRL 150,000 (USD 26,000) per year, for three years.
Those who work in this sector in Brazil know that, while not an extraordinarily large amount, this type of resource could completely transform small, localized media organizations.
Núcleo itself began with a single grant of about R$100,000 back in 2020, provided by a Google program for journalism startups (I sometimes wonder if they would have selected us had they known our coverage would be so critical and consequential).
In Brazil, about half of all municipalities are considered news deserts, according to the latest survey by Atlas da Notícia from 2023 – which means more than 26 million people live in places without any mapped news outlet. [Disclaimer: I am one of the founders and current data coordinator of Atlas]
This problem is even worse when you look at the so called "drylands" ("quasi deserts" municipalities), with only 1 or 2 outlets that risk becoming deserts. In total, more than 60 million people, or about 30% of the population, live in those two categories, with extremely limited journalistic resources to cover local civic life and bring purely municipal problems to light.
It's very important that the FAJ grants are entirely oriented toward irrigating these locations, shifting some of the concentration of philanthropic journalism funding away from national organizations and outlets in the Rio-São Paulo-Brasília axis (which includes Núcleo).
According to the excellent report published by the fund:
In Brazil, over the past two years, the ten main foundations that invested in journalism directed more than US$16 million to 81 organizations [...] Of these, just nine organizations received half of the total investment, while 72 organizations shared the other half.
This doesn't mean that national outlets and those from major centers will no longer receive any funding – there are still other avenues, such as direct negotiations and other grants. But the fund's stated mission is to finance other types of organizations, and that is very refreshing and necessary.
The FAJ is funded by the Ford Foundation, IFPIM, OAK, Open Society Foundations, and Luminate. [Disclaimer: Luminate is an institutional supporter of Núcleo]
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