For Ad Campaigns, NJ Agencies Should Buy Local

Photo courtesy of NJ News Common.

This op-ed was originally published with Rebuild Local News.

In Hunterdon County north of New Jersey’s capital — where more than 130,000 people live, work, and send their kids to school — not a single full-time journalist is covering the news. New Jersey as a whole has just 5.1 local journalists per 100,000 residents, ranking 49th out of 50 states, according to research by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. 

But legislation introduced this month in the New Jersey legislature could help increase local news coverage in Hunterdon County and across the state.

State lawmakers have introduced bills this session to establish a “buy local” policy for state agency advertising for programs and services like vaccinations, highway safety and the lottery. The goal is simple – to ensure public advertising is being placed with community news outlets relied upon by New Jerseyans.

A4677, introduced by Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald (D – Voorhees), and S3744, introduced by Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D – Hillsborough) and Sen. Angela McKnight (D – Jersey City), would require the state to set aside 30 percent of agency advertising budgets for eligible local news organizations and to publicly report agencies’ annual ad spending. Without this transparency, state advertising remains a black box – out of view of both the public and local outlets.

Many of the taxpayer dollars spent by New Jersey public agencies are likely being sent out-of-state, with Big Tech behemoths like Google and Meta. The massive New York City and Philadelphia media markets dominate the media ecosystem’s ad dollars and audience, making it harder for local outlets to get traction.

Eligible outlets are those that employ at least one human journalist—not an AI platform—to gather and produce news for New Jersey residents, regardless of format. That includes digital, print, broadcast radio and TV. Commercial, nonprofit, and public media all qualify and the set-aside applies to state agency advertising, sponsorship and underwriting.

The bipartisan appeal of this policy is that it supports essential community news, preserves newsroom independence, and generates revenue to hire more journalists and fill news coverage gaps – all without any new budget appropriations. 

By spending a portion of their advertising dollars with community news outlets, government agencies can amplify the impact of their advertising spend and target the audiences they most need to reach. New York City pioneered a city-level advertising set-aside in 2020. Since then, the policy has generated more than $72 million for more than 200 community and ethnic news outlets. A movement around this policy is gaining momentum, with states and municipalities, including California, Maryland, Chicago and San Francisco, having introduced or put ad set-asides in place for local news. 

The bills include objective eligibility standards to weed out low-quality misinformation, politically funded “pink slime” propaganda and AI slop. They also exclude “ghost newspapers,” publications that simply rehash wire stories and ads without doing original reporting.

This policy does not create an entitlement or prop up bad business models. Local news outlets must compete for state advertising dollars like every other media outlet. The bill also allows the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium to do the legwork of creating a directory of eligible local news outlets so that state agencies can more easily place ads in multiple local news outlets.

Research shows that when a local news outlet closes, communities face higher borrowing costs, lower voter turnout, fewer choices of candidates on the ballot, more government waste and corruption, and more corporate crime.

New Jersey local news has earned the investment that these bills will deliver. And New Jersey communities deserve the essential news coverage a state advertising set-aside will help fund. We urge lawmakers to vote in favor of A4677 and S3744.

Stay up to date with the status of Bill A4677 by visiting here and Bill S3744 here.

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