FRONTLINE Receives New Grant from Knight Foundation for Local Journalism Initiative

The $1.5 million will allow the acclaimed PBS series to continue supporting regional newsrooms’ investigative storytelling

THU., MAY 1 — FRONTLINE, the award-winning PBS investigative documentary series produced at GBH in Boston, has received a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation aimed at continuing the series’ efforts to fortify local journalism in communities across America. 

The $1.5 million grant will support FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), a project that has supported more than a dozen local newsrooms around the country since 2019. Reporters affiliated with local media organizations can submit proposals to join the next LJI cohort by Monday, June 2, 2025. Our 2025-26 partners will be announced by July 1. The initiative aims to promote sustainable, public interest journalism in communities where local news organizations have been hit hard by financial pressures, or in news deserts. It also provides editorial and financial support for newsrooms, which can include paying journalists’ salaries and sharing FRONTLINE’s expertise on investigative techniques, video storytelling and connecting journalism with wider audiences. Through LJI, FRONTLINE has partnered with newsrooms to produce in-depth investigative projects in various formats, from digital and print, to video and audio. The initiative has helped produce major investigations, including a series of stories about a polluting lead smelter in The Tampa Bay Times that won a George Polk Award and Pulitzer Prize, as well as a multiplatform investigation with Maine Public Radio and the Portland Press Herald into the deadly 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, that was nominated for a 2025 George Foster Peabody Award. 

The initiative will support four projects annually over the next three years. Applications and more information are available here.

“FRONTLINE’s partnerships with local newsrooms are a win-win,” said Marisa Kwiatkowski, director of journalism at Knight Foundation. “Local newsrooms benefit from FRONTLINE’s investigative rigor, multimedia storytelling and community engagement, while FRONTLINE benefits from their deep sourcing and local expertise. These collaborations also help elevate local reporting to national audiences.”

“Trustworthy local reporting is an essential resource to communities around America. It exposes injustices, holds powerful people and institutions to account, and helps to tell the stories that make up the fabric of our nation,” says Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE. “We’re immensely grateful to Knight Foundation for their generous support of our public media mission and our Local Journalism Initiative, and we look forward to amplifying the impactful investigative reporting from newsrooms in cities and towns across the country.”

“FRONTLINE is thrilled to continue these vital investigative partnerships — to work with local experts on deeply reported accountability journalism that directly impacts Americans and their communities. We’re grateful for Knight’s unflagging support for this important work,” says Erin Texeira, FRONTLINE’s Senior Editor and Director of Local Journalism. About FRONTLINE FRONTLINE, U.S. television’s longest running investigative documentary series, explores the issues of our times through powerful storytelling. FRONTLINE has won an Academy Award® as well as every major journalism and broadcasting award, including 108 Emmy Awards and 34 Peabody Awards. Visit pbs.org/frontline and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to learn more. FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation We are social investors who support democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once had newspapers. Learn more at kf.org and follow @knightfdn on social media. Press Contacts: FRONTLINE: anne_husted@wgbh.org | 617.300.5312 Knight Foundation: Atena Sherry, sherry@kf.org