In the coming months and years, there will be a lot of discussion about what legislation is necessary to strengthen press protections in a post-Trump world that would finally fill—once and for all—the holes in press freedom law that Trump and other presidents have exploited over the past 25 years. The ideas are myriad and they are all important: a ban on subpoenas and surveillance of journalists in leak investigations via the PRESS Act, a federal anti-SLAPP bill, codifying NYT v. Sullivan, strengthening the Privacy Protection Act, Espionage Act reform, bolstering support for local news, and many more.

But just as important as the question of what is the question of how.

It is notoriously difficult to get Congress to pass reform on any prominent issue, and the last major press freedom legislation that was signed into law was the SPEECH Act more than 17 years ago, at a time when it was fairly uncontroversial.

In order to get any press freedom legislation passed—especially in an environment where trust in the media is at an all-time low—the press freedom community needs a much more comprehensive and aggressive lobbying strategy that goes well beyond the usual advocacy many organizations are used to.

At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we learned a lot of lessons from the almost-successful push to get the PRESS Act passed in 2024, where we poured almost all of our advocacy efforts into lobbying for that one bill, and I’d like to share them here.

Our biggest takeaway is, as a group, press freedom organizations must do a lot more than sign coalition letters, write an initial endorsement or blog post, and talk to a few friendly staffers.

We need to start a relentless, multipronged effort from the very beginning of the congressional session that does not let up for a moment. This includes:

• Finding co-sponsors on the relevant committees ourselves (via outreach, local op-eds, and local leaders who have personal connections). Bill authors or initial sponsors may not have the motivation, the time, or (believe it or not) the relationships to do this themselves, so it’s up to advocacy groups to do the legwork to find and convince key offices to become sponsors and then make sure their offices follow through to make it official. Local press associations and other state-based organizations are often key to making these pitches.
• Pushing committee chairs to get the bills out of committee quickly. It doesn’t matter if a lot of members support our bill—if it doesn’t get out of committee, then the full chambers won’t vote on it. Targeting relevant committee members as soon as Congress is in session, plus putting a special emphasis on ranking members to make sure a vote happens ASAP, is imperative. The Senate will have to deal with a lot of last-minute nominations and budget issues at the end of each congressional session, so every day our bills sit is a day that is lost.
• Engaging with members of the opposite party (sometimes through intermediaries they will listen to). Here, I’ll use Republicans as an example. We will have to regularly generate talking points that will specifically appeal to their base and the right-wing media they support, work with right-leaning groups to get meetings we can’t, publish op-eds in right-wing media, and pitch conservative radio stations, podcasts, and television shows to talk about the issue. They rely on press freedom too, even if they hate mainstream media, and our talking points must emphasize that.
• Hiring more lobbyists. 501(c)(3)s are often nervous about directly hiring lobbyists because of lobbying limits in the 501(c)(3) rules and potential funder restrictions. But there is not a total ban on lobbying; as long as you disclose it, you’re permitted to spend a modest percentage of your budget on it. It’s also important to emphasize that lobbying on specific issues relevant to your mission is different from “electioneering,” which is banned. (Please consult your lawyer about the specific rules.) We had a lot of success hiring and working with Republican lobbyists aligned with us on the PRESS Act issue. It’s also important to hire not just a general lobbyist, but one with specific contacts in the offices we are most concerned about. Even if they can’t move votes, they can often gather valuable intel that we would not otherwise have access to.
• Doing a comprehensive whip count. Keeping track of the positions of all 535 members of Congress is a chaotic job but also can make all the difference. A comprehensive whip count is also not just marking each representative as Yes/No/Unknown. It’s a list of key staffers, who is engaging and who is not, on what date the member is known to have last weighed in, and a whole host of other information that would be hard for one group to track themselves but is a perfect project for a coalition.
• Doing extra legwork for the staffers themselves. This includes seeking out intel and trading it with staffers; making introductions across offices (believe it or not, they often don’t know each other!); offering to write talking points, hearing questions, letters to relevant federal agencies, or op-eds for the Congressmembers; and much more.
• Finding any avenue to engage the Congressmember themselves. Often we are only talking to staffers, who will always do a majority of the work, but it’s likely the member is unaware of much of the legwork their staffers are doing until the last minute. If we don’t have direct connections with the members themselves, we need to find people (whether it be donors, lobbyists, friends, or others) who do. That means acting like journalists ourselves: cold emailing or calling, knocking on doors, finding leads, and not giving up when we hit dead ends.
• Engaging with reporters to ask on-the-record questions. Reporters likely aren’t going to sign letters or do advocacy themselves, but working with them, especially in the halls of Congress, to ask questions at press gaggles about the legislation as regularly as possible is the best way to get a lawmaker on the record. We should have a relationship with every single reporter who regularly covers Congress!
• Engaging news outlets’ owners and CEOs directly to get them personally involved as soon as possible. They need to do more than sign on to coalition letters too, and they can help with all of the above: they likely have direct connections with members themselves, they can hire lobbyists themselves (some even have under-the-radar lobbying budgets!), they have influence over their editorial boards, and much more. Of course, many won’t engage, but some will. All we need is a few of the big ones to do work behind the scenes.
• Ghost-writing op-eds. We might not always be the best messengers for our own message. It may be someone with a much higher public profile, or someone who is more sympathetic to a lawmaker or segment of the public we are targeting. We have to not only find the individuals to put their names behind our idea but also be OK with the fact that we will never get “credit” for the work.

Of course, I don’t want to imply we invented any of these tactics; many organizations already do at least some of these things on one issue or another, and others have had more lobbying success than us. It’s also true that a lot of these items involve calling in favors or using finite amounts of political capital. It means that we won’t be able to use all of these tactics for every single bill we want passed. But for at least one, or maybe a few, it can work if we commit as a group to work together on it and leave no stone unturned.

Let’s start with the PRESS Act.