I'd say start-up funding, and there are different ways to think about it. Part of it is start-up training, specifically for people who are going to do local journalism.
The other is setting up mechanisms they can use, off-the-shelf kinds of technologies, to run locally. That could be done through a grant or funding that would be available to anybody anywhere in Canada, for instance, and maybe even sold abroad.
On start-up funding, if you're actually going to go into the venture funding of starting an organization, that becomes very different, because you have to start dealing with grants. You have to start dealing with some sort of granting agencies to deal with that. It can be done, and it can be done in a way such that it is not discriminatory. It often has to be done with funding through mechanisms where the funding board is completely non-partisan. That has been done. It has worked in other locales. It can be done.
It can also be done by linking to local community organizations that are already there, for example by asking the local university or college, or maybe even some high schools, if they could start a local news site and get it running and telling them that you'll give them some money to get the software they need to do that, to buy the site, and to do things that need to happen.
There are many ways you can do that, but it doesn't take a great deal of money to start up a local digital operation, because you often start with only two to five employees, with everybody else working part-time or contributing their efforts.