Filling the Gaps: Independent, Investigative Statewide News Organizations
Three startup founders share lessons they’ve learned so far
One of the bright spots in journalism today is the emergence of statewide news nonprofits that hold leaders accountable, explore solutions, and show how the decisions made in state capitals affect communities. As legacy media organizations continue to contract dramatically, founders step in to build organizations that can fill information gaps.
Indeed, a recent research report by the Lenfest Institute’s Statewide News Collective found that “independent news organizations are having a significant impact on their communities by serving as trusted sources of information, keeping their audiences informed about major issues and stories, and encouraging civic engagement.”
In June, Matt Wynn, the Executive Director of the Nebraska Journalism Trust, Rebecca Klein, the publisher of NY Focus, and Chris Baxter, the CEO/president and founding editor of Spotlight PA came to the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY to share lessons from their experience launching these organizations and key factors around their sustainability, operations, and more. Video of the panel is here.
[comments lightly edited for clarity]
Origin stories
“It kind of hit me that I’d been waiting for someone else to start this thing, and it was going to fall to me” — Matt Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust
All three leaders described recognizing that state capitals were increasingly going uncovered, allowing officials to act with little public accountability.
Klein, NY Focus: I had been a reporter, and just looking around, it felt like everywhere was a huge dumpster fire, and I was just very concerned about the prospects for democracy, the prospects for my own career, and the prospects for my community.
Baxter, Spotlight PA: When Spotlight PA was launched, it effectively doubled the full-time press corps in Harrisburg in one day, and if it were to disappear tomorrow, about 90 percent of news outlets in Pennsylvania would have zero access to state capital or statewide reporting. It began with six or seven staffers and about $2 million in initial runway, including contributions from community foundations; today, almost five years later, we have 26 people, have expanded with one local bureau and a second one planned, and provide work to 120 newsroom partners across the state…It’s very exciting to be able to build something new and that’s why I took this opportunity, because I didn’t think I’d ever get another chance to build a newsroom how I thought it should be and it needed to be. The erosion of what is out there is so rapid that you constantly just feel like we’re only scratching the surface, we can’t even keep up with the decline. So it’s hard but rewarding.
Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust: One motivation was that as a nonprofit, we get to put the mission first and do the kind of journalism we wanted to do. We don’t exist to make some guy rich, which is good because no one’s getting rich, but we are here to do revelatory work that changes lives, and that’s what the business is aligned to do.
All of the founders mentioned drawing on their journalism experience and treating launching a startup as a reporting project. Klein spent the first few months interviewing any newsroom nonprofit leader she could find, making a guidebook of sorts based on the lessons they had learned. She found that people were generous with their time, and by the end of the process, she understood some of the challenges people had faced and how they’d overcome them. She also used reporting skills to find the right people to talk to and get the information she needed from them.
Finding funding
Baxter, PA Spotlight: When you are starting out, you need to explain to people that if you value this work, you need to support it. You need to educate people. You need to explain the importance of journalism to democracy, and the fact that it is no longer supported in the same way that it used to be.
Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust: People have always been used to supporting the orchestra, museums, the arts, cultural institutions, etc., so we talk a lot about how to convince them to support journalism too. The difference is, people love the ballet, and no one is like, you know what, I love journalism! They don’t love journalism, they love Nebraska and they love Nebraskans. And that’s the gap we cross with our supporters. We tell them, look, you don’t have to support journalism itself, but by supporting us, you are supporting Nebraska, you are getting stories of people doing amazing things, holding people in power to account, fixing systems that are broken.
Tracking impact and big wins
Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust: Anytime that a law is changed, a bill is introduced, somebody resigns, a policy has changed, anything like that, we write it down and we can then point to it and we can say, this is the number of times that we have had a impact on an institution in the state. For example, Lincoln Public Schools stopped charging for student lunch debt — they held a meeting right after we did a story on it.
Klein, NY Focus: Our ultimate goal is, we haven’t reached it yet, but hopefully someday, is changing the culture of Albany. We cover what happens in the state capital and what it means for communities all over the state, and right now there is a sense in Albany that no one is watching. If we are dogged enough, if we’re consistent enough, if we’re around long enough, people will know that someone is watching, and we think that will have impact for years to come. That is the ultimate goal, that is the pie in the sky, that not only will that change the way our elected officials behave, but I think that will also change what we as citizens expect of our elected officials.
When we first started, one of our big stories right out the gate was about this big campaign finance law that had just been passed….We circled back a year later, and it had never been enforced so, after our investigation, now it is being enforced. The New York Department of Corrections had also, under the radar, banned incarcerated people from publishing any of their writing or artwork. We wrote about it, and in 24 hours they rescinded the policy. We call the budget our Super Bowl. This year we had five people up there, and we had more people up there than any other outlet in the state.
“I had a reader ask me a few months ago…do you ever wonder, for all the things they’re willing to do when you’re there, what it means that they’re willing to do when you’re NOT there? …and I thought it was a really great way to think about it.”
Baxter, PA Spotlight: Like Albany, Harrisburg is sort of geographically isolated from the population centers. A lot of the preservation of power in Harrisburg is predicated on preserving urban/rural divides, and we are trying to break down those divides.
I always like to start with this example — early on during Covid we were of course covering the state labor department…Because our reporter had actually paid attention to a department that had gotten no attention for years, some of the people inside started saying hey, there’s a much bigger story that no one knows anything about. It turns out that when people get paid too much unemployment assistance, they have to pay it back with interest, and while sometimes it’s fraud, most often it’s actually bureaucratic and paperwork errors. It turned out that the labor department for 10 years had charged a far higher interest rate than was allowed by law. They had discovered this, and for six years did nothing. They talked about it internally, but they never told the public; they never told anyone affected. We found out about it and we dug into it. They admitted to the error and said that they owed $19 million to Pennsylvanians. And so at this point, Spotlight PA had a $1.7 million budget, so that is the kind of return on investment you can get with journalism.
A lot of times people donate to things because they want to effect change on an issue they care about, and it’s just really important to know that a lot of times journalism can move the needle so much faster than our political system ever will.
Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust: The first time that I realized Dick Tofel [former president of ProPublica] was a genius was when someone asked him about [ProPublica’s] business model and he said, well we ask people for money and then we spend it on journalism. Yeah, that’s it, that’s all there is to it! But there is an art and a science to that. There is an art for certain gifts from certain people from certain institutions. There’s a science of membership, of saying you know what percent of our readers find us valuable enough that they will contribute to us on a monthly or an annual basis.
Listening and engagement
Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust: So when we were first getting started, I called Carrie Brown because she is a community engagement person, and we built our listening tour strategy out of her advice. We do this a couple different ways, but the best version is you go to a town and you partner with whoever is there, a community foundation, a newspaper. The partner tells you, these 10 people have great stories to tell, they invite them in, we listen. These can be an ordeal, they go a long time. Every 15 minutes a new person comes in and tells you their entire life story, and then the next person comes, and this goes all day long, but you walk out of there with amazing stories. We try to do events where we are accessible to the public. We try to do a fundraiser as well and where we meet our supporters and that sort of thing, and they’re great.
Baxter, PA Spotlight: So far we’ve held a number of public-facing events where we’ve partnered with the local community foundation or a local newspaper or the local NPR affiliate or various nonprofit organizations and tried to get as many people to come as possible. We plied them with pizza and we compensated everyone who came with a $15 gift card. We also had them fill out a survey when they were there, and we also sent out each survey to all of our subscribers and put it on various Facebook groups. We tried to get as many people as possible to talk about what they feel is missing in their community. We’re sifting through all of this massive amount of information that we received and we’re trying to use it to figure out what our strategy should be, what beats need more attention, what places need more attention, how are people receiving their news, how we can tailor our distribution strategy to make sure that we’re reaching them in the way that they want to be reached. We also did listening sessions when we launched around the state and we’ve continued to do that.
Ultimately, the very simple equation to nonprofit news is, we produce something that you think is valuable, and you step forward and support it. We need to make sure that we understand what people are going to view as valuable. We are trying to disrupt the old model; we’re trying to disrupt all of the negative experiences that people have had with the media over the past 20 years. And that can actually be very little things, like I have this rule where we answer pretty much every email, unless it comes in just flaming hot and completely inappropriate. But everyone else, we engage. If they come in saying, why did you do this story, it just proves you’re so conservative or liberal or whatever, we’ll respond and point out some other stories, and you’d be shocked how many times that person then responds in a much more positive way. But people also just really appreciate that they know us. We respond, we’re real people, we’re here, we’re on the ground, we live here, we care about this place, we have families here, we want Pennsylvania to be better, and we also genuinely think that there’s more that connects us than divides us. We show that human side, be very honest and open about what we’re doing, and it just seems like the more we do that and the more we get in front of people in person, it always moves the needle. Always.
How to set priorities
Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust: We are a slow news operation. We only do four stories a week. But people tend to spend a lot of time with our stories. When I was at USA Today, our time spent with our stories was like 15 seconds. Last month, we had people spending six minutes — I mean it’s just insane. The quality of the work…people respond.
Klein, NY Focus: We ask the central question: Who runs New York? We want all of our stories to flow from that, and how can we make it a more democratic and transparent state. And if a story speaks to that mission, then we feel like it could speak to everyone who lives here.
Baxter, PA Spotlight: One of the hardest, if not the hardest, part of the job is all the things that we say no to, because I think instinctively as journalists, and with the business model of legacy media, we have come to equate value with quantity, and that I think is fundamentally is not necessarily true for one. For two, I think it’s evolving, because people’s digital lives and experiences, their email inboxes, everything now is just a fire hose. So we too publish about one story a day plus other stuff….and what we heard from people was like no, actually I don’t want 10 things a day, I want you to give me the most important thing today. So that’s what we tell people, we’re not going to give you everything, but you know that when we give you something, it’s going to be worth your time top to bottom. It’s going to make you think, it’s going to make you act, it’s going to be just of more value, and you know what we’re seeing, early in Spotlight’s life, is that indeed people place a value on that and will come forward and support that.
On journalism students seeking jobs
The panelists said that when they recruit, they often find that students don’t really know much about the independent nonprofit news sector and how big it is, and that sometimes it pays better and they can do more of the kind of work they hope to do. All encouraged students to check them out and consider applying for jobs and internships when available.
Other nonprofit statewide news innovators
Naturally, these three are not the only nonprofit organizations keeping an eye on state capitals and more. The Institute for Nonprofit News keeps a comprehensive dataset on nonprofit news of all kinds; there may be one or even two to support in your state. For example, one of my favorites is Black By God, which describes itself as being “at the forefront of community-led news and storytelling in West Virginia…committed to showcasing the diverse experiences of Black and BIPOC communities in the Appalachian region.” Mountain State Spotlight also serves West Virginia, my husband’s native state, with a mission “to help West Virginians improve our state by producing ‘sustained outrage’ journalism that exposes abuses of power by government, business and other institutions.”
