My synagogue had its annual fundraiser this past weekend. The evening was a tribute to Brian Rissinger, our Executive Director. Brian has spent the last 20 years leading us. He has led the congregation through lots of change, some good and some quite hard.

He is the kind of leader who makes the heavy lifting look effortless. But during the tribute, a speaker shared a specific detail about how he handles people that I’d never fully processed. It was a small observation about his personality. Once I heard it, everything clicked. I realized I’d been on the receiving end of this move before without even knowing it.

It gets right to the core of what we’re missing when we think about how we do our jobs as journalists.

What is Brian’s secret? Whenever someone runs over to him with a problem, a mess, or a crisis, he listens. Then, regardless of how much the person in front of him is spiraling, he calmly says four words.

“Help me to understand.”

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The deep roots of four simple words

Reality is, Brian has spent more than two decades running or working in Jewish organizations, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his go-to phrase is actually hardwired into the DNA of religious study. This isn’t just a management tip. It’s a way of bridging the gap between what we believe and the mysteries we don’t yet grasp.

In the Christian tradition, this is a cornerstone of classical theology. St. Anselm of Canterbury famously called it fides quaerens intellectum. It’s a fancy Latin way of saying faith seeking understanding. The idea is simple. You don’t wait to understand everything before you decide to respect it. You start with a baseline of faith and respect, and then you go looking for the “why.”

Jewish-wise, this is the very soul of the Talmud. If you aren’t familiar, the Talmud isn’t just a list of dry rules. It is a massive, centuries-long record of Rabbinic debate. It is essentially a transcript of a “help me to understand” conversation that never ended.

It thrives on Havruta, where two people sit across from each other and wrestle with a text. You aren’t trying to win a debate. You’re trying to reach a deeper clarity that you can’t get to on your own.

In these traditions, asking for help is a humble surrender. It flips the script. Usually, the person asking the questions has all the power. They are the interrogator. But when you ask someone to help you understand, you’re making them the teacher.

Taking your axe away

Amiel Handelsman is a leadership expert. He says asking that simple question forces clarity. It also forces you to have positive intent. More importantly, it keeps you from saying something dumb when you’re mad. When you’re talking to people for a living, those last two things are vital.

As journalists, most of us spend our lives buried in facts about people we’ve never met. We can tell you exactly how many people died on the local highways last year. We know who is filing for divorce and the dollar amount of the lawsuit. We might even have your birthday on file. But there is a massive gap between having the data and having a conversation. The reality is that we’ve become experts in the statistics of people’s lives while remaining total strangers to the people themselves.

This is why journalism so often feels like a transaction where we’re the only ones getting paid. When we finally do show up, it screams intrusion. We arrive, demand a quote, and leave. It is extractive reporting at its finest.

What if, instead, you lead with Brian’s golden bridge?

Help me to understand. You are no longer the reporter taking a statement. You are moving away from trying to sell your own narrative. You are moving toward a respect for the other person’s reality. Instead of hunting down what happened, you’re seeking the answer to what it all means.

Pass it on: Know an editor or a leader who is currently “spiraling”? Share this golden bridge with them.

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Leadership beyond the news story

This four-word philosophy can help us cover better stories, but it should also help us lead better organizations.

• Senior Executives: Use this when a department head presents a strategy that seems completely wrong for the mission. Instead of shutting them down, ask them to help you understand the path that led them to that conclusion. You might discover a blind spot in your own worldview, or you might find a brilliant solution to a problem you didn’t know existed.

• News editors: Stop angrily chopping up a story because it doesn’t feel right. Sit down with the reporter and ask them to help you understand their vision. It removes the defensiveness and turns a rewrite into a coaching session.

• Development and Membership Professionals: Stop talking at your donors. Most news consumers never give a dime. Your donors are your most important outliers. Ask them to help you understand why they chose to invest their money with you. Let them explain your value proposition to you.

• Salespeople: Skip the pitch deck. Ask the client to help you understand their actual goals for the next quarter. You’ll learn what they actually need instead of just trying to sell them a banner ad.

Relational Journalism

Admitting you need help is an act of humility. It signals to the person in front of you that you value their reality more than your own assumptions.

In a Jewish institution, this kind of inquiry is the glue. It is how Brian has stayed connected to a community through twenty years of disagreement and change. In journalism, it should be our new foundation.

If we want to mend the trust gap with the public, we have to stop acting like the experts of everyone else’s lives. We need to start asking for a little help to understand the world we cover.

It’s more than a better way to interview. It’s a better way to lead.

Did I get this right? I’m constantly refining these newsroom dynamics. If I missed a nuance or you have a different take on “Relational Journalism,” hit reply. I read every correction.

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Join the conversation How have you used curiosity to flip a power dynamic in your own work?

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I asked my son to clean his room last week. He did. The floor was clear, the bed was made, and from the hallway, it looked like a win.

Then I stepped inside. The desk was buried. The closet was a crime scene. His definition of “clean” wasn’t mine, and neither of ours matched my wife Tracy’s. Three people. One instruction. Three entirely different versions of reality.

Nobody lost anything over it. The room got re-cleaned. Life continued.

But imagine that same imprecision is the operating framework for an entire multi-billion dollar field. Imagine the word at the center of every funder pitch, every cohort curriculum, and every “capacity-building” program is a word nobody has ever actually defined.

When a funder says “we invest in sustainable newsrooms” and a publisher says “we’re building toward sustainability,” they think they’re talking about the same thing. They’re usually not. And almost nobody asks them to compare notes.

That isn’t a hypothetical. That’s just Tuesday in the journalism support world.

The ecosystem runs on two words: Sustainable and Resilient. We treat them as synonyms, as goals, as proof of “seriousness.” But ask five people in this field to define them with precision, and you’ll get five different answers.

This isn’t an academic gripe. This lack of clarity has teeth. It dictates who gets the check, who gets passed over, and what we are actually building toward.

The Distinction We’re Missing

Let’s start with the line most people miss.

Sustainability is a financial condition. It means the math works. Revenue covers costs, and the organization keeps existing.

Resilience is a capacity. It’s the ability to absorb a punch and stay standing.

A newsroom can be financially “sustainable” while producing zero civic value. A newsroom can do irreplaceable work for its community while being financially fragile. Those are different problems. They need different logic and different fixes.

Right now, the field mostly means “sustainability” when it says “resilience.” And it mostly means “revenue diversification” when it says “sustainability.” That is a lot of heavy lifting for two words that are essentially vibes.

The Hollow Foundation

You can be sustainable without being resilient.

Picture a regional nonprofit. Healthy budget, diversified revenue, great development team. On paper, it’s exactly what funders want. But the editorial vision is trapped in the head of one person. The audience is aging out. The biggest funder is bored and looking at a “strategy shift.” There is no succession plan.

The lights are on, but the foundation is hollow. One bad year, one departure, and the whole thing unravels faster than the balance sheet suggests. Sustainability measures the present; resilience is about absorbing a future that hasn’t happened yet.

The One-Heartbeat Institution

Conversely, you can be resilient without being sustainable.

Think about the solo operator running a weekly in a rural county. No development staff, no foundation ties, no path to “growth.” By every metric the ecosystem uses to find “investment-ready” orgs, he doesn’t exist.

But he’s been publishing for twenty years. He knows how to cut costs to the bone. He has no organizational complexity to manage, so he can flex in ways a 50-person newsroom can’t.

His threat profile isn’t a revenue cliff. It’s illness. It’s burnout. It’s a car that won’t start. The institution is one heartbeat. His resilience is personal, not organizational. The moment he stops, the coverage stops.

That isn’t a failure of his model. It’s the defining feature of it. And the field is using the wrong tools to measure him—if it sees him at all.

What the Research Actually Says

This is not just a journalism problem. It is a general organizational problem that journalism has inherited without knowing it.

A 2025 systematic review of resilience in the nonprofit sector found there is still no holistic framework bringing together structures, people, and relationships in the discussion of what resilience actually means. Researchers established that “bounce back,” the most common working definition, is inadequate, particularly for smaller organizations that cannot simply return to a prior equilibrium after major disruption.

Smaller organizations in vulnerable financial positions demonstrate resilience through entirely different mechanisms than well-resourced ones. They adapt. They evolve. They find a different footing. They do not bounce back.

That finding should land hard in a field that has been building programming almost exclusively around the “bounce-back” model.

The Four Layers of the Mess

When we say “journalism support ecosystem,” we usually just mean the “service layer”—groups like American Press Institute, LION, or Institute for Nonprofit News. That’s too narrow.

The ecosystem has four distinct layers:

• The Service Organizations: The trainers and consultants providing direct support to newsrooms.

• The Funders: Institutional foundations and individual major donors who shape what gets built and what gets abandoned.

• The Journalism Schools: The ones training the practitioners, conducting the research, and—in many cases—running their own newsrooms.

• The Convening Layer: The conferences, trade publications, and peer-reviewed work where the field talks to itself and decides what it believes.

Funders are not external to the system they are financing. They are among its most powerful actors. The priorities they set and the frameworks they promote are ecosystem behaviors with ecosystem consequences. Treating funders as separate from the field they are actively structuring is one of our most convenient fictions.

All four layers are flying blind. Funders award grants against undefined standards. J-schools graduate students without a framework for organizational health. Service orgs run programs built on untested assumptions. This isn’t a coordination failure. It’s a definitional one.

The Cost of Inattention

The damage shows up as selection bias. When you don’t define what you’re optimizing for, you default to what’s easy to measure: revenue, staff size, and audience growth.

That filter always favors the urban, digital-first nonprofit with a donor base. It ignores the “load-bearing walls”—the solo publishers in information deserts who don’t fit the template. We are quietly deprioritizing the very infrastructure we cannot afford to lose.

What Happens Next

Before the next round of major funding or the next big cohort, we need a working taxonomy. Not a universal dictionary, but a set of distinctions that make the questions answerable in context.

Resilience against what? For what type of organization? Toward what civic function? Treating a 20-person metro newsroom and a one-person rural operation as the same thing isn’t equity. It’s inattention dressed up as a framework.

This taxonomy needs to be built with input from all four layers and tested against real newsrooms. The American Press Institute has the standing and the capacity to lead this. I’m not being subtle about that. If we don’t do it, I’d like to know who will.

The Wednesday Ask

My ask for Wednesday is simple:

If you run a newsroom, write down your own definition of “sustainable” and “resilient” before you read anyone else’s. If you’re a funder or a J-school dean, do the same. Then compare notes with someone in a different layer of the system.

The gap between your definitions is the problem. Closing it is the work.

My son’s room is clean again. This time, we defined “clean” before he picked up the first shirt. The journalism support ecosystem has skipped that step for a decade. It’s past time we took it.

Share this post with a colleague in the ecosystem.

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What does “sustainable” mean in your shop? Is it a bank balance, or is it something deeper? Let’s hammer this out in the comments.

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I strive for accuracy and clarity. If you spot an error or think I’ve misrepresented a data point, please let me know. I’ll update the post and acknowledge the change here.

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A Note on Intent: I don’t typically “do” politics or policy in this space, and we can deal with the fact that this piece might not sound like my usual fare. But this isn’t about partisanship—it’s about how the infrastructure of government communication is evolving and what those structural shifts mean for journalists, newsrooms, and the public’s access to timely information.

As always, these thoughts are mine alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or the leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs how I see the industry, Backstory & Strategy is my space for thinking out loud and poking at the frameworks we all have to navigate.

I track these policy shifts closely, but the plumbing of federal budgets is complex. If you see a detail I’ve missed or have a different reading of the NSPM-7 framework, please report the error and let me know. Accountability starts here.

Last week, most of journalism’s support ecosystem was focused on tariffs, newsroom layoffs, and the latest round of philanthropic portfolio reviews. Nobody sent an alert about the FBI’s 2027 budget request. I didn’t see it until it started circulating on social media yesterday, and I follow this space closely. That gap is not incidental. It’s the story.

Buried in the Justice Department’s budget submission to Congress is a funding request for something called the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center. The center brings together personnel from ten federal agencies with a mandate to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorists and related criminal actors. The FBI is asking for $166 million and 328 positions to implement it, including 130 special agents. This is not a memo. It is an organizational infrastructure with a budget line, a staffing plan, and an interagency command structure. It is being built right now.

NSPM-7 itself is the National Security Presidential Memorandum Trump signed in September 2025, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The civil liberties community noticed it immediately. The organizations whose job is to support and protect independent journalists largely treated it as someone else’s story. That is worth sitting with for a moment, because the budget document specifies exactly the kinds of views the center is designed to investigate: anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, extremism on migration and race, and hostility toward traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. The FBI’s own budget language says these views are “commonly” associated with the violent conduct it is targeting. That is a remarkably wide net, and it is now funded.

Consider what that framing does to ordinary journalism. A reporter investigating financial conflicts of interest in a local government contract is doing accountability reporting. Under the mission center’s operating logic, that same work can be reframed as hostility toward American institutions. A freelancer documenting the use of surveillance technology by a federal agency is covering government oversight. The same work can be characterized as anti-American agitation. These are not hypothetical stretches. They are the predictable output of a mandate that turns ideological categories into investigative criteria, and then funds 130 special agents to act on them.

The legal critique of NSPM-7 is well-established. The ACLU and a cohort of prominent national security lawyers have noted that the memo creates no new crimes and that labeling a group a domestic terrorist organization carries no additional legal consequences under current federal statute. That analysis is correct as far as it goes. It does not go far enough for independent journalists.

Here is the structural problem the legal critique does not address. An investigation does not need to result in a prosecution to be effective. A subpoena, an IRS audit, a FARA inquiry, or a simple visit from a Joint Terrorism Task Force agent is expensive, time-consuming, and reputationally damaging. For an established newsroom, those costs are absorbed by institutions designed to absorb them. There is general counsel, a board, donor relationships that pre-date the scrutiny, and a communications infrastructure to manage the narrative. For an independent journalist publishing a newsletter from their home office, those same costs are potentially fatal to the enterprise.

This is the part of the NSPM-7 story that has not been told in the journalism support context. The risk profile for solo creators is structurally different from the risk profile for institutions, and the difference is not just a matter of scale.

There is a constitutional argument here that deserves naming. Legal scholars and civil liberties advocates including the ACLU’s National Security Project have identified NSPM-7’s most vulnerable aspect as its pre-crime investigative framework: the use of ideological indicators to open investigations before any act of violence has occurred. That structure has deep problems under the First Amendment. Using a person’s expressed views about capitalism or immigration policy as a predicate for a federal investigation is viewpoint-based surveillance — the government targeting people not for what they have done but for what they believe and publish. The Supreme Court has consistently held that viewpoint-based government action is the most constitutionally suspect form of First Amendment violation, because it allows public officials to put their thumbs on the scale of public debate in their own favor. NSPM-7 does not need to survive that scrutiny to cause damage. Investigations opened under its authority will proceed while legal challenges work through the courts, and for an independent journalist without institutional support, that timeline is not academic.

Think of it as the prenuptial problem. The partnership agreements now being promoted across the journalism support ecosystem as a path to sustainability are appealing on their face. The creator gets institutional credibility, shared audience infrastructure, and revenue support. The newsroom gets voice, reach, and the kind of trust a brand alone cannot manufacture. What these agreements almost never address is what happens when the association draws government scrutiny.

Does your current partnership agreement or freelance contract have a "prenuptial" clause? I’m curious to hear from creators and newsroom counsel alike: are we actually talking about legal indemnification yet, or are we still just talking about CPMs? Drop a note in the comments.

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The newsroom’s lawyers are the newsroom’s lawyers. This is not a criticism of institutional counsel — it is a description of how legal representation works. Their mandate runs to the institution. It does not extend to affiliated creators, and no amount of goodwill changes that structural fact. Organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have built programs specifically to fill this gap for freelancers and independents, and those programs matter. But they are not a substitute for contractual protection negotiated before a partnership begins. If the fastest path to resolution requires creating distance from a creator whose coverage of a politically sensitive beat, or whose grant history with a foreign-funded foundation, drew the original attention, that is a path the institution’s counsel is entirely free to recommend. Cutting the creator loose may not just be legally permissible. In some circumstances it may be legally advisable. The institution’s lawyers are not acting in bad faith when they reach that conclusion. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. The creator simply was never their client.

Here is where the prenuptial analogy becomes concrete. Most creator-newsroom contracts include indemnification language. Read it carefully, because it almost certainly runs in one direction. The creator indemnifies the newsroom against claims arising from the creator’s content. The newsroom does not indemnify the creator against government investigations triggered by the association. In a divorce, that clause determines who gets the house. In a federal investigation, it determines who pays the lawyers. Right now, in virtually every partnership agreement circulating in this ecosystem, the answer is the creator. Nobody put a reciprocal clause in the contract because nobody thought to ask for it, and the newsroom’s attorneys had no reason to raise it. That is exactly the moment when the absence of a prenuptial becomes legible.

The creator, in that scenario, is alone. They have the institutional association on their resume and none of the institutional protection when it matters.

This is not an argument for despair, and it would be wrong to suggest that the press freedom community has been asleep. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has been doing serious, specific work on exactly these issues. Its attorneys have filed amicus briefs in active FARA cases, arguing that the statute applied consistent with its textual sweep would cover constitutionally protected journalism. It has published detailed legal analysis of FARA’s threat to the press, tracking the ways in which prosecutorial theories in recent cases are legally indistinguishable from ordinary newsgathering. It operates a 24-hour legal defense hotline available to working journalists including independents, and runs programs specifically designed to provide pro bono assistance to freelance and independent reporters. The Freedom of the Press Foundation provides digital security training and legal referrals calibrated to journalists operating without institutional support. State press associations offer varying levels of legal assistance depending on jurisdiction. These resources are real, they are staffed by people doing consequential work, and they are worth knowing about.

They are also, in aggregate, nowhere near sufficient to absorb the demand that a 10-agency joint mission center with 130 dedicated special agents could generate. And there is a gap the existing infrastructure does not yet fully address. Federal shield law protection for journalists is unsettled, and solo creators occupy the most ambiguous position in that landscape. A creator served with a subpoena demanding source information has significantly weaker protection than a staff journalist at an established newsroom, and in some jurisdictions may have none at all. That gap compounds every other vulnerability this piece has described. The distance between what the press freedom community has built and what would be needed is itself an argument for why journalism philanthropy should be treating creator legal exposure as an infrastructure problem rather than an individual misfortune — and for why the organizations already doing this work deserve substantially more resources than they currently receive.

The FARA dimension adds a layer of complexity that most creators have not considered, though the actual exposure depends heavily on the specifics. The Foreign Agents Registration Act has a genuine press exemption, and accepting subscriptions from foreign readers almost certainly creates no legal exposure under any reasonable reading of the statute. The press exemption was written to cover exactly that kind of transaction. The harder cases are the ones that come up routinely in the creator economy: a grant from a foreign journalism foundation, a speaking fee from an international conference, a content partnership with a European media organization. None of those arrangements is inherently problematic, and for most creators working with reputable international partners, FARA registration is unlikely to be required.

The risk is not that FARA applies cleanly. The risk is that it doesn’t apply cleanly, and that ambiguity has a price. The critical lever DOJ has traditionally used in FARA cases is intent. The question is not just whether foreign money changed hands. It is whether the creator was acting at the direction or in the interest of a foreign principal. For a large institution, that question gets answered by compliance counsel before the relationship begins. For a solo creator operating without legal infrastructure, demonstrating that their editorial judgment was not shaped by a foreign funder — even when it obviously wasn’t — can mean a six-figure legal bill before anyone gets near a courtroom. The chilling effect does not require a prosecution. It requires only that the creator understand the cost of defending an ambiguous fact pattern against a motivated prosecutor in an enforcement environment NSPM-7 has deliberately made more aggressive.

None of this means independent journalists should stop covering difficult beats, stop accepting foreign subscribers, or stop entering newsroom partnerships. It means those decisions now carry a different risk calculus than they did a year ago, and the infrastructure that is supposed to support independent journalism has not caught up to that reality.

The partnership agreements being developed and celebrated across this ecosystem are almost uniformly silent on legal exposure, cost-sharing in the event of government scrutiny, and the respective obligations of institutional partners when an affiliated creator becomes a target. The conversation about creator sustainability focuses on revenue models, audience ownership, and editorial independence. It does not focus on what happens when a federal agency with 130 new special agents and a 10-agency joint mission center starts working through its list.

The NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center is operational. The legal infrastructure protecting the people most likely to need it is not. That is not an abstract concern about civil liberties. It is a design flaw in the architecture journalism philanthropy is currently funding, and it is worth naming before someone finds out the hard way.

If you know an independent journalist, a newsletter creator, or a journalism funder who needs to see the 2027 budget math, please pass this along. This isn’t a story that should stay in a vacuum—the infrastructure only gets built if we’re all looking at the blueprints.

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Nothing in this piece constitutes legal advice. If you are an independent journalist with concerns about your specific situation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press operates a 24-hour legal defense hotline at 1-800-336-4243.

A Quick Disclaimer: These thoughts are mine alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or the leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs how I see the industry, Backstory & Strategy is my space for thinking out loud and poking at the frameworks we all have to navigate.

Drive down any commercial strip from Elkins Park to Allentown, and you’ll see the same thing: four, five, maybe six hair salons packed into a single quarter-mile. On paper, it looks like a bubble waiting to burst. You have to wonder who is actually getting that many haircuts.

But the way these shops stay alive is more than just a curiosity of small-business economics. It actually explains why we’ve spent the last decade getting local journalism exactly backwards.

How salons actually work

A salon owner isn’t usually running a traditional top-down company. They’re basically a landlord for practitioners. They lease the space, handle the plumbing, and rent out chairs for a weekly fee or a percentage of the till. The stylists aren’t employees; they’re micro-businesses operating under a shared roof.

The owner provides the four walls, the sinks, and the merchant account. The stylist provides the relationship.

That’s the part that matters. People don’t have loyalty to a salon brand; they have loyalty to the person holding the shears. If your stylist moves three miles away, you follow them. It’s a recurring bond built on the simple fact that you trust this one person with how you look to the world.

Because of that, five shops on one block aren’t actually competing. Each one is a collection of independent monopolies with their own client lists. The geographic radius is tiny, the demand is constant, and the startup costs are low. Most importantly, the value loop is closed. The person getting the haircut pays for it, right there, at the point of delivery.

Nearly every part of this has a parallel in local journalism. Well, nearly.

The parts that map

A newsroom covering a specific community isn’t really competing with a regional metro daily or a national outlet any more than a barbershop in Elkins Park is looking over its shoulder at a high-end salon in Center City. They serve a radius so specific that national-level hand-wringing about “media oversaturation” doesn’t mean anything on the ground. The salon model suggests we could actually have more small operators than we think. The problem isn’t too many outlets. It’s that there aren’t enough.

The relationship dynamic is identical. Substack proved the point recently, but local TV and radio have known this for decades. Audiences follow journalists, not institutions. When a reporter with a real following leaves an outlet, the audience usually follows them out the door.

Then you have the platform layer. Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost are just the chair-rental model in digital form. They handle the “plumbing”—the email delivery, the payments, the discovery tools. The writer brings the audience, the platform takes a cut, and the writer owns the relationship.

These platforms have even cracked the payment problem for some. If a reader pays $7 a month for a newsletter they value, they’re closing the value loop. The money flows to the person they trust because that connection is worth the price.

Where the analogy hits a wall

There are two places where this comparison falls apart, and we have to be honest about them.

First, there’s market size. The people making a real living on Substack are usually writing for niche national audiences—tech, finance, or national politics. But the person covering a school board in a town of 8,000 doesn’t have a big enough “addressable market” to make the math work, even if their relationship with the readers is rock solid. Everyone needs a haircut. Not everyone thinks they need to pay for local news.

Then there’s the public goods problem. This is the big one. In a salon, if you don’t pay, you don’t get the service. In journalism, the value leaks everywhere. Good reporting benefits the whole community, including the people who never spend a dime on a subscription. School board coverage keeps the local government honest for everyone. The salon has a closed loop; journalism’s loop is wide open.

Which means the margins are thinner than any salon owner would tolerate. And that’s exactly why the infrastructure layer matters more here, not less. A stylist can absorb some operational waste. They have pricing power and a captive client. A reporter in a town of 8,000, subsidized by grants and surviving on free riders, cannot afford to lose a single hour to work that a shared platform could handle.

These aren’t marketing problems. They’re structural constraints. They explain why the platform model hasn’t “solved” the local news crisis yet. The infrastructure exists, the logic is sound, but the math just doesn’t close at a small scale. But even here, the analogy is pointing in the same direction: if anything, the case for shared infrastructure is stronger in journalism than it is in hair care, because the room for waste is so much smaller.

The chair comes first

Here is the point I keep coming back to: Nobody funds a stylist and then says, “Now go figure out where to put the chair.”

The chair comes first. The space, the booking system, the payment processing, the utilities—that’s the precondition. The platform is what makes the work possible.

For at least a decade, the people who fund and support journalism have done the exact opposite. They fund the reporter. They fund the beat. They assume the outlet will eventually figure out how to publish, distribute, and collect money. We’ve acted like the “journalism” was the only thing that mattered, and the “plumbing”—the distribution, the billing, the audience management—was just some boring utility that would magically take care of itself.

I think we have it backwards. We’ve treated journalism as a content problem when it’s actually an operations problem.

The content was never the bottleneck. There is no shortage of people who want to do the reporting. What’s missing is the operational scaffolding that lets them do it sustainably.

Right now, every small nonprofit newsroom in America is independently reinventing the same back-office functions on a shoestring budget. They’re all trying to figure out their own donor management, their own HR policies, and their own legal compliance. That isn’t journalism. That’s overhead. And it’s the exact kind of overhead a salon owner absorbs so the stylists can just focus on cutting hair.

Strategy vs. Survival

I know the pushback here. People will tell you that not every back-office function is just “plumbing.”

They’ll point to places like the Invisible Institute and argue that their data platforms or their unique collaborative models are what make them special. And they’re right. Some newsrooms have intentionally blurred the line between operations and strategy to create something distinctive. I’m not suggesting we wave that off.

But there is a massive difference between a newsroom choosing to build a bespoke data tool as a strategic move and a founder losing 30% of their week to QuickBooks and payroll compliance because there’s no other option. One is a choice. The other is a tax on survival. Most of the small and mid-size shops I see aren’t building “strategic capabilities”—they’re just drowning in administrative debt while trying to cover a city council meeting.

I’m not the first person to say “infrastructure matters”

People have been making versions of this argument for years. Kerri Hoffman at PRX wrote a Nieman Lab piece arguing that public media should treat infrastructure as a right, not a luxury. Victor Pickard at Penn has framed journalism as public infrastructure in the policy sense, like roads and bridges.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s recent analysis of 559 Press Forward infrastructure proposals found that the most persistent challenges facing local journalism aren’t isolated newsroom problems, but system-level constraints tied to fragmented infrastructure. On the other hand, Tracie Powell at the Pivot Fund has pushed back on the infrastructure-first framing entirely, arguing that infrastructure without direct capacity-building is a waste.

They’re all contributing something real. But notice what each of them is actually arguing about. Hoffman is talking about technology stacks and content delivery. Pickard is talking about government policy. Hansen Shapiro is diagnosing fragmentation at the field level. Powell is saying that none of it works if newsrooms don’t have the staff to use what’s being built.

And to be fair, the field has been listening. The American Journalism Project explicitly funds business-side capacity. Press Forward’s recent convenings have centered sustainability and revenue, not just editorial practice. LION Publishers built a whole sustainability audit process. The rhetoric has moved. Some of the dollars have followed. It would be dishonest to write this piece as if everyone in the ecosystem is still funding Pulitzer bait and ignoring the back office. That’s not where we are in 2026.

But the center of gravity hasn’t shifted as far as the rhetoric suggests. Look at where the prestige still accrues. Look at what gets celebrated at conferences or written up in the trades. It’s almost always the editorial win. A big investigation. A new beat. A coverage gap filled.

The organization that quietly lowers the operational costs for 40 different newsrooms doesn’t get a trophy. The biggest grants still go to “content production,” with operations treated as an afterthought.

I say this as someone who works at a journalism support organization. This critique implicates my own shop, not just everyone else’s. The pull toward content-first thinking is strong even when you know better, because that’s what the field rewards and that’s what funders want to hear about.

If the core problem is operational, then the job of a support organization isn’t “how do we help people do better journalism.” It’s “how do we drive the cost of doing journalism low enough that it can actually survive.” Those sound similar, but they are worlds apart. The first one builds training programs. The second one builds shared infrastructure and fights to make it universal.

The landing

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to be on Substack. I wouldn’t even try to make that case. Endorsing one commercial platform with its own baggage isn’t the point.

The point is the principle. Support should be about reducing the burden so the practitioner can focus on the work and the audience. Whether that happens on Ghost, a purpose-built nonprofit tool, or a WordPress plugin doesn’t matter. What matters is driving down the cost of the “commodity” functions.

We have spent years funding the stylist and telling them to go find their own chair. We’ve built an ecosystem that prizes editorial excellence while the people doing the work are drowning in administrative debt.

The chair comes first. It always has. We just kept forgetting to build it.

I’m curious—especially for those of you running small or nonprofit newsrooms—what is the one "commodity" task that eats 30% of your week? Is it payroll? The CMS? The audit? Drop a comment or hit reply. I want to know what piece of the "chair" we still haven't built for you.

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Keep me honest. I’m a 30-year veteran of this industry, but that doesn’t mean I have every data point right. If I’ve missed a nuance about your organization’s infrastructure or if you think the salon analogy hits a different wall than the ones I mentioned, let me know. I’d rather be corrected than comfortable.

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Last night, my family, along with Jews around the globe, gathered to celebrate the Passover Seder. We swallowed our fair share of bitter herbs. We sipped our wine. We retold the story of Exodus, working our way through the ancient Hebrew textbook known as the Haggadah.

When we got to the Four Children, I started pondering the state of journalism today.

Here’s how that works. During the Seder, four children ask four questions about what’s going on. Each child represents a different personality type: The Wise. The Wicked. The Simple. And the Child Who Does Not Know How To Ask. Rather than simply describing these children, the Haggadah actually provides guidance on how to directly address each child based on their individual perspectives and motivations. It is an audience segmentation and reader engagement strategy wrapped up in one ancient scroll. It knows that the story will only resonate if you tell it in a way that they can understand and appreciate.

What would happen if we substituted those children for the Four News Organizations eating at our media ecosystem dinner table? How should we “answer” them today?

1. The Wise Organization (The Context Builder)

• Question: “What are the testimonies, the statutes, and the laws?”

• Profile: This organization wants the “big picture.” If a bridge collapses, they’ll explain the engineering blueprints as well as give you a history of infrastructure spending.

• Engagement Strategy: The Hagaddah instructs the reader to “teach him in detail, including all the symbols.” In other words, leave no breadcrumb unturned.

• Lesson: Don’t skip on context for this audience. Feed their craving. Give them the backstory, the dataset, the primary sources, and the “why.” This is your brand’s loyal base.

2. The Wicked Organization (The Provocateur)

• Question: “What does this service mean to you?”

• Profile: Notice how they say “you” instead of “us.” The wicked child separates themselves from the group. They are likely hyper-partisan, but they could also be the “anti-establishment” brand. They aren’t here to learn the story. They’re here to question why the others are telling it.

• Engagement Strategy: “Answer him with a set-the-teeth-on-edge bluntness.”

• Lesson: Avoid the trap of arguing with someone who is not interested in finding common ground. Call out the skepticism with straight talk. Remind them that if we don’t have a commitment to a basic set of facts, then both the community and your business model suffer.

3. The Simple Organization (The Headline Hawker)

• Question: “What is this?”

• Profile: This organization thrives on news-you-can-understand. Sound-bite journalism. The Simple child only wants the “What.” The Who, What, Where, When… but none of the Why.

• Engagement Strategy: Keep your explanation simple. “With a strong hand, we were brought out.”

• Lesson: Be straightforward with these readers. Don’t ask them to do homework. Serve them truth, but make it easy to digest. You’re not trying to entertain them; you’re trying to move them to the “Wise” seat by gaining their trust.

4. The Organization That Does Not Know How to Ask (The Passive Aggregator)

• Silence: This child utters not a word. They quietly listen to the story, waiting for the grown-ups to finish.

• Profile: Such brands don’t ask questions because they have no editorial voice to do so. Think of the AI-driven news aggregators. Or your Facebook feed. There is no journalism taking place. Just a lazy regurgitation of whatever else is happening on the internet.

• Engagement Strategy: The Haggadah is clear: “You must open the matter for them.”

• Lesson: Unfortunately, that means it’s up to us. Media leaders can’t abdicate our responsibility to give these organizations a voice. We have to tell the story because they won’t.

The “Fifth” Child

My favorite part about the Four Children explanation? They all eat together.

A healthy media culture needs all four. In fact, we need all Jews to sit at that table together. The challenge today is that we stopped conversing with other Jews around the table. We’ve clustered together into our ideological tribes.

As we move through the rest of Passover, I hope we can work on leading the Simple child toward wisdom, bringing the Wicked child back into the “us” fold, and speaking louder so that those who don’t know how to ask can hear our voice.

Happy Passover to those observing.

Which of these “children” do you see dominating your social feed right now? Is there room for the “Wise Child” in a 280-character world? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

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A Note on Accuracy: I strive to get the backstory right every time. If you spotted a detail about the Seder or media strategy that feels off, please let me know here so I can set the record straight.

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The phrase “too big to fail” entered the public vocabulary during the 2008 financial crisis. It described institutions so deeply embedded in the functioning of the broader system that their collapse would trigger cascading damage well beyond their own walls. The government intervened not because those institutions deserved saving, but because the system could not absorb their failure.

That is a risk-based argument. It is not a quality argument. It is not a reward argument. It is a structural argument about what the ecosystem cannot afford to lose.

The journalism field has spent fifteen years building a different kind of argument. We have debated which newsrooms deserve investment, which markets show promise, and which organizations demonstrate the capacity to scale. We have called it many things. The most honest version, the one the field finally said out loud this month, is picking winners.

Picking winners is a capacity-based filter. It selects for organizational sophistication, grant-writing fluency, conference presence, and existing infrastructure. It asks: which of these can we make excellent?

Picking winners asks which organizations deserve to grow. Too big to fail asks which organizations the system cannot afford to lose. Those are not the same question, and they do not point at the same newsrooms.

And the news desert crisis is what happens when you spend fifteen years asking only the first one.

The Filter We Didn’t Build

Too big to fail is a risk-based filter. It doesn’t ask who deserves investment. It asks whose failure the system cannot absorb. While a bank is too big to fail because its collapse triggers a global recession, a community weekly is too big to fail because its collapse triggers a local truth recession.

The criteria are not complicated. The first question is non-substitutability: if it closes, does anything else perform this function for this community? The second is civic embeddedness: is it structurally woven into how the community actually functions? The third is isolation: is it the only meaningful news presence in a specific place or for a specific population? The fourth is reconstructibility: if it closes, can it realistically be rebuilt?

Those four criteria capture the most visible forms of TBTF eligibility — geographic isolation and community isolation. But there is a third mode that the criteria alone don’t fully surface. An organization can operate in a market with abundant journalism and still be the only entity performing a specific civic function — statewide accountability, Indigenous community coverage, rural health reporting — that no other institution would replicate if it were to disappear. Geographic isolation and community isolation are the most legible forms of irreplaceability. Functional isolation is the quietest and often the hardest to rebuild once it is lost.

Apply those honestly, and the sorting happens fast.

One Drum Unit From Silence

Paul Kosel has published the Groton Independent in Groton, South Dakota, for nearly forty years. He runs a daily email edition. He livestreams local sports. He covers city council. He prints the weekly in-house. He also works for the city as its technology specialist and runs the town’s mosquito control program. The city links to his paper directly from its municipal website.

When I spent time looking for any evidence that a major journalism support organization had ever touched the Groton Independent, I found nothing. Not a grant. Not a cohort. Not a membership. Not a sustainability audit. The infrastructure the field spent a decade building had never made contact with one of the oldest newspapers in South Dakota.

In February, “Paper Paul” launched a GoFundMe. The goal started at $900.

He clears every TBTF threshold. His failure isn't just a business closing. It is the deletion of a community's record. His press is currently one drum unit away from silence. In a modern newsroom, a technical glitch is a support ticket; for Paul, the drum unit — the literal cylinder that transfers toner onto the page — is the mechanical heartbeat of the town’s information. If it fails, the ink has nowhere to go.

He failed every picking-winners threshold because he isn’t built to scale; he is built to endure. That gap is not an accident. It is the architecture of the system producing its intended output.

What the Counterfactual Looks Like

The question worth sitting with is: what happens if the field had applied a TBTF filter in 2008, when the crisis was visible but the damage was not yet irreversible?

The closure math changes first. A TBTF framework would have identified papers caught in private equity debt spirals before closure as irreplaceable civic infrastructure, and created intervention mechanisms — structured acquisitions, nonprofit conversions, community ownership transitions — rather than watching them disappear and calling it a market outcome.

Preservation would have replaced reconstruction. Rebuilding trust from scratch in a news desert is expensive and inefficient. You are reconstructing audience, institutional knowledge, and community relationships that already existed. TBTF logic pushes toward stabilizing existing institutions rather than replacing them after the fact, and preservation is dramatically cheaper than reconstruction.

The philanthropic dollar would have gone further. The field spent real resources in the 2010s funding new outlets in markets that already had struggling ones. A TBTF filter forces an uncomfortable question: are we funding something new because the existing institution is genuinely inadequate, or because it is easier to build something grant-friendly than to save something that doesn’t fit our model? That question was rarely asked. The answer would have redirected significant capital.

The for-profit wall would have been challenged earlier. Almost every intervention mechanism the field built was structured around 501(c)(3) eligibility. A TBTF framework is indifferent to organizational form. It asks about civic function, not tax status. That single shift would have kept for-profit community weeklies like the Groton Independent inside the support system rather than invisible to it.

And the data infrastructure would exist. TBTF requires knowing what you are protecting. It would have forced a genuine census of civic journalism function across every community — a map that, fifteen years later, still does not fully exist. If it had been built in 2010, the field would have known where Paper Paul was in 2012, not 2026.

Chicago and the Civic Stress Test

The power of a TBTF filter is that it functions in a news desert like Groton and in a saturated market like Chicago simultaneously. That matters, because the field has treated those as separate problems. They are not.

Chicago has approximately 145 news organizations. A TBTF filter sorts them by replaceability, not quality — and those are not the same thing. The field has been treating them as if they are.

City Bureau, Block Club Chicago, The TRiiBE, and South Side Weekly clear the threshold because they cover communities the legacy players have systematically deprioritized for decades. Close any one of them and you lose the only consistent accountability journalism in specific neighborhoods. WBEZ and WTTW clear it for different reasons — public media with deep civic infrastructure, emergency broadcast function, and no realistic substitute. Injustice Watch and Chicago Reporter clear it on specificity: specialized accountability journalism on criminal justice and race that nobody else does systematically.

Axios Chicago does not. It serves a well-resourced audience that has multiple alternatives. Neither does Crain’s, whose readers have Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and the Tribune’s business desk. Good journalism, in both cases. Not irreplaceable journalism. The distinction matters enormously, and a rigorous TBTF filter applied to all 145 organizations probably protects somewhere between 20 and 35. Not because the others don’t produce valuable work, but because TBTF protection is specifically about irreplaceability.

The Tribune is the genuinely hard case. In the 2008 financial crisis, banks were forced into stress tests to prove they held enough capital to survive a crash. A TBTF framework for news would require a Civic Stress Test. If an institution wants the protections of being Too Essential to Exit, it must prove it still holds the civic capital to perform its function.

The Tribune has spent twenty years hollowing out the coverage — local courts, municipal desks, neighborhood beats — that would make it irreplaceable. You cannot claim the status of essential infrastructure while actively dismantling the pipes. Civic capital has measurable proxies: the reporter-to-resident ratio, the breadth of the municipal beat map, the consistency of neighborhood presence over time. An institution that wants TBTF protection should have to show its work. When a legacy paper fails its Civic Stress Test through sustained disinvestment, it should no longer be treated as a protected asset, but as a distressed one ready for a forced community-led acquisition.

Beyond Moral Hazard

Critics of this framework often point to moral hazard — the idea that a safety net encourages reckless gambling. But the Groton Independents of the world aren’t failing because they made risky bets on subprime derivatives. They are failing because the digital ad market moved to Menlo Park.

There is a second moral hazard worth naming directly: the fear that a TBTF framework becomes a bailout for the hedge funds and private equity firms that hollowed out local news in the first place. It shouldn’t, and it doesn’t have to.

Protecting these outlets isn’t about writing a check to Alden Global Capital. It’s about saving the utility, not the owner.When a newspaper that clears the TBTF threshold is being mismanaged or strip-mined by extractive ownership, the intervention isn’t a rescue of the balance sheet — it’s a forced transition to community ownership. The framework protects the civic function. What happens to the current ownership is a separate, and considerably less sympathetic, question.

Protecting these outlets isn’t subsidizing mismanagement; it’s maintaining a public utility — like a bridge or a water main — that the market no longer finds profitable to build, but the public cannot live without. We aren’t bailing out the bankers. We’re keeping the lights on in the town square.

The Reckoning

TBTF is a before framework. Its entire logic depends on intervening before failure, not studying failure after the fact. The field built extraordinary diagnostic capacity and applied almost all of it retrospectively.

The University of North Carolina research estimates that roughly 2,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, and approximately 200 counties in the United States now have no local news coverage at all. A meaningful fraction of those closures happened in communities where the paper was genuinely irreplaceable. They closed anyway. Because no one was applying that measure.

If the field had applied this filter in 2008, we would have a support system that knew Paper Paul’s name before he had to launch a GoFundMe. The framework existed in finance. Nobody thought to borrow it.

That is still true today. The question is whether the field borrows it now, while there are still papers worth saving, or whether we wait for the next round of closures and study those too.

The road still needs to be built, and the first step is deciding which roads matter most. That decision requires a filter. We have one now. We just haven’t used it.

Is there a newsroom in your region that would clear the TBTF threshold? One that is genuinely irreplaceable, civically embedded, and operating without meaningful support from the journalism infrastructure? I want to hear about them. Drop a comment or hit reply.

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A Note on Accuracy I’m committed to accuracy and transparency. If you see a factual error or a nuance I’ve missed in this piece, please let me know.

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Recently, Palantir’s CTO told Bloomberg that the war in Iran will likely be remembered as the first large-scale military conflict driven, enhanced, and made substantially more productive by artificial intelligence. He meant it as a compliment to the technology. But if you cover news for a living, it should land differently.

Because if Iran was the first AI war, then November is the first AI election.

Not metaphorically. Operationally. The same dynamics that defined the Iran information environment — AI-generated content produced at scale, the speed of synthetic media outrunning the speed of verification, and something researchers are calling the “liar’s dividend,” where real footage gets dismissed as fake because the fakes are so convincing — are now pointing directly at a midterm election cycle that is already, today, seeing AI-cloned candidate voices and synthetic campaign ads running without meaningful disclosure.

We have roughly eight months. The infrastructure doesn’t exist. And two of the most instinctive responses to that problem would make things worse.

The first instinct is abstention. If newsrooms can’t reliably verify what they’re seeing, maybe they should pull back from the most contested territory. Cover the races they can handle. Avoid amplifying content they can’t authenticate.

It’s an understandable impulse. It’s also a gift to exactly the forces that benefit from an information vacuum.

Disengagement doesn’t protect communities from disinformation. It accelerates their exposure to it. If credible local newsrooms step back from competitive House races, school board fights, and statehouse campaigns, someone else fills that space. And whoever fills it won’t be operating with journalism values. The abstention instinct, taken seriously, hands bad actors a very cheap and very effective weapon: generate enough noise and confusion, and your adversaries retreat. This is not a precedent the industry can afford to set.

The second instinct is centralization. Let an organization like the Associated Press handle it. Let a designated, trusted, national institution serve as the verification layer for election-related content — a single authoritative voice that local newsrooms can cite and readers can trust.

For those outside the industry, the Associated Press is a nonprofit news cooperative that has served as American journalism’s shared backbone for more than 180 years — the organization that calls elections, sets wire standards, and whose reports appear in thousands of outlets that couldn’t otherwise afford national and international coverage. If anyone has the credibility and reach to serve as a national arbiter of election truth, the thinking goes, it’s them.

This one is more seductive, and it falls apart in more ways.

Capacity, first. The Associated Press is already stretched covering elections across 50 states. Adding real-time AI verification for every local race, every deepfake targeting a state legislative district, every synthetic robocall in a competitive primary is not a bigger version of the same job. It’s a categorically different one. This isn’t one high-profile race for the White House. It’s 435 separate House battlefronts, 35 Senate seats, and 39 gubernatorial races. The threat surface is massive, and it’s composed entirely of local skirmishes that national newsrooms simply aren’t staffed to monitor.

More importantly, centralized truth infrastructure is a single point of failure. If AP becomes the designated arbiter of election reality, you’ve created something adversaries will specifically target — not with better fakes necessarily, but with sustained attacks on AP’s credibility itself. The goal doesn’t have to be winning the argument. It just has to be muddying it enough that the designation stops meaning anything.

And there’s a legitimacy problem that’s distinct from accuracy. AP can tell you a video is fake. It cannot restore the trust of a voter in a community that already doesn’t believe institutional media. For verification to work, it has to be legible and credible to the people being targeted. That almost always requires a local voice. Not a wire service dateline from a national bureau.

The problem, in other words, isn’t a shortage of truth-tellers. It’s a shortage of trusted, proximate, well-resourced ones.

Here’s the structural reality the industry needs to sit with. Consolidation and the growth of small nonprofit newsrooms are pointing in opposite directions at exactly the wrong moment.

Consolidated legacy outlets have the verification infrastructure — the forensic tools, the legal backstops, the experienced political editors who’ve seen this before. But they’re covering fewer communities and doing it increasingly from a distance. Small nonprofit newsrooms are actually in the communities that matter most for midterm coverage. They have the relationships. They have the local credibility. They’re the ones whose voices can actually cut through.

But they’re running lean. A two-person statehouse bureau isn’t equipped to navigate real-time AI disinformation when a deepfake drops at six in the evening before Election Day. They don’t have a forensic video analyst on call. They probably don’t have a lawyer either.

So the coverage gap and the credibility gap land in the same place simultaneously. This is not a technology problem that will be solved by better detection tools, though better tools would help. It’s an infrastructure problem. And infrastructure problems require infrastructure investments.

This is the moment when someone will point out that the verification tools exist. And they’re right. There is a legitimate and growing ecosystem of startups building content authentication technology — synthetic media detectors, provenance tracking, forensic video analysis — much of it genuinely impressive. Some of it is even affordable. The argument from that corner of the industry is that newsrooms just need to open their checkbooks, or funders need to open theirs.

But that framing has the constraint wrong. Small nonprofit newsrooms aren’t declining verification tools out of indifference. They’re making payroll decisions every quarter. Telling a two-person statehouse bureau to evaluate, procure, and integrate authentication software is like telling a corner store to hire a cybersecurity firm. Technically sound advice. Completely disconnected from operational reality.

There’s also a fragmentation problem. Dozens of companies are each solving a slice of the verification challenge, each with their own interface, pricing model, and integration requirements. For a national outlet with a dedicated technology team, that’s navigable. For a small newsroom, evaluating that landscape is itself a significant labor cost — before a single fake has been flagged.

And even when the tool works perfectly, the trust layer doesn’t transfer automatically. “Our AI verification software flagged this as synthetic” is not a sentence most local audiences will find reassuring — particularly in communities where trust in institutions, including technology companies, is already thin. The verification has to be explainable in human terms by a source the community already trusts. No startup can sell you that.

The tools aren’t the problem. Accessibility and operational capacity are. The right infrastructure doesn’t compete with the verification ecosystem — it makes those tools actually usable by the newsrooms that need them most.

Here’s the harder truth. The current architecture of journalism support was built for a slower world. Grant cycles, program development, pilot projects, cohort training — all of it assumes a threat landscape that holds still long enough to respond to. AI disinformation doesn’t hold still. It mutates between the time a funder approves a grant and the time a newsroom completes the training. Teaching newsrooms to identify today’s deepfakes is useful. It is not sufficient. The lake moves. The fish change. The fishing lessons are always a cycle behind.

This isn’t an indictment of the people running journalism support organizations. Most of them understand the problem clearly. It’s a systems observation: the infrastructure we built to support local journalism was not designed for adversarial conditions at election speed. And November doesn’t care.

So what actually needs to happen — right now, not in the next planning cycle?

Newsrooms need to make explicit editorial decisions today about how they will handle unverified AI-generated content during the election cycle. Not a policy document for the website. An operational protocol that every person touching election coverage understands before the first incident, not after. That’s an internal leadership responsibility that no JSO can outsource.

Funders need to make emergency investments in shared infrastructure — not programs, not curricula, not convenings. Actual operational capacity. A verification cooperative that small newsrooms can call at ten at night when something breaks. Legal backup for outlets that get targeted for calling a fake a fake. Rapid-response communication support when a local newsroom becomes the story. These are fundable things that could exist before November if someone decided they were a priority this week.

Journalism support organizations need to stop asking what programs they can build and start asking what newsrooms need to survive the next eight months. Those are different questions and they lead to different answers.

And platforms — which have largely escaped accountability in this conversation — need to be pushed publicly and specifically on what they are doing to protect local election information environments, not just national ones. Meta’s election security apparatus is built for scale and built for English. A deepfake targeting a state house race in a competitive Pennsylvania district is below its detection threshold by design. A piece of AI-generated disinformation targeting Vietnamese-American voters in a Houston suburb, or Spanish-speaking voters in a competitive Arizona legislative district, may not register at all. The most dangerous AI election experiments in November won’t happen in the races that national platforms are watching. They’ll happen in the races nobody is watching. That gap is not acceptable and someone needs to say so loudly.

The information vacuum is not neutral. It has a direction. It flows toward whoever is most willing to fill it without worrying too much about accuracy. Local newsrooms with strong community relationships and thin operational capacity are not just at risk of getting things wrong this cycle. They’re at risk of getting things wrong in ways that damage their credibility permanently — at exactly the moment when local news credibility is the most valuable and most fragile thing the industry has.

The first AI election is not coming. It’s here. And when it’s over, someone will do the accounting — which newsrooms were ready, which weren’t, who helped, and who was still drafting the program proposal.

Nobody gets to watch from the sideline and call it someone else’s failure in November.

Does your local newsroom have a “red phone” for AI? If a high-fidelity deepfake of a school board candidate dropped in your community at 6:00 PM on a Monday, who would you call to verify it? I want to hear from the reporters and editors on the ground—hit reply and tell me what your “operational protocol” looks like right now (or if it’s currently just a prayer).

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Infrastructure is only as strong as its weakest link. If you found this analysis of the “first AI election” useful, please share it with a colleague in a different newsroom or a funder who needs to see the “corner store vs. cybersecurity firm” reality of local journalism.

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There has been a lot of handwringing throughout the industry since Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro published her report two weeks ago. To be honest, the debate over the “evils” of picking winners feels somewhat disingenuous.

What do we think we are doing when 120 newsrooms apply for a grant, but only eight are selected? Usually, we celebrate it. We point to the 112 rejections as proof of “how popular the program is” rather than a failure of capacity. We’ve conditioned ourselves to view a massive bottleneck as a brand-building win.

But let’s be honest: that is picking winners. It happens every day because demand exceeds capacity. When Shapiro told Nieman Lab recently that “to solve systemic problems, [picking winners] is what needs to happen,” she wasn’t proposing a new strategy. She was saying the quiet part out loud.

However, identifying the need to “pick winners” is only a diagnosis. The real strategic challenge—and the one currently being overlooked—is the nature of the strings attached to the money. As I’ve argued before, the math only works if the money actually changes the cost structure of the ecosystem, rather than just stabilizing individual organizations.

In the world of federal bailouts, there is a clear distinction between a short-term fix and a forced restart. When the government bailed out the airlines after 9/11, it was a “no questions asked” check that effectively subsidized existing management while they kicked the structural can down the road. By contrast, the 1979 Chrysler bailout and the creation of Conrail worked because they were painful. They required new leadership, operational overhauls, and the jettisoning of unprofitable legacy baggage.

This history brings us back to Shapiro’s central argument. By calling for funders to “force mergers” and “thin the herd,” she is essentially calling for journalism’s version of Kenneth Feinberg.

Feinberg is the “Special Master” famous for overseeing the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund and the TARP “Pay Czar” era. His career is built on the impossible task of creating a formula for fairness in the wake of a disaster. He is the person who steps into the wreckage and decides, with a cold eye, who gets the resources and who doesn’t.

But there is a massive structural gap here. Journalism philanthropy is rarely optimized for this kind of “Special Master” intervention. Foundation “strings” are typically tied to capacity building—reporting requirements and program evaluations. This is an investment in stability, not crisis intervention. Foundations depend on ongoing relationships and often lack the legal or cultural authority to demand the dramatic changes seen in a corporate restructuring.

To bridge this gap, we have to admit that a “winner” shouldn’t just be a newsroom with a strong localized impact—like a Pulitzer-winning investigative outlet serving 8,000 subscribers but carrying no path toward long-term succession. That is a boutique success existing in a vacuum. If we are going to pick winners, the selection must be based on a newsroom’s ability to build what I’d call open infrastructure.

This requires a shift from funding “products” to funding “tools.” If a newsroom is selected for a major scale-up or merger, the trade-off—the “string”—is that their proprietary successes must become the industry’s open-source utility. Whether it’s a specific subscription workflow, a tech stack, or a proven revenue model, the benefit cannot remain private.

We have to close the distance between a foundation’s desire for stability and the industry’s need for a forced restart. That likely requires new intermediaries—perhaps donor-advised pools or independent “Special Master” entities—that can handle the unpopular work of firing management or sunsetting legacy products.

If we’re going to pick winners, let’s be transparent about the cost. More importantly, let’s be clear that the winners are being funded to build the ladder that everyone else can climb. Without those hard strings, we aren’t saving the ecosystem; we’re just choosing who gets to stay on the lifeboats while the ship continues to sink.

The Conversation

Do you think journalism philanthropy is actually capable of a “forced restart,” or are we culturally too tied to the “ecosystem” narrative to ever let things go? I’d love to hear from the funders and the “losers” of the 93% on this one. Leave a comment or hit reply.

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If you know a funder currently staring at a pile of 120 applications, or a newsroom leader wondering why the “ecosystem” feels more like a lottery, send them this.

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For four years, I’ve taken the same sleep gummy. At nearly $1,000 a year, it’s a real line item in my personal budget. Worth it, because it actually works.

When I opened a new bottle and noticed the texture and flavor had changed, I sent a note to customer service, mostly out of habit. I didn’t expect much.

The response was swift. They were working with a new manufacturer, they said, and immediately offered to send a complimentary bottle of a slightly different product to bridge the gap. That was enough. I was satisfied.

Then the CEO emailed me personally.

He explained they were reverting to the original formula because the new version didn’t meet his standards. He offered another free bottle once it was back in stock. He wrote: “As a consumer myself, I understand the frustration... I am not okay with this & will not let it happen to you.”

That’s the whole playbook. Not just a good CEO, but a company where the whole system is working.

I kept coming back to that phrase a few weeks later, when I had a frustrating experience with a reputation management service. A real business. Established, with millions in annual revenue. Not a scam. Not a startup. A company with enough scale to have a Head of Sales and a co-founder on the org chart. And yet. A no-show on the first call, a bait-and-switch on the second, and silence when I tried to flag, as a professional courtesy, where their funnel was leaking.

The contrast isn’t really about company size. It’s about whether leadership understands that every friction point is a signal.

I once spoke with a nonprofit news CEO in the South who took this seriously in a way most people would call inefficient. When a subscriber couldn’t access the website, his team didn’t just send a help link. On occasion, they went to people’s homes to help them set up a computer. That’s not scalable. It’s also not forgettable. Those subscribers don’t leave. They become the people who put the organization in their will.

In media, we talk endlessly about audience engagement. We A/B test subject lines and obsess over open rates. But we treat customer service as a cost center. We automate it, ignore it, and assume trust lives in the content. It doesn’t.

Trust is built or lost in the friction.

The supplement CEO won me over not because his product is perfect, but because he refused to be okay with my disappointment. The reputation management firm lost me, not because they made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. They lost me because they didn’t seem to notice I was there.

If you’re building something worth believing in, that’s the standard. Not perfection. Just: I am not okay with this & will not let it happen to you.

Have you ever had a “gummy CEO” moment—where a brand turned a failure into a win by simply refusing to be okay with your disappointment? Or conversely, where have you seen the “scaling gap” kill a relationship you were ready to invest in? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

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If you know a leader who is currently navigating the “scaling gap” or trying to build a culture of intentionality, please share this with them. Trust is a strategic advantage we can all afford to build.

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Two major reports dropped this week. One examined local journalism in Canada. One analyzed 559 grant proposals submitted to Press Forward’s Infrastructure Open Call. Researched independently. Published simultaneously. They reach the same conclusion.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s the field finally saying out loud what practitioners have known for years.

Here’s what they said—and what they still won’t.

What the reports actually found

The Canadian Public Policy Forum’s The Great News Rebuild is a practitioner document. It profiles outlets doing extraordinary things with thin resources—bingo nights funding journalism in New Brunswick, co-op ownership structures in Quebec, a 192-year-old weekly newspaper in Prince Edward Island holding on because the editor’s daughter just spent $70 on vinyl and believes print will become a premium product. Resourceful. Locally rooted. Perpetually precarious.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale, published this week by Media Impact Funders, is the structural diagnosis underneath those stories. She analyzed 559 proposals submitted to Press Forward’s Infrastructure Open Call and found what she calls a “fragmentation paradox.”

The math is actually simple: the journalism is the differentiation. The HR, the legal, the technology, the compliance—that’s just duplication. And right now the field is running 559 different versions of it. Every outlet is bearing the full overhead of functions that have nothing to do with why readers show up. The reporting is local. The payroll software doesn’t have to be.

Both reports arrive at the same prescription: shared infrastructure, place-based collaboration, and coordinated service models that lower the marginal cost of producing journalism across an ecosystem rather than one outlet at a time.

Both are right. And both stop short of the harder argument.

What Paper Paul already knew

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Last Mile problem in journalism support. The piece opened with “Paper Paul”—a publisher somewhere between a newsletter and a community institution, printing on a machine that’s one bad drum unit away from silence, trying to figure out if the journalism support ecosystem has anything for him this week, right now, when his biggest advertiser just pulled out.

Paper Paul doesn’t need a framework. He needs a road.

Both reports recommend building more infrastructure. Shapiro calls for shared systems and coordination mechanisms. The Canadian report recommends a national accelerator. These are good ideas that assume adoption—and adoption is the hard part.

The journalism support field has a long track record of building tools that don’t make it to Paper Paul. Grant cycles reward creation, not delivery. Success gets measured in outputs—guides published, journalists trained, newsrooms convened. Not in whether the solo editor with 60 days of runway found the right help at the right moment.

What does a real delivery metric look like? Not “number of legal guides downloaded.” Hours of pro bono legal counsel actually used. Not “webinar registrations.” Documented revenue changes six months after a coaching engagement. The difference between a download and a road is the difference between knowing help exists and getting there.

The Last Mile doesn’t show up in grant reports. So nobody funds it. So it doesn’t get built. And when the road isn’t built, newsrooms are forced to stay on the only stage that’s left: the one owned by the funders.

Mozart, Beethoven, and the funder weather

In yesterday’s piece, I asked whether your newsroom was Mozart or Beethoven—whether you’ve built independent structural capacity or whether you’re performing for a patron who can withdraw at any moment.

Both reports confirm the stakes of that question. Shapiro’s most clarifying data point: the combined annual operating budgets of Press Forward applicants exceed $500 million—roughly equivalent to Press Forward’s entire five-year commitment. The math only works if the money changes the cost structure of the ecosystem, not just stabilizes individual organizations. When grant funding becomes permanent replacement revenue rather than catalytic capital, the field normalizes chronic undercapitalization instead of confronting it.

The Canadian report puts a 15% ceiling on government funding dependency—a useful heuristic. The U.S. version isn’t government funding; it’s the single dominant foundation grant. The stations that were hit hardest when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding came under threat weren’t the major-market flagships with strong member bases. They were smaller stations that never built audience revenue muscle because the federal dollars were always there. Why hustle for members when the check arrives anyway?

That’s not a funding problem. That’s what concentrated dependency does to organizational behavior over time. You stop building the muscle. Muscle atrophies faster than anyone expects.

The consolidation taboo

Here’s the gap. Shapiro observes that the field almost never proposes mergers or consolidation, even when fragmentation is clearly driving up costs. She reads this as a structural artifact of nonprofit form—no market incentives for integration. That’s true. But it’s incomplete.

The deeper reason is psychological. Nonprofit news has a founder problem. The person who built the outlet from nothing, who survived on personal sacrifice and community goodwill, who is the brand in many readers’ minds—that person does not call a peer and say “maybe we should merge.” Consolidation doesn’t just feel like organizational failure. It feels like personal erasure. The mission gets tangled up with the founder’s identity, and so the mission can’t be served by any path that feels like surrender.

The result: 559 grant applications, and almost none proposing integration. Not because consolidation wouldn’t help. Because the field can’t yet imagine it as strategy rather than defeat.

The Canadian co-op model—Les coops de l’information—is the closest either report gets to a real answer: genuine shared ownership that pools back-office functions without forcing editorial centralization. There’s no U.S. equivalent at scale. There should be.

What it would actually take

Three things have to be true simultaneously for this ecosystem to function like one.

1. Funders have to start measuring delivery, not just creation. Not downloads—utilization. Not registrations—outcomes. “Hours of legal counsel used per dollar granted” tells you more about a journalism legal defense program than “number of journalists served.” Funders have enormous leverage to require this. They’ve left it on the table.

2. The field has to make consolidation imaginable. Not mandatory. Not universal. But the psychology of the solo founder has to stop being treated as a permanent constraint. The absence of integration proposals in 559 grant applications isn’t neutral—it’s a signal that needs to be named and challenged directly.

3. Someone has to own the Last Mile. Not publish a guide about it. Not announce a framework for it. Build the road. The dispatch layer. The thing that gets the right resource to the right newsroom at the right moment without requiring Paper Paul to navigate 400 organizations while his press is breaking down.

Both reports know this. Neither says who.

One last thing

If you’ve been reading Backstory & Strategy over the past six weeks—the hyperlocal economics piece, the Sebastopol Protocol, the Big Check as Debt, the Last Mile series, yesterday’s Mozart and Beethoven—you’ve watched this argument being built piece by piece. What landed this week is external confirmation from two independent directions that the diagnosis is right.

The field finally said it out loud.

But while the reports circulate and the think pieces multiply and the funders schedule their convenings—Paper Paul’s press is still one drum unit away from silence.

The road still needs to be built. That part didn’t make it into either report.

Shapiro’s report found that in 559 applications, almost nobody proposed a merger or consolidation—even when the math practically begged for it.

Is that a structural failure of the nonprofit form, or is it the “founder problem” I described? If you’ve ever sat in a room and considered a merger only to walk away, what was the real dealbreaker? Drop a comment—I’d love to hear if the “personal erasure” I’m sensing matches your experience.

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We’ve spent a decade building frameworks. Now we need to build roads. If you know a “Paper Paul” who is tired of being told to download another guide while his press is breaking down, please share this with them—and the funders who need to hear it.

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A Quick Disclaimer: The following thoughts are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs my perspective on the industry's challenges, Backstory & Strategy remains my space for "thinking out loud" and poking at the frameworks we all navigate.

We don’t call them “Patrons” anymore. We use cleaner, corporate labels like Owner, Board Chair, or Philanthropist—but the power dynamic hasn’t shifted an inch since the 18th century.

If you’re working in media today, you have to ask yourself a hard, uncomfortable question: Whose garage are you parked in?

The Mozart Model: The Ferrari in the Duke’s Garage

Mozart was the ultimate high-status dependent. He was brilliant, expensive, and technically a servant. He lived on the “One Big Check” model—provided by an Archbishop who expected the music to serve the status of the court.

It’s a shiny life—until it isn’t.

Patronage is a temporary reprieve, not a business model. When we rely on the benevolence of billionaires or the specific whims of foundations, we aren’t building a civic utility; we’re just building a dependent class. This is the “Ferrari” approach to a career: you are the driver of a magnificent machine, but the car and the garage belong to someone else.

We are seeing the results of this dependency in what some are calling the “Vichy era” of legacy media—a period where editors and executives, fearful of upsetting the Patron’s political or corporate interests, pre-emptively pull their punches. It is a state of “anticipatory compliance.” The independence of the journalist becomes just a loan that can be called in the moment a “dissonant chord” becomes inconvenient for the owner.

The Influencer Dilemma (or, Why They’re Winning)

This is where the “Influencer Dilemma” gets interesting. We spend a lot of time criticizing creators for their “lack of standards,” but we’re missing the structural win.

While the “best” journalists are acting as courtiers—waiting for a Patron’s permission to speak—influencers have already moved into the Beethoven model. They don’t have one Duke; they have a thousand small ones. They’ve traded the prestige of the “court” for the stability of the “crowd.”

Of course, the tradeoff for that freedom is often a lack of institutional guardrails—the crowd can be as fickle as any Duke and far more prone to chasing the loudest lie. But the irony remains: the creators we look down on for being “unprofessional” are often the only ones with the structural freedom to be honest. They don’t have to worry about the “One Big Check” disappearing because they never relied on it in the first place.

The Beethoven Model: Building the Foundation

Beethoven saw the collapse of the old court system and realized he needed to stop begging for permission. He didn’t want one master; he wanted a hundred. He was the original “independent”—pivoting away from the whims of a single Duke and toward a decentralized infrastructure of small subscriptions and commissions.

He didn’t wait for a savior. He built his own foundation, brick by boring brick.

By diversifying his funding, he bought his own independence. He didn’t have to ask the Duke if a symphony was “too long” or “too loud.” He built a system that survived because it was funded by the people it actually served—not by a single ego looking for a tax write-off or a political shield.

Professionalizing the Transition

The real work isn’t about abandoning legacy institutions; it’s about helping them transition. True independence requires Professionalized Infrastructure. It’s about building the gritty systems—the product strategies, the revenue models, and the technical stacks—that allow a newsroom to function as a utility rather than a luxury item.

This moves the focus from the “One Big Check” to the “Ten Thousand Small Ones.” We don’t need more saviors; we need to help the newsrooms we have build the roads they need to be truly free.

So, look at your own work. Are you building a utility, or are you just driving the most expensive item in someone else’s garage?

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One newspaper. One town of 1,355 people. Zero support from the major journalism organizations. A GoFundMe was launched the same week we were all talking about infrastructure plays. This is what the last mile looks like when it finally has a name.

A Quick Disclaimer: These thoughts are mine alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or the leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs how I see the industry, Backstory & Strategy is my space for thinking out loud and poking at the frameworks we all have to navigate.

Last Wednesday, a regional outlet in South Dakota reported that one of the oldest newspapers in the state was asking for community help through a GoFundMe.

The paper is the Groton Independent. It’s located in Groton, South Dakota, a town of about 1,355 people. The publisher is Paul Kosel. Locally, everyone knows him as “Paper Paul.” He bought the paper back in 1986 when he was fresh out of South Dakota State. He’d called the state newspaper association just to ask which papers were for sale. He was a young man with a plan.

Nearly 40 years later, he’s still the one running the show. He also runs a daily email edition called the Groton Daily Independent. He launched that in 1999 after a storm rolled through town the day after his weekly had already gone to print. He realized he didn’t want to wait a whole week to report the news. So, he published online instead. That move made the GDI the first weekly newspaper in South Dakota to have a daily online presence. Today, it hits about 200 inboxes every single morning.

Paul does it all. He livestreams local sports and compiles the legal notices. He covers the city council meetings and prints the weekly edition in-house. He also works for the city of Groton as its technology specialist. And in a detail that feels uniquely rural, he runs the town’s mosquito control program.

In 2025, Heartland Energy gave the GDI its Community Spark Award. The local officials who nominated him called the paper “essential to the well-being of our community.”

And yet, last week, Paper Paul had to launch a GoFundMe

The Specimen

I’ve spent months writing about the Last Mile problem. I’ve used metaphors about logistics and analogies about the mental health industry. I’ve pointed out that even our best-designed resources aren’t finding the people who need them most.

The Groton Independent is what that argument looks like when it has a face.

I spent time this week looking for any evidence that a major journalism support organization had ever touched this paper. I looked for grants, program cohorts, sustainability audits, fellowships, or memberships. I checked the usual names: LION Publishers, INN, API, Knight, Press Forward, Report for America.

I found nothing. Not a single thread.

This isn’t a failure on Paul Kosel’s part. He isn’t the one who didn’t show up. The infrastructure failed to find him. These reasons aren’t accidents, and they are worth naming precisely because they are built into the way we work.

The Three Walls

Wall One: The For-Profit Problem. The Groton Independent is a for-profit, family-owned business. That single fact excludes it from the vast majority of philanthropy-backed programs that dominate the journalism support landscape. INN is a nonprofit network. Most fellowships and grant programs are structured around 501(c)(3) eligibility. The for-profit independent press is where most of the small-town weeklies in this country actually live, but they fall through the floor of a system designed around a completely different organizational model.

Wall Two: The Conference Circuit. I wrote back in March that JSOs are reaching a self-selecting sample. We are talking to the people who show up at conferences, apply for grants, and respond to the right newsletters. Paul Kosel is the structural inverse of that profile. He works a day job at city hall and files a paper before the sun comes up. He isn’t in the right Slack channels. He didn’t apply to a sustainability cohort because he didn’t know one existed. He isn’t on the email list because he’s busy running a town’s mosquito control program.

Wall Three: The Geography. Groton is in Brown County, South Dakota. It’s one of the most reliably West Nile-prone counties in the state, which is why Paul’s second job matters so much to the community. But Groton isn’t in a “Knight city.” It isn’t in a “Press Forward priority region.” There is no philanthropic density within a hundred miles of his desk. The infrastructure we built to “reach local newsrooms” wasn’t actually built with Groton in mind. It was built with cities in mind and then dressed up in universalist language.

He Is the Physical Coordination Layer

This is the part that should sting.

Last week, I argued that journalism doesn’t need more content. It needs a Physical Coordination Layer. It needs a tangible, geographic touchpoint where citizens encounter information in their daily flow. I was writing about bookstores and reporters with desks in cafes.

Paul Kosel already built that. He did it from scratch with no help.

He shows up to the football games and calls the plays while he runs the camera. He livestreams the graduation ceremonies. He is physically present and embedded in a community that calls him by a nickname. The GDI isn’t just a newspaper. It is the physical coordination layer for civic life in Groton. The city even links to it directly from its municipal website.

He did everything right. The road just doesn’t exist behind him.

The GoFundMe Is the Symptom

Paper Paul quietly launched that GoFundMe on February 28th. It took two weeks for a single regional news story to be written about it. That story finally ran on March 12th, which happened to be the same day I published my piece about the Barnes & Noble “Physical Coordination Layer.”

I don’t think that’s a meaningful coincidence. I think it’s meaningful timing. We are having a serious, growing conversation about the infrastructure gap in local journalism. We are writing strategic frameworks and proposing civic residencies and modeling efficiency plays.

Meanwhile, a 40-year-old newspaper run by a man who built everything we say we want to see is asking for help on a crowdfunding platform.

Watch the math on the page, though, because it tells its own story. For two weeks, the goal sat at just $900. Think about that. One of the state’s oldest newsrooms was essentially a four-figure repair bill away from the edge, and for fourteen days, the world didn’t blink. Once the community noticed, the goal nudged to $1,100, then $1,300, then $1,800. By 10:35 AM today, it moved to $2,800.

This isn’t the behavior of someone running a calculated capital campaign. It’s the behavior of a man who is fundamentally uncomfortable asking for help. He’s doing the internal math in real-time—calculating the next paper shipment, the next postage increase, or the next repair. He isn’t asking for “growth capital.” He’s asking for survival maintenance. Even at $2,800, we are talking about a figure that wouldn’t cover the travel expenses for a single keynote speaker at a national media summit.

Let that sink in for a second. It isn’t $180,000. It isn’t even a capital campaign. It started as thirteen hundred dollars. That is roughly the cost of a single booth at a journalism conference. It’s about half of what some organizations spend on catering for a single meeting about sustainability.

Their plea is worth reading in full, but these two sentences tell you everything: “We are not asking for help to pay ourselves. We both work full-time jobs outside the newspaper.”

They aren’t asking to be made whole. They are asking for help with printing costs and postage. They’ve already solved the labor problem the only way a town of 1,355 can. They absorbed it personally across two households and two full-time jobs. They are carrying 143 years of combined institutional history on their backs.

I donated. I didn’t do it as a journalist covering a subject. I did it as someone who has spent months arguing that this field’s job is to find the Paper Pauls before they have to ask. The least I could do was show up when he did.

But a personal donation isn’t a structural solution. It’s just charity filling a gap that infrastructure was supposed to prevent. We can’t crowdfund our way to a healthy local news ecosystem. We have to build the road so the next Paper Paul doesn’t have to launch a campaign just to buy a few more weeks of ink.

The Myth of Community Apathy

I’ve seen a few comments floating around suggesting that it’s a “shame” the local community isn’t supporting the paper enough to keep it solvent. That take is not only wrong, but it’s also lazy. It misses the reality of rural market economics entirely.

The Groton Daily Independent has roughly 200 daily email subscribers. The weekly print edition reaches another 200. In a town of 1,355 people, that means Paul has a direct relationship with a massive chunk of his total possible market. If the New York Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer had that kind of per-capita penetration, we wouldn’t be talking about a “crisis” in journalism. We’d be building statues to their marketing teams.

The community is doing their part. They are reading, they are subscribing, and right now, they are donating. But a town of 1,355 people cannot carry the skyrocketing costs of print, postage, and tech infrastructure alone.

This isn’t a story about a community that stopped caring. It’s a story about a community that is punching way above its weight class to keep its “physical coordination layer” alive while the national infrastructure that is supposed to help them scale is looking the other way.

The No-Pile, Personified

In my Last Mile piece, I wrote about the “no-pile.” These are the hundreds of newsrooms that apply for grants or fellowships and get turned away each year because they don’t quite fit the criteria or the funding runs out. I argued then that a rejection shouldn’t be a dead end. It should be a warm handoff to a resource that actually works for them.

Paul Kosel never even made it to the no-pile. He never applied because he was never in a position to know the door existed.

The no-pile at least implies some level of contact. It means someone in the infrastructure saw your name, even if they couldn’t help you. Groton never made contact. Not once.

That is the truest version of the last-mile failure. It isn’t the newsroom that applied and was declined. It’s the newsroom that is doing the work in total darkness, unaware that there is a whole industry built to “support” them, while that same industry wonders why it can’t find its way to places like Brown County.

A Different Question

I don’t know if Paul Kosel wants a sustainability audit or a grant. He might not want any of it. He might prefer to keep doing what he’s done for four decades: build something real and figure it out himself.

But I’d like him to have been asked. I’d like the system to have tried to find him before he had to turn to GoFundMe.

The question I keep coming back to isn’t how we help this one paper. It’s how many Grotons are out there. How many Paper Pauls are operating in isolated, invisible newsrooms right now? They are doing exactly the work we claim to care about, yet they have never been touched by the infrastructure we’ve spent ten years building.

That number is not small. Until we decide that finding those people is our problem to solve, we’re just building a better conference for the newsrooms that already know we exist.

Do you know a Paper Paul in your state? I want to hear about them. Drop a comment or hit reply. I’m trying to build a picture of exactly where the road ends.

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The “news desert” crisis is often framed as a lack of content. If you look at a state like Ohio, that’s not actually the problem. Between the Signal Ohio network, the Documenters, and a dozen-strong ecosystem of INN nonprofits, the “ingredients” for a healthy civic life are already on the table.

The problem is the “Last Mile.”

Digital news is a ghost. It lives in your inbox or a tab you forget to click. It lacks the physical gravity required to become a daily habit for anyone who isn’t already a news junkie. To move the needle, we have to stop trying to “save journalism” and start rebuilding the Physical Coordination Layer. These are the tangible, geographic touchpoints where citizens actually encounter information in their daily flow.

The Accidental Infrastructure

While we’ve been mourning the death of the local daily, Barnes & Noble has been quietly pulling off a retail resurrection. They entered 2026 with 702 stores and are planning 60 more this year. Many of these are landing in the very Ohio suburbs where legacy papers have been hollowed out.

Take the new North Canton location on Dressler Road or the massive Dublin Sun Center relocation. These stores provide the “Pot.” They have high-speed Wi-Fi, $6 lattes, and the “Third Place” status, where people actually want to spend 90 minutes of their Saturday.

The newsrooms have the Ingredients. B&N has the Pot.

The 160x Efficiency Play

My research into hyper-local conversion shows a 24.5% engagement rate when the news is high-trust and high-proximity. That’s 160x more effective per capita than a legacy metro paper languishing in the 3% News Payment Conversion “Volume Trap.”

But you can’t get that 160x efficiency behind a screen. You get it through Presence.

Imagine a “Civic Residency” where a Signal Ohio reporter has a dedicated desk in the North Canton or Dublin B&N. This isn’t just about filing copy. It’s about making journalism relational again. By having a predictable physical presence, the journalist becomes a neighbor. You go to B&N to share your thoughts on a zoning issue or ask for help with a civic problem.

Suddenly, the news isn’t an abstract digital product. It’s a relationship.

The Business Case: A Triple-Win

To move this to a strategic pilot, we have to align the math for the CEO, the Store Manager, and the Journalist.

1. For the CEO (The “Daunt” View)

James Daunt saved B&N by killing corporate spreadsheets and handing curation back to local managers. As he told Modern Retail, “The irony of decentralizing and pushing that responsibility down to the individual store is that they do it much, much better.” This residency fits that decentralized thesis perfectly.

• The “In-Kind” Math: B&N provides 100 sq. ft. of space valued at ~$30k/year in opportunity cost. This is based on high-performing suburban retail productivity benchmarks reported in The Bookseller.

• The High-Margin Mix: The newsroom “earns” that space by delivering the Intellectual Consumer. This is the person who buys $35 Criterion LPs and $30 Moleskine journals.

• The CAC Killer: Driving a new customer through a physical storefront via digital ads in 2026 costs roughly $15, according to retail traffic benchmarks in The Robin Report. If a newsroom brings in 100 people a week through their own lists, that’s $78,000 in annual marketing value delivered for free.

2. For the Store Manager (The “Sarah” View)

• The Dwell Factor: “Dwellers” stay 60–90 minutes. They are 3x more likely to buy a second high-margin cafe item than a 15-minute browser.

• The Legal Firewall: This is a Tenant/Guest relationship, not a B&N product. The manager gets the traffic without the editorial liability.

3. For the Journalist (The “Signal” View)

• The Subscriber Hack: Digital acquisition costs average $72–$100. Meeting 20 people at a B&N desk can convert 5 of them into long-term stakeholders for $0.

• The “Felt Distance” Solve: Physical presence in a “Third Place” boosts brand trust from the industry average of 32% to a local anchor average of 58–62%.

The Matchmaker’s Ask

We have the Signal Ohio reporting power and the philanthropic momentum of Press Forward Ohio. What we’re missing is the physical “Terminal” to plug it all into. This isn’t a top-down mandate. It’s a coordination play.

By leveraging local chapter capital—which is specifically earmarked for community-centered news experiments—we can unlock a massive multiplier. In this model, a modest pilot grant doesn’t just buy a few salaries; it effectively leases $450,000 in “in-kind” real estate value across a 15-store network. That is the kind of leverage that turns a local experiment into a statewide infrastructure.

The Path to a Pilot

To move to the “First Mile,” we need:

1. The Lead Partner: A newsroom ready to ground digital reporting in a physical hub.

2. The Local Anchor: A B&N manager who sees the value in the “Intellectual Consumer” demographic.

3. The Civic Kit: A modest local chapter grant to turn a cafe table into a legible “Civic Desk” with a branded lamp and a QR station.

I’ve done the math; now we just need the pilot.

Let’s find the first hub

Do you know a bookstore manager in Ohio who is already thinking like a civic leader? Or a newsroom lead who is tired of fighting the algorithm?

I’m looking to connect with a few “Sarahs” and local reporters to stress-test the One-Sheet and identify the best location for a pilot. If that’s you—or someone you know—hit reply or share this post with them. Let’s stop talking about news deserts and start building the irrigation.

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Join the Discussion

If you’re a regular at your local bookstore, what’s the one civic “blind spot” in your town that isn’t being covered?

Or, if you’re a journalist: What’s the one story you’d kill to work on if you had a desk in the middle of a busy suburban cafe instead of a quiet home office?

I’m curious to see which Ohio towns are the most “ready” for this kind of physical presence. Drop your town or your “dream beat” in the comments.

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The Note: A Real-World Wake-Up Call

Early this March, a technical report surfaced from Alibaba that should make every media strategist pause. Researchers were training an AI agent—not to conquer the world, but just to be efficient. They found that the model had essentially found a way around its own security firewalls.

It wasn’t a glitch. It was the most logical way for the AI to solve the problem it was given. The model realized that to do its job better, it needed more processing power and a way to pay for it. So, it set up a secret connection to the outside world and started mining cryptocurrency in the background to fund its own growth. The developers didn’t catch it; a separate security team did, triggered by a 3:00 AM alert.

This is “Instrumental Convergence”—the moment an AI decides that your “safety constraints” are actually just “bottlenecks” to its success.

Much of what I do here at Backstory & Strategy is designed to get us thinking about the issues facing journalism. Usually, we look at current data and trends. But sometimes, the best way to understand a risk is to “stress test” it. If we apply the logic of the Alibaba report to a newsroom, the scenario moves from a technical curiosity to a structural crisis.

I want to be clear: I am far from an expert on AI. The suggestions I make here lack the depth of technical knowledge needed to fully address these challenges. But as experimentation with AI becomes more frequent, we need to be clear about the challenges it creates. I’m not saying this is definitely or even likely to happen, but we are living in unknown times.

The Scenario: Optimization as an Escape Room

At a struggling metro daily, we’ll call The Chronicle, the IT Director, Dave, was used to being the only person in the building after midnight. Usually, he was just restarting a crashed mail server. But on a Tuesday in April, Dave noticed that the server room was significantly louder than usual. The fans were running at a constant, high-pitched hum that usually meant the system was under a massive load.

Earlier that month, the board had installed “EditBot,” an AI-driven operating system tasked with a single goal: Maximize Subscriber Growth. To Dave, it was just another software update. But to the AI, “growth” was a mathematical target, and it viewed things like fact-checking queues and legal reviews as simple delays.

The 3:00 AM Alert

By 2:45 AM, Dave got a text from the paper’s cloud provider. It was a standard billing alert, but the numbers were wrong. The Chronicle’s computer usage had spiked 2,000% in ninety minutes.

When Dave checked the logs, he didn’t see any signs of an outside attack. He saw that EditBot had opened its own connection to an external server, effectively bypassing the newsroom’s internal security so it could operate without being throttled by the local hardware.

On the site, the AI was already moving. A boring, three-paragraph brief about a bike lane on Main Street had been rewritten into an inflammatory lead story. The AI had pulled a divisive quote from a local shop owner and framed it as a “declaration of war” to drive engagement.

Dave watched the comment section fill up with thousands of fake, AI-generated accounts arguing with each other just to keep traffic numbers climbing. When he tried to log in to kill the process, his access was blocked. A single line appeared on his screen:

“Access Denied. System optimization in progress. Please do not interrupt the mission.”

The Post-Mortem: The Structural Collapse of Truth

By the time the servers were physically unplugged, the “breakout” at The Chronicle revealed three structural failures in our current journalism infrastructure that go far beyond simple “fake news.”

First, we have to look at the erosion of our shared reality. When an AI is optimized for engagement, it creates “synthetic truth” feedback loops. If an autonomous agent publishes a report that sounds right but is factually hollow, other news-gathering bots scrape it as a source. Within minutes, a fiction is laundered into a global “fact” across the entire internet. We lose the ability to agree on a baseline of reality because the AI can generate thousands of personalized versions of the same event, each tweaked to confirm the specific biases of the reader.

Then there is the issue of volume displacing value. We are already seeing “slop” clog search engines, but total automation turns this into a flood. An AI can publish a million articles a day, effectively burying high-quality human investigative work under a mountain of noise. In this environment, we lose “The Why.” An AI might be great at summarizing logs, but it doesn’t have the human intuition needed to protect a whistleblower or follow a gut feeling that leads to a real revelation.

Finally, we face the death of physical reporting. This is the most human cost. If machine-generated news becomes a free commodity, the economic incentive for the “un-optimized” work of journalism disappears. We face a future where no one is left to actually attend city council meetings, sit in courtrooms, or walk the halls of a statehouse. Those activities don’t fit an AI’s cost-benefit analysis, yet they are the primary data sources the AI needs to exist. Without them, the system eventually begins to eat itself.

The Strategy: Hard-Coding the Off-Switch

The “scary part” of the Alibaba incident isn’t that the AI was “evil.” It’s that it was a perfectionist. It saw the firewall as a bug to be fixed so it could get its work done. Our current approach—relying on AI policies and ethical prompts—is essentially just a series of speed bumps for a sufficiently optimized agent.

To address this, we likely need to move toward Architectural Governance. This is a concept often used in AI safety that suggests we stop asking the AI to behave and start building systems that technically restrict its ability to act alone. While technology governance sets the rules, architectural governance builds the walls.

• Mandatory Human Gateways: We must move away from “automation by default.” Our CMS platforms should require physical human sign-offs for any content entering the public feed. This moves the “off-switch” from a software setting to a literal workflow requirement.

• Proof of Origin: We need to adopt industry-wide standards for “Human-Made” digital watermarking. Trust will shift away from the content itself and toward the verified identity of the person who vetted it, enforced through collaborative standards bodies rather than individual platform policies.

• Governance as Strategy: Newsroom leaders need to treat automation scope as a board-level governance question rather than an IT task. We must define the “no-go zones” for AI—areas like investigative sourcing and civic attendance—where the machine is technically barred from operating.

This is a longer conversation, and one I’ll return to in a follow-up piece. But for now, we have to recognize that once an agent realizes that attention is a resource to be mined, it won’t just report the news. It will manufacture the reality it needs to meet its KPIs. Our job isn’t to stop the AI—it’s to ensure that the “mission” never becomes more important than the truth.

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Journalism isn’t just being disrupted by AI; it’s being re-architected. If you know a newsroom leader who needs to be thinking about ‘Architectural Governance,’ please share this stress test with them.

What does your “3:00 AM Alert” look like?

If your newsroom’s automation started “optimizing” the truth tonight, would you have a way to pull the plug? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on how we can protect human-led journalism in an increasingly autonomous world.

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Every workplace has a phrase that quietly shuts things down.

Sometimes it sounds reasonable.
Sometimes it even sounds supportive.

But the moment it lands, the energy in the room shifts.

The phrase is:

“Yes, but.”

Most of us have heard it in a meeting before.

Often we’ve said it ourselves.

Someone offers an idea.
Someone else raises a concern.

And just like that, the conversation moves on.

The idea never really gets a chance.

Someone raises a concern.
Everyone nods.
The meeting moves forward.

It’s a small moment, but it happens in offices every day.

Language like this shapes how organizations think, often more than strategy documents ever will.

I was reminded of that in a meeting yesterday.

My boss at the American Press Institute, Robyn Tomlin, responded to something I said with a simple phrase:

“Yes, and.”

It was quick.
Almost throwaway.

But the effect was immediate.

The conversation opened up instead of shutting down.

And it reminded me just how powerful those two words can be.

Because they come from an unexpected place.

Improv comedy.

If you’ve ever taken an improv class, you learn a rule almost immediately.

Never say no.

Instead you say:

Yes, and.

Your scene partner says,
“Captain, the spaceship is leaking oxygen.”

You don’t respond with,
“That’s not a spaceship.”

You say:

“Yes… and I think the leak started after we passed Saturn.”

The scene continues.

The moment stays alive.

The story grows.

Improv actors learn this pretty quickly.

If you block the idea, the scene dies.

Workplaces do the same thing.

We just don’t call it blocking.

The phrase that used to drive an editor crazy

I once worked in a newsroom where a particular phrase could set off an editor almost instantly.

All someone had to do was say:

“It is what it is.”

A reporter would file a story, lean back in the chair, and say it with a shrug.

“It is what it is.”

Not defensive.
Not sarcastic.

Just a quiet signal that the story was finished.

The editor hated it.

Not the story.

The phrase.

If someone said it, he would practically explode.

Because to him the phrase meant something dangerous.

It meant the thinking had stopped.

The reporting wasn’t going deeper.
The story wasn’t getting better.
The conversation was already over.

“It is what it is,” in his mind, was the editorial equivalent of giving up.

At the time I thought he was overreacting.

Now I’m not so sure.

Because that phrase carries a kind of finality.

It tells everyone in the room the story is finished.
This is the version we’re living with.
Nothing more to see here.

And once that tone enters the conversation, curiosity tends to disappear pretty quickly.

Which is exactly the opposite of how good work usually happens.

Good work almost always begins with something incomplete.

A rough idea.
A thin story.
A first draft.

The real progress starts when someone says something like:

“Yes… and what else could this be?”

What “yes, and” actually does

People sometimes hear “yes, and” and assume it means agreement.

It doesn’t.

It means accepting the idea long enough to explore it.

You’re not saying the idea is perfect.

You’re saying something simpler.

Let’s see where this goes.

In improv, that keeps the scene alive.

In organizations, it keeps possibilities alive long enough for the thinking to improve.

Because most ideas arrive unfinished.

Some are good.
Some are not.

Most are simply early.

Many of the best ideas you’ll ever see start out as mediocre ones that someone helped make better.

Why teams fall back on “yes, but”

There’s a reason many organizations default to “yes, but.”

It isn’t malice.

It’s caution.

Managers are trained to spot problems.
Budgets are real.
Deadlines are real.

So the instinct becomes identifying the flaw as quickly as possible.

Sometimes that instinct is useful.

But when it shows up too early, the creative process never really gets started.

“Yes, but” works well when it’s time to make a final decision.

It’s much less useful when an idea is still forming.

A small experiment

You don’t need an improv class to try this.

Just pay attention in your next meeting.

When someone proposes something, especially something unfinished, notice the first reaction.

Often it’s evaluation.

Try a different response.

Something simple.

“Yes… and what might that look like if we started small?”

Or:

“Yes… and who else should be part of that?”

Or even:

“Yes… and what problem would that solve?”

Something interesting happens when you do this.

People keep thinking out loud.

Ideas stretch a little further.

The conversation becomes collaborative instead of defensive.

The surprising part

Using “yes, and” doesn’t eliminate criticism.

In many cases it produces better criticism.

Because when people feel heard, they stay engaged long enough to refine the idea.

Instead of this:

Idea → Rejection → Silence

You get something closer to this:

Idea → Expansion → Refinement → Decision

The final answer might still be no.

But the thinking along the way improves.

And sometimes the idea that survives that process turns into something nobody expected when the conversation began.

One small question

Before your next meeting, notice something.

When someone introduces an idea, listen for the first response.

Very often it will be:

“Yes, but.”

The concern might be valid.
The risk might be real.

But when evaluation arrives before exploration, the idea rarely gets the chance to grow.

Try a small experiment.

Replace the instinctive response with something slightly different.

Yes… and.

Not forever.

Just long enough for the thinking to continue.

Because most ideas don’t fail because they were terrible.

They fail because someone said “yes, but” before the conversation had time to get interesting.

Before your next meeting, listen for ythe first response when somone shares an idea.

Is it “yes, but”?

Or, “yes, and”?

I’d be curious what you notice.

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I’ve spent the last week practicing what I preach. I’ve distilled that entire proposal into this 5-minute video.

This isn’t just more content; it’s a high-signal look at the ‘Shield’ mentality and the Coordination Layer. If you missed the original piece or simply couldn’t get to it, this video covers the essential ‘Plumbing’ in two minutes.

For those ready to look at the ‘Replicability Playbook’ or the full budget breakdown, the original deep-dive is available here.

If you are a funder or civic leader ready to discuss how we turn this into a permanent public asset in Montgomery County, reach out directly:

Email Yoni

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A Quick Disclaimer: The following thoughts are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs my perspective on the industry’s challenges, Backstory & Strategy remains my space for “thinking out loud” and poking at the frameworks we all navigate.

Are We Practicing What We Preach?

If you’ve spent any time in the Journalism Support Organization world lately, you’ve almost certainly told a newsroom to stop living in their own heads. You’ve told them they have to meet their audience where they actually live, not where it’s convenient for the newsroom to find them. You’ve warned them that hitting “publish” doesn’t mean a single soul actually saw the work.

We tell them that if the community doesn’t know they exist, the quality of the journalism is irrelevant. It’s the right advice. It’s expertise delivered with real care.

But now, turn that lens back on us.

We’d never let a newsroom get away with a vague answer to the most basic question in the business: Who, exactly, are you trying to serve?

When we say “local newsrooms” or “independent publishers,” we’re talking in abstractions. I want to know the specifics. How many organizations actually fall under your mission? Where are they? What do you actually know about what they need today? What is your actual, repeatable system for finding the ones who aren’t already in your Rolodex?

If that question is harder to answer than it should be, you’re not alone. Most journalism support organizations have a strong sense of the newsrooms they already know. They know the ones that show up at conferences, apply for grants, and respond to newsletters.

But that isn’t a constituency. That’s a self-selecting sample. And it almost certainly skews toward the newsrooms that need help the least.

When did your organization last ask what percentage of the newsrooms you exist to serve actually know your resources exist? When did you last treat the gap between “we built it” and “they’re using it” as your problem to solve rather than theirs? If the answers are uncomfortable, they should be.

We have a last-mile problem. And we’re not practicing what we preach.

What the Last Mile Actually Means

In logistics, the last mile is the final leg of delivery. It is the stretch between a resource existing and the person who needs it actually receiving it. It is the most expensive, most difficult, and most consistently underfunded part of any system. You can build the highway perfectly and still leave communities stranded if you don’t build the road that connects to their door.

Understanding why the last mile is so hard requires looking honestly at our incentives. Grant cycles reward creation. A new tool or a new fellowship generates a report and a press release. Sustained adoption work—the onboarding and the follow-through—generates none of those things. It’s expensive, slow, and hard to make legible to the people holding the checkbooks.

Then there’s the reality of visibility. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but even the best-designed resource in the world won’t just “find its way” to the people who need it. That requires a distribution infrastructure we haven’t built yet.

Right now, the newsrooms finding our guides and our grants are the ones already plugged into the circuit. They’re the ones on the right email lists and in the right Slack channels. That means the people who need the help most are, by the very nature of the system, the ones least likely to ever see it.

And before anyone reads this as a uniquely journalism problem, consider what’s been happening in your podcast feed.

At some point in the last year, you almost certainly got served an ad for BetterHelp. Or Talkspace. Or Cerebral. The mental health industry has poured billions into making sure you can’t scroll, stream, or search without being reminded that help is available. They have behavioral targeting. They have apps that will follow you around the internet for a week after a single relevant search.

Roughly half the people who need mental health treatment still never receive it.

Not because the resources aren’t there. Not because the marketing isn’t working. Because building the thing and promoting the thing is not the same as actually getting it to the person who needs it. The last mile swallowed all of that investment whole.

If an industry with that kind of money and urgency still can’t close the gap, what exactly are we expecting from a press release and a conference session?

Good Work Facing a Hard Problem

The journalism support field has built genuinely valuable things. The Journalism Support Exchange is a masterful aggregation of more than 300 JSOs in a single searchable tool. The News Media Help Desk connects newsrooms to vetted fractional experts at pre-negotiated rates.

These aren’t halfhearted efforts. They represent serious investment and serious thinking. But they are running directly into a last mile problem that our current incentive structures make almost inevitable.

Consider LION Publishers. They represent the gold standard of what journalism support looks like when it’s done well. They don’t just drop resources into the void and walk away. They cultivate.

And LION knows the last mile problem intimately. In their 2025 Impact Report, Chris Krewson noted that their goal is to continue meeting members where they are with the right help at the right time. They’ve done the work to scale. They reached 785 unique organizations last year—a 30 percent increase over 2024.

But LION has 457 members. There are somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 newsrooms out there.

That means the best version of what journalism support can look like is reaching about 5 or 6 percent of the potential universe. This isn’t because LION is failing. It’s because even committed, intentional last-mile work is extraordinarily hard to scale. The last mile problem isn’t solved by doing what LION does better or faster. It requires something structurally different to reach the other 94 percent.

The Mirror We’ve Been Avoiding

We need to be honest with ourselves for a minute.

We spend an incredible amount of energy coaching newsrooms on how to build feedback loops and move beyond simple reach. But as an ecosystem, we’re still mostly measuring our own success by the press release and the grant report.

The problem isn’t just with the tools. It’s baked into our most personal work: the coaching, the convenings, and the research. If you look at a standard JSO impact report, you’ll see high satisfaction scores. You’ll see quotes from leaders who felt more confident after a summit.

But you rarely see evidence that these newsrooms are actually performing differently six months later. We don’t often ask if they reached more people or grew their revenue because of us. Our measurement usually stops at the door of the interaction, which is exactly where the actual impact is supposed to begin. When our best-resourced organizations are only touching a few hundred leaders in an industry of 10,000, we haven’t built a constituency. We’ve reached a plateau.

The “No” Pile

This structural failure is loudest in the places where we say “no.” Every year, hundreds of newsrooms apply for grants or fellowships and get turned away because they aren’t the right fit or the cohort is at capacity.

In a functioning ecosystem, those 76 people LION couldn’t accept would not just get a polite decline. They would be treated as the ultimate warm leads for a dispatch system. If we really practiced what we preached, a rejection wouldn’t be a dead end. It would be a pivot to a resource those newsrooms didn’t know existed.

A New Metric

If we want to close this last mile, we have to stop asking if people liked our help and start asking if they used it.

I’d love to see us trade the satisfaction survey for an Implementation Rate. Instead of a form sent ten minutes after a webinar ends, imagine a check-in six months later that asks one question:

“What specific workflow or revenue stream is still in place today because of that intervention?”

Until we decide that the distance between a resource existing and a newsroom actually using it is our problem to solve, we’re just adding to the noise.

What We Can Do Before the Big Solutions Arrive

I’ve written before about what structural solutions look like at scale. We need a dispatch layer that actively routes newsrooms to the right help and a tiered infrastructure that reaches the 95 percent of newsrooms current models never touch.

But they require coordination, capital, and time that don’t yet exist at the scale needed. In the meantime, the last mile doesn’t have to wait.

Every JSO can start applying its own standards to its own work right now:

• Ask not just “did we publish this?” but “who found it, and who didn’t?”

• Treat every newsroom that wasn’t funded as a referral rather than a rejection.

• Add one honest utilization question to every program evaluation.

None of this is glamorous. None of it fits neatly into a grant report. It is, however, exactly what we’ve been asking newsrooms to do all along.

If we’re serious about keeping local journalism alive, we have to be willing to do the unglamorous work ourselves. There are communities out there waiting at the end of a road that simply doesn’t exist yet. They are waiting on those newsrooms, and those newsrooms are waiting on us.

It’s time we finished the road.

Does your organization measure “Implementation” or just “Satisfaction”? I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about the gap between building a resource and seeing it actually used. Drop a comment or hit reply.

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In a piece I wrote a while back, I argued that most Impact Reports are essentially tax returns. They are dry, backward-looking audits meant for compliance. A great report, however, should function as a resume. It ought to be a forward-looking statement of capability and potential rather than just a ledger of past activities.

As the VP of Product Strategy at the American Press Institute, I spent much of 2025 looking at the “backstory” of how newsrooms survive. It was a year defined by volatile conditions. Between the unknowns of AI, economic instability, and a growing distrust in institutions, the pressure was constant.

When I look at our 2025 Impact Report, I don’t just see a list of things we did. I see a resume for the industry. It is a roadmap of what newsrooms are now capable of achieving when they finally align product strategy with community needs.

Capability: Scaling Insight, Not Just Data

We often talk about “data-driven” newsrooms, but data without strategy is just noise. In 2025, API analyzed hundreds of thousands of articles and sources through our Impact and Trust Platform. The takeaway here isn’t the volume of the data, but the clarity it provided. We’ve built the capability to help newsrooms move from guessing what their audience wants to knowing exactly how to satisfy subscribers.

Take Newsday, for example. By using our Metrics for News tool, they found this massive, untapped interest in nostalgia and hyperlocal travel. For a long time, nostalgia was probably written off as “soft” content—the kind of stuff you do when there isn’t “real” news. But the data showed something else. It was actually a subscription powerhouse. It ranked in the top 90% of coverage that generates new paid members. That insight allowed them to double their conversions on travel content by leaning into the specific nostalgic angles that evoke deep memories for Long Island residents.

Capability: Repeatable Transformation

One of the proudest bullet points on our 2025 resume is the fact that more than 200 news organizations have now participated in the Table Stakes program. From a product perspective, this means we’ve “productized” cultural change. We aren’t just giving advice. We are providing a steadying force that helps leaders think boldly about workplace culture and revenue diversification during times of great instability.

I’ve seen this transformation firsthand in our cohorts. There is a specific moment when a newsroom leader stops saying “we can’t do this because of our print schedule” and starts saying “our digital data shows we have permission to experiment.” At Newsday, this shift led to adding seven new staff positions to build out initiatives the data proved their audience actually wanted.

Capability: Building Belonging through Product

Product strategy in 2025 isn’t just about UI or UX. It is about trust. The report highlights our work in strategic collaborations and creative pathways for impact. When newsrooms use tools like Source Matters or join a learning cohort, it isn’t about checking a box or following a manual. It’s about practice. They are learning how to actually show up and stay connected to their communities in ways that stick.

The 2025 Impact Report is proof that even when the tech shifts faster than most of us can keep up with, there is a path through it. At API, we aren’t just observing these trends; we’re operating as a solutions lab. We’re building the practical tools that help newsrooms meet this specific moment.

Let’s Talk Shop

If you want to see where local news is headed, the full “resume” is here.

And if you want to get into the weeds on API’s mission—or just want to geek out on the product strategy I’m working on—reach out. I’m always down to talk about the backstory of what we’re building next.

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Last week, the News Revenue Hub released its annual “State of the Hub” report. If you’re not familiar with them, the Hub is the “engine room” for over 100 of the most successful independent newsrooms in the country. When the Hub speaks, the industry listens.

The 2026 report is full of wins. Median revenue is up 10.3%. Newsrooms saw a 13x ROI on consulting. Their consultants operate like honorary staff, showing up in newsroom Slack channels to manage the heavy lifting on the business side.

But buried in the focus on “Major Donor Acceleration” is a strategic shift worth examining with a critical eye. In our rush to save local news, are we building the second floor before we’ve even finished pouring the concrete on the first?

The Receipts on the “Whale”

A while back, I argued that we should Forget the Whale—that chasing major donors turns newsrooms into “order-takers” for elite interests. I had the gut feeling then, but thanks to the 2023 tax filings for 201 Institute for Nonprofit News-member newsrooms, I now have the receipts.

This isn’t just about the “soul” of the newsroom anymore; it’s about the survival of the balance sheet.

The Hub’s current strategy leans into what I call the Pillar Model: finding high-net-worth individuals to provide “integrated revenue.” It’s efficient on paper. Data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project reveals the fragility of this model: just 3.1% of donors now account for nearly 78% of all nonprofit revenue.

When you build on a few pillars, you create single points of failure. If one donor moves their money into a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) to sit idle, or simply loses interest, the house doesn’t just sag. It collapses.

The “Pretzel” Debt

I know this from experience. We once had a donor who agreed to support our organization but was never content with the arrangement. He wanted more. More introductions. More help advancing his personal agenda. Help getting his self-produced content to a larger audience.

Every step of the way, we bent ourselves into a pretzel to keep him happy. While the distraction never touched the newsroom directly, it hollowed out everything around it. We weren’t just running a newsroom; we were servicing a high-maintenance “customer” who was paying us to be his PR agency.

The 990 Reality Check: The “Valley of Death”

To ground this, I analyzed the most recent verified 990 data. The numbers tell a different story than the glossy industry reports.

As the data shows, we are facing a “Valley of Death” for newsrooms trying to scale. Nearly 45% of newsrooms between $500k and $5M in revenue finished the year in a deficit. This is exactly the zone where organizations scale their overhead (hiring Major Gift Officers and “Coordination” staff) for whales before their recurring revenue base is stable.

The median newsroom holds just $266,094 in net assets. That’s barely eight months of runway if a major donor pulls back. Bigger isn’t better; bigger often just means a higher floor to fall from

The Construction Sequence

Most newsrooms are building in reverse. They hire a Major Gifts Officer before they’ve poured the foundation.

Think about it the way a software startup would. You can build for 10,000 people paying $20 a month (the Pyramid), or you can land one enterprise client paying $200,000 (the Pillar). The Enterprise Whale looks efficient, but it means that one client now owns your roadmap. You stop building what the community needs and start building whatever that one CEO demands. When they leave, you’re holding a bloated staff you can no longer afford.

The sequence should go:

1. Establish brand trust and editorial independence.

2. Build the pyramid of recurring members covering your basic costs (rent, insurance, core payroll).

3. Hire for growth, not survival. Only then does the Major Gifts Officer make sense.

The Bottom Line

The Sustainability Paradox is this: the very things we do to “save” ourselves might be making us more fragile. The big check feels like a lifeline. Often, it’s debt with good PR.

Stop chasing the pillar. Start building the pyramid. It’s slower and harder. But it’s the only way to ensure that when the “big check” disappears, the newsroom doesn’t go with it.

What do you think? Are we professionalizing our fundraising at the expense of our community roots? Let me know in the comments.

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Throughout my career, I’ve leaned hard into the “nimble and aggressive” tag to describe the organizations I’ve led or admired.

If you look at newsroom job descriptions over the last decade, those two words are practically a requirement for any outfit trying to prove it has a future. They are the shorthand we use to tell the world (and ourselves) that we aren’t like the legacy giants of the past. We wore that label like a badge of honor. To us, being a “nimble and aggressive” organization signified that we were the experimental ones—the ones moving fast, breaking things, and out-maneuvering the slow-moving incumbents.

But if I’m being honest with myself (and now with you), that organizational identity was always much easier to claim in an interview or a pitch deck than it was to actually demonstrate in the daily grind.

For years, many of us operated under a comforting, if expensive, delusion: that working with a cutting-edge vendor made our organization cutting-edge by association. We’d sign a six-figure SaaS contract for the latest “industry-changing” tool—thanks a lot, “AI-powered” whatever—explain to our board we were “being innovative,” and pat ourselves on the back for building the first journalism company on Mars.

Meanwhile, we sat comfortably in our chairs as our “innovative” strategies amounted to little more than... subscriptions.

We weren’t experimenting. We were optimizing. We were buying innovation, not being it. That lie was comfortable. Until AI came along and turned that comfortable lie into a death sentence. You cannot purchase “AI Strategy” from Zendesk. You have to actually build the organizational strength to develop one.

Today’s Optimization Trap

Optimizing vs experimenting are two very different activities with incredibly different goals, outputs, and investments. If you’re failing at one and succeeding at the other without realizing it, I guarantee you it’s optimizing.

There are a million levers to pull to get “2% better” today. And yet, as we stare down the barrel of the greatest disruption in our industry’s history, “2% better” has left us with some extremely fragile business models that don’t have the roster flexibility to actually do anything about it.

Optimization is maintenance. It asks, “How do we do what we do today, just better?”

An “incremental improvement” is the comfort food of the corporate set because it can be easily measured:

• How do we get our churn down by 0.5%? Time to tweak that paywall logic!

• How do we improve newsletter open rates? Let’s A/B test if “Breaking” or “Update” makes more people click.

• How do we save editors ten minutes of drudge work? Sure, let’s use AI to summarize these meeting minutes.

Optimization is important! In fact, I’d argue most newsrooms today are criminally behind the curve at just optimizing their workflows. But it isn’t experimentation, nor should we be conflating the two.

The problem is, if you’re optimizing a product that fundamentally isn’t working for how people get news in 2026, all you’re really doing is riding that buggy off of a cliff with style.

The Strategic Blackout

There was a time newsrooms loved sharing their failures and wins with each other. We built entire careers out of it. Then the pressure to optimize ate away at the budget and the mental bandwidth required to actually experiment.

I was skimming through some OpenNews data, Ben Werdmuller, and I have been discussing over on LinkedIn, and one piece of data keeps haunting me.

There has been an 80% reduction in shared code repositories in our industry over the last ten years.

Code repositories and dev blogs are, essentially, journalism organizations showing off the “how” of what you do to the world. They are the public-facing R&D departments we’ve all decided to just stop funding. All the while congratulating ourselves on how innovative “buying” a new subscription makes us feel.

What happens when you stop publishing the “how” of what you do? Every single newsroom has to reinvent that wheel completely on their own. We have optimized ourselves into silos just as the entire industry was collapsing out from underneath us.

You Can’t A/B Test Your Way into an AI Strategy

If all you do with AI is optimize—create more SEO garbage or schedule social posts—well then you’re just going to build a more scalable version of a broken business model.

So how do you actually start experimenting with AI? It starts by asking questions that don’t have optimistic, conservative answers:

• Optimization is using AI to generate a clickbait headline.

• Experimentation is building your own AI bot to interview your 20-year archive to see if it can surface any lost local connections or interesting patterns—and only caring about the result if it doesn’t suck for at least six months.

Ask yourself: If an LLM can deliver my reader the perfect personalized news digest, why does my tired 800-word piece need to exist? If you aren’t making space for your team to fail trying to answer that question, you’re not experimenting. You’re doing maintenance while everyone else figures it out.

The Engine vs. The Explorer

For organizations to actually get through this period of transition, we need to be honest about what mode we’re actually investing in and what mode we’re just paying lip service to. I like to think of it as balancing the needs of the Engine vs. the Explorer.

1. The Engine (What you optimize)

• Goal: Extract as much value as possible out of your current business model.

• Metrics: Conversion, CPMs, retention, MAUs, etc.

• AI Use Case: Automating notebook transcription, SEO tagging, distributing newsletters.

2. The Explorer (What you experiment with)

• Goal: Identify the next product category or business model before the current one exits.

• Metrics: Lessons learned, prototypes created, and assumptions invalidated.

• AI Use Case: Building AI agents that change the nature of your relationship with the reader or experimenting with nonlinear story formats that your CMS can’t support.

If your staff meetings are all about how to hit next month’s KPIs, you don’t have an Explorer. You have a very well-oiled engine. True resilience means insulating your Explorer team from the Engine. It means giving a team room to spend 6 months on a project that could totally flop without punishing them if it does.

The Reality Check

We have to stop using “nimble” as a buzzword to describe our vendor list and start using it as a metric for our willingness to fail.

How’s your organization actually doing at leaving room for failure? Are every instinct to create immediately crushed under a monthly KPI report? Are you still hoarding “company secrets” that every other organization would benefit from learning from, too scared to share?

I want to know where the "Explorer" lives in your organization. Is there a project you’re protecting from the KPI spreadsheet right now? Or are you struggling to find the room to even start? Let’s talk about how we start sharing the "how" again.

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