The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is gone. The $535 million it distributed annually to more than 1,500 local stations is not coming back in any timeframe that helps a station facing a budget shortfall next quarter. The Public Media Bridge Fund — an initiative of Public Media Company led by Executive Director Erik Langner and backed by an advisory board that includes the CEOs of INN and the Democracy Fund’s equitable journalism program — has distributed $26 million to 74 organizations operating 186 stations, serving 30 million people across 29 states. It is a serious operation doing serious work. PMC CEO Tim Isgitt has been named to the TIME100 Philanthropy list for it.

It is also, by design and by honest description, a bridge. When asked what comes next, Isgitt said plainly that the fund is trying to “help everybody buy some time.”

Time for what, exactly, is the question the bridge was not built to answer.

Public Media Company projects that 115 stations — concentrated in rural and underserved communities, most of them relying on CPB for 25 percent or more of their operating revenue — will likely close by mid-2026 without sustained intervention. The Bridge Fund’s three-phase model — Stabilization, Sustainability, Transformation — is designed to move stations through crisis toward a more resilient future. The Sustainability phase explicitly funds mergers, regional networks, hub-and-spoke arrangements, and shared services. The Transformation phase is about system-level evolution. The intent is right. The architecture is sound. What the field does not yet have is a principled framework for answering the questions that precede every merger decision: Who should merge with whom? What gets preserved and what gets rationalized? How do you govern a merged institution serving genuinely different communities? And — the question receiving almost no attention — when is a merger the wrong answer entirely?

There is a Harvard Shorenstein playbook on public media mergers, published in 2021 by Elizabeth Hansen and Emily Roseman. It is a careful piece of research. It is also designed for a different problem — the merger of a public media station with a digital news startup — and it predates the CPB defunding by four years. The Bridge Fund’s Emergency Restructuring Program offers advisory support for structuring mergers and shared services agreements, and requires that applicants be open to restructuring as a condition of support. That is the right posture. What it does not yet provide is tier-differentiated guidance for which kind of merger to pursue, and what governance protections to build in before the papers are signed.

What the field has is money, urgency, institutional seriousness, and good intentions. What it does not yet have is the framework. This is an attempt to provide one.

The healthcare system dealt with a version of this problem thirty years ago. The lessons it produced are directly applicable to what public media is facing now. One of them is uncomfortable: consolidation designed around efficiency produces different outcomes than consolidation designed around function. The field is currently equipped for the former. It needs a framework for the latter.

What Emergency Medicine Figured Out

If you read my piece on the “160x problem” last year, you know I’ve been obsessed with how systems collapse when we manage them by headcount rather than by geography. In that essay, I looked at how the closure of a single rural trauma unit ripples outward, overloading regional hubs and creating vast medical deserts. The core tension there is identical to the one we are facing in public media today: if you look at a map through a spreadsheet, an isolated, low-volume node looks like an inefficiency to be eliminated. If you look at it through human anatomy, it is the only thing keeping a patient alive during the “golden hour” after a crash.

The trauma center model works because it starts with a different question than the one most consolidation processes ask. Not “which institutions are inefficient?” but “what function does each institution perform, and what happens to the community it serves if that function disappears?”

The answer to that question produced a tiered system. Level I trauma centers — the academic medical centers, the Johns Hopkins and Massachusetts Generals — handle the most complex cases, train practitioners, and maintain research capability. Level IV centers — the small rural hospitals — stabilize patients, manage what they can, and refer what exceeds their capability to the appropriate tier. Neither is a diminished version of the other. They are doing different, equally necessary work at different scales.

The critical design feature is not the tier itself. It is the referral protocol — the formal relationship between tiers that makes the system function as a system rather than as a collection of disconnected institutions. The small hospital knows what it can do and what it cannot. It knows where to send the patient when the case exceeds its capability. The large center knows it cannot serve rural Montana from Boston.

Healthcare’s consolidation wave in the 1990s and early 2000s applied a different logic. The pressures were familiar — declining reimbursements, rising costs, fragmented infrastructure that looked inefficient by the metrics being applied to it. The consolidation that followed optimized for institutional sustainability. The communities that lost local hospitals in the name of efficiency did not redirect their care to regional centers. Research documents what followed: reduced care-seeking, delayed treatment, and worse health outcomes — particularly for emergency and maternal care — in communities that lost local institutions. The research documenting what those communities lost came twenty years later. The hospitals were already closed.

Public media is not at the beginning of a stable period where a twenty-year correction cycle is merely inefficient. It is at the beginning of a consolidation moment, driven by financial emergency, that will produce decisions difficult to reverse. The trauma center model does not counsel against consolidation. It counsels for consolidation designed around function preservation rather than cost reduction. Those are related goals. They are not identical. And right now, the field has the tools for one and not the other.

What the Data Actually Shows

Semipublic, a public media financial transparency project run by former NPR product manager Alex Curley, has compiled every publicly available CPB financial filing from public media stations across fiscal years 2019 through 2024. That dataset — Annual Financial Reports, Financial Summary Reports, and Audited Financial Statements covering the vast majority of CPB grantees — reveals something the aggregate numbers obscure.

The average federal funding reliance across 467 surveyed stations was 16 percent of total revenue in FY23. Public television stations averaged 18 percent. Public radio stations averaged 14 percent. Those numbers have anchored most of the public conversation about how stations will absorb the CPB loss.

The distribution is the story. Not the average.

Among NPR member stations, the median reliance was just 8 percent — meaning more than half relied on federal funding for less than a tenth of their revenue. The average was 13 percent. That gap between median and mean is the tell: a large cohort of NPR stations has meaningfully reduced its federal dependence, while a smaller cohort has become significantly more reliant. The stations at the high end of that distribution are not randomly distributed across the country. They are concentrated in rural markets, in states with limited philanthropic infrastructure, and in communities that lack the donor base large-market stations draw on.

Two populations are particularly exposed. African-American Public Radio Consortium stations relied on federal funding for an average of 26 percent of revenue — twice the overall average. Native Public Media stations averaged 53 percent. These are not outliers in the statistical sense. They are a specific, identifiable population of stations serving communities for whom public media is not a civic amenity. It is infrastructure.

That distribution maps onto four merger tiers. Each tier has a different financial profile, a different community function, and a different set of merger options. Treating them as variations of the same problem produces the wrong answers for most of them.

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The Four Tiers

Tier One: Low Federal Reliance (0–10% of revenue)

These are the large-market stations — GBH in Boston, WNYC in New York, KQED in San Francisco. They have diversified revenue, substantial membership bases, and enough institutional scale to absorb the CPB loss, however painfully. GBH lost 8 percent of its annual budget when federal funding was rescinded. It launched a $225 million fundraising campaign in response. That option is not available to a station running on $2 million a year in a rural market.

Tier One stations are the Level I trauma centers of this system. Their merger role is not to be absorbed — it is to absorb, selectively and with intention. The GBH and New England Public Media merger, announced in May 2026, is a Tier One institution taking on a smaller regional partner while explicitly committing to preserve NEPM’s brand, programming, and Springfield studios. That commitment is not incidental. It is the entire point. A merger that doesn’t make that commitment in writing, with structural enforcement, is not the GBH/NEPM model. It is a different transaction with different risks.

Tier One stations considering acquisitions should be required — by their boards, by their funders, and by the framework — to answer one question before any other: what community function does this institution perform that our merged organization must continue to perform, and how will the merged governance structure ensure it?

Tier Two: Moderate Federal Reliance (10–20% of revenue)

Mid-size stations with meaningful federal funding gaps but enough membership infrastructure to have options. Arizona Public Media lost roughly 15 percent of its revenue when CPB funding was rescinded and responded by eliminating positions and leaving others unfilled. That is a painful adjustment. It is not an existential one.

Tier Two stations have two viable merger paths. Horizontal mergers — combining with another Tier Two station in an adjacent market — can produce real administrative efficiencies without the governance complexity of a vertical merger. Shared HR, shared legal, shared engineering, consolidated membership appeals. The Vermont Public and Ocean State Media models both emerged from this horizontal logic. Two stations of comparable size and mission, finding efficiency through combination while preserving distinct community service.

The second path is upward affiliation — a formal operating relationship with a Tier One station that provides back-office services and coordination infrastructure without a full merger. This is the referral protocol made concrete. The Tier Two station retains its editorial independence and community governance. It gains access to legal, financial, and technical resources it could not afford independently. The Tier One station gains distribution reach and community presence in a market it could not serve cost-effectively on its own.

It is worth noting that even well-structured horizontal mergers are not insulated from the revenue loss. Ocean State Media— the merger of Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio, completed in May 2024 — is a model of thoughtful integration. It still faced a $1.1 million budget hole and nineteen employee buyouts after federal defunding. Sound merger structure reduces the damage of the revenue loss. It does not eliminate it. The goal of the framework is to ensure that when the damage comes, the community function is the last thing cut rather than the first.

What Tier Two stations should resist is downward pressure — the instinct, under financial stress, to absorb a Tier Three or Tier Four station before solving their own sustainability problem. A Tier Two station that cannot yet sustain itself is not positioned to preserve the community function of an institution it takes on.

Tier Three: High Federal Reliance (20–40% of revenue)

This is where the merger conversation gets hard and where the existing frameworks offer the least guidance. West Tennessee PBS. Basin PBS in Texas. WQPT in Illinois. Stations that relied on federal funding for 40 percent or more of their total revenue, in markets where membership culture is limited and philanthropic infrastructure is thin.

These stations need mergers. The question is what kind.

A Tier Three station absorbed by a Tier One institution is not the GBH/NEPM model. GBH had the scale and the organizational intentionality to make explicit community function commitments and enforce them. Most Tier One stations absorbing a Tier Three partner will not have that combination. The absorbed institution’s community function will not be destroyed on purpose. It will be attenuated slowly, through governance decisions made by people who are not wrong to make them — decisions about resource allocation, coverage priorities, and organizational investment that will, over time, reflect the priorities of the institution doing the absorbing rather than the community being served.

The right merger for a Tier Three station is a horizontal one — with another Tier Three station in an adjacent or complementary market — combined with an explicit regional network arrangement that connects both to a Tier One or Tier Two coordination layer. The merged institution serves its combined geographic footprint. The coordination layer provides the back-office, legal, technical, and professional development infrastructure neither station could afford independently. Neither the merger nor the coordination arrangement requires giving up local editorial governance.

In markets where no compatible horizontal partner exists — particularly in states where a single station may be the only public media licensee across a vast geography — the Tier Three station faces the same structural challenge as Tier Four, and should be treated accordingly rather than forced into an unsuitable vertical merger with a large institution that lacks the intentionality to preserve its community function.

The governance document for any Tier Three merger must include — at minimum — the four structural protections detailed in the governance section below: a defined community coverage commitment, a protected budget line, a sunset review with teeth, and an explicit restriction on the disposition of broadcast infrastructure. None of these are optional for a cross-tier merger. They are the difference between a merger and an acquisition dressed in the language of preservation.

Tier Four: Critical Federal Reliance (40%+)

Stop. Before you merge, ask the question.

The five most CPB-dependent stations in the Semipublic dataset — KCUW in Oregon, KSHI in New Mexico, KUHB, KDSP, and KNSA in Alaska — all had reliance above 80 percent. The Native Public Media network averaged 53 percent. The African-American Public Radio Consortium averaged 26 percent. These stations exist in communities where commercial media has no presence, where the donor base is thin by design, and where the institution performs a function — emergency alerts, local language broadcasting, community-specific journalism, the civic connective tissue of isolated populations — that no merged institution will replicate.

For Tier Four stations, merger is often the wrong answer. It is not wrong because mergers are bad. It is wrong because the community function these stations perform is inseparable from their community embeddedness, and that embeddedness does not transfer. A Native-language public radio station absorbed into a regional network does not become a Native-language public radio station with better back-office support. It becomes a line item in a budget managed by people making decisions for a much larger institution. When that line item gets cut — and under financial pressure it will — the community loses the emergency alert that interrupts regular programming in the specific county where the listener lives. It loses the election coverage nobody else will do. It loses the school board meeting at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday that no commercial outlet attends. The station closing is a media story. What follows is a governance story.

The right answer for Tier Four stations is not merger. It is a dedicated coalition funding mechanism — a sustained, structured commitment from Tier One institutions, major foundations, and the philanthropic networks that have benefited from the public media ecosystem — to fund the specific community functions these stations perform that the market will not replace.

The Adopt a Station project, built by Semipublic’s Alex Curley from the CPB financial data, demonstrated that individual donors will direct money to specific at-risk stations when given the mechanism to do so. That model needs to be scaled institutionally. A formal commitment from the ten largest public media stations — GBH, WNYC, KQED, WETA, and their peers — to fund a dedicated Tier Four support pool would be more honest about what the ecosystem needs than a merger framework that doesn’t apply to the stations most at risk of disappearing.

The Bridge Fund is currently buying time for Tier Four stations. What happens when the Bridge Fund runs out matters more than any merger framework. The field should be designing the permanent mechanism now, while the temporary one is still functioning.

The Governance Problem Nobody Is Solving

The Harvard Shorenstein playbook on public media mergers — designed for mergers between public broadcasters and digital newsrooms, not station-to-station mergers — nonetheless produced a finding that applies here with equal force: public media mergers founder on governance more often than they founder on finances. The cultures, the editorial policies, the board compositions, the accountability relationships — these are harder to merge than the balance sheets.

That finding applies with additional force to the tier-spanning mergers the current crisis is producing. A Tier One station absorbing a Tier Three partner is not combining two similar institutions. It is creating a two-tier system within a single organization. The small station’s community will be numerically underrepresented in any governance structure built around audience size, donor base, or organizational headcount. Goodwill is not a governance mechanism. It is a starting condition that erodes under budget pressure.

Four structural protections every cross-tier merger document should include:

First, a dedicated community advisory board for the absorbed institution’s market — not advisory in the sense of being consulted, but advisory in the sense of having a defined role in coverage decisions, with a reporting relationship to the full board and a mechanism for escalating concerns about service reduction.

Second, a protected revenue allocation — a defined percentage of combined revenue, or a minimum dollar commitment, dedicated to the absorbed institution’s market. Not subject to reallocation in a budget crunch without full board approval and public disclosure.

Third, a sunset review — a formal assessment at three and five years of whether the merged institution is actually serving the absorbed community at the level the merger documents committed to. With teeth. Which means a defined consequence if it is not.

Fourth, an explicit restriction on the disposition of broadcast infrastructure. A station’s license, towers, and spectrum are public resources, not institutional assets to be repurposed or monetized when the financial pressure intensifies. The Bridge Fund has explicitly identified protecting spectrum and towers as a core mission priority. The merger document is where that protection gets legally enforced. Any merger in which the absorbed institution’s broadcast infrastructure can be sold or repurposed without community board approval and public process is not a merger. It is an acquisition dressed in the language of preservation.

None of these provisions are impossible to draft. The spectrum restriction in particular requires careful FCC-compliant language and cannot be boilerplate — it needs to specify what triggers community board review, what constitutes a qualifying public process, and what happens in the event of a subsequent acquisition of the merged institution. All of them require a board willing to enforce them against the institution’s own financial interest under pressure. That is the governance problem. The framework can require the documents. It cannot require the will.

From what I am observing in boardrooms right now, most station trustees are approaching these decisions with a corporate M&A mindset rather than a public trustee mindset. They look at a balance sheet with three months of runway left, panic, and look for an exit strategy that protects the legal entity. The underlying instinct is to treat the station like a distressed commercial asset — assuming that any entity that survives, under any corporate banner, is a win. What is entirely missing from these initial executive sessions is a rigorous assessment of community impact. Boards are voting to merge before they have even defined what local editorial output they are legally bound to protect. The framework can require the paperwork. The field has to supply the rest.

What the Field Should Do Right Now

The Bridge Fund is doing what it said it would do. The Sustainability Program’s requirement that merger proposals demonstrate efficiency gains without sacrificing local programming is the right standard. The Emergency Restructuring Program’s advisory support for stations facing sudden financial shocks is filling a gap that would otherwise go unfilled. The three-phase model from Stabilization through Transformation reflects a genuine theory of change, not just emergency triage.

What the framework below adds is specificity the Bridge Fund’s current programs do not yet provide: a tier-differentiated approach that tells stations which kind of merger to pursue, what governance protections to build before signing, and when to pursue something other than a merger entirely.

Six practical steps the field can take before the next round of merger decisions:

One: Adopt the tier classification as a shared language. The Semipublic data makes it possible to classify every at-risk station by federal reliance ratio in a single afternoon. That classification should be the starting point for every merger conversation, not an afterthought. Funders reviewing merger proposals should require it. Stations considering a partner should know their own tier and their prospective partner’s tier before any conversation goes further. The Bridge Fund is already receiving merger proposals. A tier-classification requirement in the application process would cost nothing and produce significantly better decisions.

Two: Build a proactive matching function, not just an application process. The Bridge Fund currently operates reactively — stations in crisis apply for support, and the Fund helps them identify options. Nobody is sitting with the Semipublic tier data, mapping the ecosystem, and initiating conversations between compatible stations before the financial emergency forces incompatible ones together. Public Media Company’s twenty-five years of transaction experience — more than $250 million in facilitated deals — almost certainly includes informal versions of this matching work. The crisis requires making it systematic, funded, and proactive at a scale informal relationships cannot reach. A Tier Three station in rural Montana should not have to find its own Tier Two affiliation partner under a 90-day runway. Someone with the full map should be making that introduction months earlier. The Bridge Fund’s Sustainability Program should publish tier-differentiated guidance — explicitly different frameworks for horizontal Tier Two mergers, Tier Two upward affiliations, Tier Three horizontal combinations, and Tier Four alternatives to merger — and pair that guidance with active outreach to at-risk stations that have not yet applied. Waiting for distressed institutions to self-identify their own solutions is how you get mergers built on proximity and existing relationships rather than functional compatibility. The Emergency Restructuring Program is already doing case-by-case advisory work on merger structures. That expertise should be codified, published, and deployed proactively.

Three: Protect the infrastructure, not just the license. The Bridge Fund explicitly lists safeguarding “towers, spectrum, and other critical assets to ensure they remain aligned with public media’s service mission” as a core priority. This deserves a louder voice in the merger conversation. A station that merges and transfers its broadcast license to a larger institution retains nothing — no governance protection, no community advisory board, no protected budget line — if the merged institution later decides to sell or repurpose the spectrum. Every merger document should include explicit, enforceable restrictions on the disposition of broadcast infrastructure. A license and its associated spectrum are public resources. The merger framework should treat them that way.

Four: Tier One stations should formalize their coordination role. The WNYC Station-to-Station Programming Project — which makes WNYC’s programming catalog freely available to qualifying at-risk stations, with automatic eligibility for any station that received 10 percent or more of its budget from CPB — is a quiet example of what this can look like. A large Tier One station extending its institutional capacity to smaller stations without requiring a merger. Public Media Infrastructure, the coalition formed by APMG, NFCB, NYPR, PRX, and the Station Resource Group with CPB backing before its dissolution, is already building part of this coordination layer at the distribution and technology level. The content, legal, technical, and membership coordination layer remains largely unbuilt. Every Tier One station should be asking what Tier Two and Tier Three stations in its region need from that layer — shared legal, technical, engineering, membership, and fundraising infrastructure — and committing to provide it as a defined service relationship rather than waiting for a financial crisis to force a merger.

Five: The field needs a permanent funding mechanism for Tier Four stations now. The Bridge Fund is temporary by design. A permanent coalition commitment — from Tier One stations, from major foundations, from the philanthropic networks that have been the beneficiaries of public media’s reach — is not charity. It is infrastructure maintenance. The Tier Four stations are the distribution layer that extends public media’s reach into the communities it exists to serve. Letting them close to fund mergers among stations that could survive independently is not rationalization. It is the healthcare consolidation mistake, made deliberately.

Six: Attach the open infrastructure string to every major merger grant. This is the step that separates a stabilization program from a genuine ecosystem intervention.

The journalism philanthropy field has been debating whether someone should play a directive role in forcing consolidation — a Special Master, in the language Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro used when she called for funders to “thin the herd.” Richard Tofel’s March 2026 interview with Hansen Shapiro at Nieman Lab was the match that lit this particular debate in journalism philanthropy circles. The argument that followed was largely about whether foundations have the legal and cultural authority to demand that kind of forced restart. Public media does not have time for that debate. The Bridge Fund exists. The authority is there, in the grant conditions, if the field chooses to use it.

The string should be this: any station that receives Bridge Fund sustainability funding for a merger or regional network arrangement must open its successful operational infrastructure to other stations in the tier system. If a Tier One station receives funds to absorb a Tier Three partner, the membership model, the legal templates, the engineering documentation, the content workflows — the institutional knowledge that makes the Tier One station a Tier One station — become available to other stations in the regional tier system. Not proprietary assets to be licensed. Open infrastructure to be shared.

The WNYC Station-to-Station Programming Project is the prototype. It makes WNYC’s programming catalog freely available to qualifying stations without licensing fees. That is what open infrastructure looks like at the content layer. The same logic applies to membership infrastructure, engineering documentation, and legal templates. The winner gets the resources. The ecosystem gets the ladder.

The Chrysler restructuring worked because the strings were painful. The trade-off for survival was an operational overhaul and a transfer of value back to the system. That is the model. Without this string, stabilization grants are airline bailouts — they keep institutions flying without changing the cost structure of the system that produced the crisis.

The Question Before Every Board

Every public media station board considering a merger in the next eighteen months will face a version of the same question. It will usually be framed as: does this merger make us financially sustainable?

That is the wrong question. Or rather, it is the second question. The first question is: does this merger preserve the community function our institution was built to perform? And if not, what would need to be different for it to do so?

A station that survives a merger but no longer performs its essential community function has not been saved. It has been laundered — the license persists, the brand persists, the FCC filing persists, while the reason the institution existed quietly disappears.

New Jersey PBS found no viable merger structure before its funding collapsed — both federal and state support evaporated simultaneously, and its management partner declined to renew. That outcome is worse than a well-structured merger. It is also what happens when the field has no framework in place before the crisis forces the decision.

If public media embraces this tier-based model, we stop treating consolidation as a slow, defensive retreat and start treating it as a conscious redesign. We stop asking how to make a dying funding model stretch further and start building a distributed, resilient infrastructure that outlives the current political emergency. We unlock a system where Tier One scale actively shields Tier Four independence, and where a local station’s survival isn’t dictated by the wealth of its immediate ZIP code. It gives us a blueprint to build an ecosystem that is structurally incapable of abandoning the communities it was built to serve.

The trauma center system works because it was built around an explicit acknowledgment that different institutions serve different functions at different scales, and that the small institution doing the essential local work is not a lesser version of the large one. It is doing a different, equally necessary job.

Public media was built on the same logic. Universal access. Every community. Not just the ones where the math works.

The math has stopped working for 115 stations. The Bridge Fund is serious, its leadership is credible, and its three-phase architecture is the right structure for the moment. What it needs now is the framework this piece attempts to provide — tier-differentiated guidance for which mergers to pursue, proactive matchmaking so the right stations find each other before the crisis forces the wrong ones together, governance protections with teeth, and the open infrastructure string that turns a stabilization program into an ecosystem intervention.

Without that string, the merger grants reproduce the pattern journalism philanthropy has always produced — choosing who stays on the lifeboats without requiring the survivors to build the ladder everyone else can climb. The Bridge Fund was built to be something different from that pattern. The open infrastructure string is how it proves it.

Public media serves 43 million Americans in communities commercial media will not reach — PMC’s own figure for the population served by at-risk stations. The Bridge Fund’s distributed grants account for 30 million of them already. The decisions being made in the next eighteen months will determine whether those communities still have a station in ten years. Not because the money ran out. Because nobody asked the right questions before the papers were signed.

That is what the framework is for.

How to Read This Matrix

This blueprint converts raw data into an operational diagnostic tool for public media boards, station managers, and philanthropic funders. By inputting two critical variables—a station’s historic reliance on federal funding and its specific market profile—you can instantly determine its baseline risk and strategic constraints.

• Federal Funding Reliance: This is the percentage of your station’s total annual operating budget that vanished when federal funding was rescinded. For a large metropolitan station, this may be less than 5%. For rural, tribal, or historically underserved stations, it frequently exceeds 40%.

• The Systemic Vulnerability Index: This acts as a triage gauge. As reliance increases and philanthropic infrastructure thins, the index moves from stable/absorptive capacity (green) to existential threat/merger failure zone (deep red).

• The Outcome: The matrix dynamically generates your prescriptive tier, your viable strategic path, and the mandatory governance shields required to protect your local community footprint before any papers are signed.

4-Tier Ecosystem & Strategic Blueprint

This interactive visual model maps how your proposed 4-tier system evaluates risk under pressure. You can simulate varying levels of federal reliance and market characteristics to test the blueprint against actual station conditions

📊 Open the Matrix

By the Numbers

115 — Stations projected by Public Media Company to close by mid-2026 without sustained intervention, most in rural and underserved communities

43M — Americans served by the 115 at-risk stations, per PMC’s own calculations — in communities commercial media will not fill

$26M / $73M — Distributed to 74 organizations by the Public Media Bridge Fund from $73 million raised — across 186 stations in 29 states serving 30 million people

16% — Average federal funding reliance across 467 surveyed stations in FY23 (Semipublic / CPB financial data)

53% — Average federal funding reliance among Native Public Media stations — more than three times the overall average

26% — Average federal funding reliance among African-American Public Radio Consortium stations — twice the overall average

8% — Median federal funding reliance among NPR member stations, versus a 13% average — the gap that reveals the distribution story the averages obscure

705 vs. 44 — Staff count at GBH versus New England Public Media at the time of their May 2026 merger — the scale differential every cross-tier merger must account for

$225M — GBH’s fundraising campaign goal following federal defunding — a Tier One option unavailable to the stations most at risk

3 — Phases of the Bridge Fund’s model: Stabilization, Sustainability, Transformation — the architecture is right; the tier-differentiated framework is what comes next

If this piece made you think — or if you think I got something wrong — I’d genuinely like to hear it. The comment section is open.

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The thing that determines how people vote is also the thing they most need help navigating day to day. And almost no one in the news is covering it that way.

Sixty-two percent of American voters say grocery prices are a major problem for their family. Not a concern. Not something they’ve noticed. A major problem. Gas is at 60 percent. Healthcare at 55. Housing at 52.

These are not niche anxieties. This is the dominant experience of American life right now. And when you ask people what matters most heading into the 2026 midterms, 43 percent name economic issues before anything else. Inflation alone, at 26 percent, ties with threats to democracy as the single most cited issue in the country.

The audience is telling us—in every poll, every focus group, and every angry comment section—exactly what they need. They need help navigating an economy that feels like it’s working against them. They need someone on their side of the kitchen table.

Right now, we aren’t even in the room.

The Weather Report Problem

Here is what economic coverage looks like at most news organizations in May 2026.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the April CPI report. Headline inflation hits 3.8 percent, the highest since May 2023. Food prices are up 3.2 percent year over year. Beef has surged 14.8 percent. Food at home jumped 0.7 percent in a single month—the biggest monthly gain since August 2022. Mortgage rates are pushing toward 6.7 percent on a 30-year fixed. The Iran war has spiked oil above $100 a barrel, gasoline is averaging $4.50 a gallon nationally, and real wages just went negative for the first time in three years.

CNBC runs a chart. NBC builds a grocery price tracker. The Associated Press writes a story quoting an economist who says it could get worse.

All of it is accurate. Almost none of it is useful.

What we have built, across the industry, is economic journalism as a weather report. Here is today’s number. Here is what went up. Here is an expert saying the storm might continue. It tells people what happened to them. It does not tell them what to do about it.

The gap between “beef is up 14.8 percent” and “here is how to restructure your weekly grocery spend when protein costs spike” is enormous. The gap between “mortgage rates hit 6.7 percent” and “here is a framework for deciding whether to buy, wait, or rethink your housing strategy entirely” is where an entire beat should live.

Almost nobody is filling it.

Where the Audience Actually Goes

When journalism leaves a need unmet, the audience doesn’t sit around in the dark. They find light somewhere else.

Right now, that means Reddit threads where strangers swap grocery substitution strategies. It means TikTok creators with varying degrees of financial literacy explaining what the Fed rate hold means for your car payment. It means Facebook groups where neighbors share tips on which gas stations are cheapest this week. The information is crowd-sourced, unverified, sometimes wrong—and often infinitely more useful than anything a traditional newsroom publishes.

This isn’t an audience sophistication problem. It’s a market signal. When institutional newsrooms won’t give people the basic layout of the land, they do exactly what any rational person does: they build their own map. They route around us.

The problem isn’t just that we’re losing those interactions. The problem is the conclusion people draw when we offer only diagnosis without navigation. They don’t think, “Wow, this newsroom lacks the resources to help me.” They think, “This newsroom doesn’t care about people like me.” That quiet realization is devastating, and it corrodes trust far beyond economic coverage.

I wrote recently about how crisis messaging in journalism depresses the behavior it intends to stimulate. The economic version of that dynamic is specific and measurable. When every story frames inflation as an unstoppable force, the implicit message is helplessness. A newsroom that says, “beef is up 14.8 percent and here are three protein strategies to hold your weekly budget steady” is doing something fundamentally different than one that says, “beef is up 14.8 percent and economists warn it could get worse.”

The first builds agency. The second builds anxiety. Both are accurate. Only one actually helps.

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The Proof We Already Have

Here is the part that should make this argument sting: We already know this works. We watched it work. And then we walked away from it.

During COVID, journalism became a utility almost overnight. Newsrooms built vaccine eligibility trackers. They mapped testing sites. They created interactive tools that told you where to find a mask, where to get a free test, which pharmacy had appointments available this week. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica built a guide to navigating the state’s unemployment system—not a story about unemployment, but a step-by-step tool for the person sitting at home trying to figure out how to file a claim. A reporter at the Tallahassee Democrat became a one-woman vaccine hotline, fielding hundreds of calls and texts from seniors who needed someone to walk them through eligibility rules and online forms.

That wasn’t story mode. That was utility mode.

I saw it firsthand. I was at PBS39 in the Lehigh Valley when Pennsylvania went into lockdown in March 2020. We launched a daily half-hour program called Community Update on Coronavirus, airing live on TV and rebroadcast on our NPR station, WLVR. It wasn’t a newscast in the traditional sense. It was a tool. Medical experts, business owners, government officials, and school leaders came on to answer real questions from real people.

When vaccines became available, we walked viewers through eligibility. When unemployment claims jammed, we brought on people who could troubleshoot the process. When schools went remote, we helped parents navigate what that actually meant for their kids. We revived the program when cases surged again in December 2020 and kept it running through June 2021.

We weren’t just reporting on the pandemic. We were helping people get through it. And the audience knew the difference.

The Business Case Nobody Made Permanent

Here is where the argument moves from the newsroom to the spreadsheet, because the data from that period is unambiguous.

The audience responded to utility journalism with the two things the industry has been chasing for a decade: trust and money.

On the commercial side, local TV news viewership didn’t just tick up; it surged. Among 18-to-34-year-olds—the demographic the industry had largely written off—local news viewership increased 162 percent by the third week of March 2020. That wasn’t a rounding error. That was a generational reversal. Adults 25 to 54, the primary advertising demographic, were up 78 percent. Viewership in Hispanic and Asian households jumped 42 percent and 62 percent, respectively. The audiences showing up were younger, more diverse, and more engaged than anything local TV had seen in years. And 83 percent of adults said they trusted their local news stations over national networks or cable.

They didn’t show up because they were bored and flipping channels. They showed up because local news was being useful to them in a way it hadn’t been before. Utility earned their attention. Nothing else had.

On the nonprofit side, the story was just as clear. Nearly two-thirds of nonprofit news outlets saw increases in individual giving during 2020, and 60 percent saw foundation support grow as well. The number of small-dollar contributors jumped nearly 50 percent in a single year, web traffic increased 43 percent, and newsletter signups rose 36 percent. INN’s researchers pointed to the increase in service journalism as a key driver of this growth—the very shift toward utility that drove the trust and the traffic.

These are not ambiguous signals. Every metric we use to measure organizational health—audience size, demographic diversity, trust, donations, subscriptions, and engagement—moved in the right direction when journalism was operating in utility mode. The data doesn’t whisper. It shouts.

And then the pandemic receded, and we went right back to story mode.

The trackers came down. The eligibility tools expired. The navigation guides stopped updating. The community programs ended. Nobody looked at what had just happened and said, “We just proved that utility journalism drives trust, growth, and revenue, so let’s build permanent beats around this model.” COVID was treated as an emergency demanding a temporary response, not as a strategic revelation that should have reshaped our entire relationship with the public.

What We Missed the First Time

Compare that to 2008. When the financial crisis hit, we didn’t make the utility pivot. The coverage was about the banks, the bailout, the policy debate. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal covered the crisis brilliantly from an institutional perspective. But what was almost entirely absent was navigation for the homeowner who just received a reset notice on an adjustable-rate mortgage and had no idea what a loan modification was, how to apply for one, or if they even qualified. The person at the kitchen table was on their own.

Admittedly, 2008 was a simpler information environment. If the Philadelphia Inquirer had built a mortgage navigation tool back then, its audience would have found it. Today, the landscape is exponentially more fragmented. The audience has a hundred places to turn, most of them unvetted, many of them wrong, and some of them actively predatory.

Which means the cost of not building navigation journalism is much higher now. In 2008, the audience was simply unserved. In 2026, they are being served badly by someone else. The longer we cede that ground, the harder it becomes to reclaim.

We are now entering a third major economic moment where the exact same need exists. Inflation is eroding purchasing power. Housing costs are locking out a generation. Real wages are slipping. And for the third time, we have a choice: cover the economy as a set of facts reported from a distance, or build the beat that helps people survive it.

COVID showed us what happens when we choose utility. 2008 showed us what happens when we don’t. The question is whether we have the institutional memory to recognize the pattern.

Moment. Action. Channel.

A few weeks ago I was at Ohio University as faculty for the Kiplinger Fellowship, running a workshop called “The Last Mile” for 31 working journalists—publishers from rural Missouri, investigative producers from network news, and solo founders building newsrooms from scratch in Providence. I handed each table a real community crisis from what I call the Bucket of Chaos and gave them one rule: solve it without writing a story. Build a tool instead.

Every single table built a technology solution. Text alerts, interactive maps, push notification systems, dashboard apps. Not one table defaulted to a story.

Thirty years ago, the same exercise would have produced phone trees and library bulletin boards. What changed isn’t just the available technology; it’s how journalists think about the problem once you give them permission to think differently about it.

To test whether a newsroom is actually building a utility or just producing more content, I use a three-part framework: The Moment, The Action, and The Channel.

The Last Mile Framework

If your economic coverage can’t answer all three of these questions, you are still stuck in story mode:

Take the grocery price spike. The Moment is standing in the supermarket meat aisle. The Action is compare, substitute, and recalculate. The Channel is not a story on the homepage that the reader might see three days later. It’s a weekly email or a text alert that lands before the shopping trip starts.

Take the mortgage decision. The Moment is when the lease renewal hits the mailbox, and you have to decide whether this is the year you try to buy. The Action is running the numbers against your local market, your income, and your down payment. The Channel is an interactive tool or calculator that lives where you can find it when you need it, not a long-form feature that publishes on an arbitrary news cycle.

Take the benefits gap. The Moment is when your hours get cut, or prices push your household past an eligibility threshold you didn’t know existed. The Action is check, apply, connect—not reading a breakdown of state policy. The Channel meets you where you are, which probably isn’t a newspaper’s website at 10 AM on a Wednesday.

Every time a reader encounters coverage that describes their economic pain without helping them respond to it, the newsroom gets filed away in the same mental category as the problem itself. Story mode on pocketbook issues isn’t just insufficient; it’s a trust liability.

The Instinct Is Already There

Here is what surprised me most at Kiplinger: I didn’t have to convince anyone in that room to think this way. The moment I gave them permission to build a tool instead of write a story, they moved immediately. The instinct was there. The framework was what was missing.

That matters because the barrier isn’t that journalists don’t understand utility. It’s that the structures they work in don’t reward it.

Nobody’s editor is asking, “What tool did you build this week?” Nobody’s performance review includes, “Readers who changed a financial decision because of your coverage.” The incentives point entirely toward story production, and the metrics track reach and engagement, not impact and agency. A reporter who writes a CPI explainer that gets 50,000 pageviews is doing better, by every metric the industry uses, than one who builds a grocery budget tool that helps 500 families save $40 a week. The first reporter produced content. The second one produced a utility.

Right now, we only know how to count the first.

Know someone who’d find this useful? Forward this piece to a colleague in news leadership, audience strategy, or journalism funding. The pocketbook beat won’t get built by accident.

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The Infrastructure Problem

Here is why individual newsrooms attempting this in isolation will mostly fail.

Economic navigation journalism requires a combination of data fluency, financial literacy, local sourcing, and UX thinking that most local newsrooms simply do not have on staff. The reporter who covers city hall isn’t going to build a grocery price comparison tool between city council meetings. The editor managing the politics desk doesn’t have a framework for translating Federal Reserve policy into household budget implications. These are real skill gaps, and acknowledging them isn’t an insult. It’s a design problem.

But the templates for this work are highly replicable. A grocery budget stress test built for Philadelphia can be adapted for Des Moines. A mortgage decision framework is geography-agnostic in its structure, even if the inputs are local. A benefits eligibility tracker needs state-level data, but a common architecture.

What would a pocketbook navigation toolkit actually look like?

An open-source grocery comparison calculator that any newsroom can plug local store data into.

A mortgage decision framework that walks readers through rate scenarios against local housing inventory.

A benefits eligibility screener that connects to state-level SNAP, LIHEAP, and childcare subsidy thresholds and updates automatically when income cutoffs change.

Text-alert templates that deliver localized price-shift summaries right before the weekend shopping trip.

None of these require original invention. They require someone to build the template once and make it available to every newsroom that needs it.

This is the kind of work that national journalism funders, industry associations, and university lab partnerships are perfectly positioned to back. One coordinated investment in a navigation journalism toolkit would be orders of magnitude more efficient than hundreds of newsrooms each independently trying to figure out how to localize CPI data.

The infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. But the design problem is solvable, and the demand signal from the audience has never been louder.

The Status Problem

There is an uncomfortable reason this beat doesn’t already exist at scale, and it has nothing to do with resources or skills.

Let’s be honest about the newsroom caste system: service journalism sits near the bottom. Telling people how to restructure their grocery spending doesn’t carry the same editorial prestige as interpreting the Federal Reserve. Building a mortgage decision tool doesn’t win awards in the same categories as investigative reporting. It doesn’t have the status of political analysis. It’s treated as a nice-to-have—tucked away on the lifestyle desk next to the movie reviews.

That distinction is a luxury we can no longer afford. It’s also a distinction the audience has never recognized. When 62 percent of voters call grocery prices a major family problem, the person who helps them navigate that problem isn’t doing lesser journalism. They are doing the journalism that matters most to the largest number of people.

And here is the part that should keep editors up at night: pocketbook coverage is one of the very few things a newsroom can build that does not immediately segment into red or blue readership. Groceries, gas, housing, healthcare—these are majority concerns across every partisan divide, every demographic, and every geography. In a media environment where everything polarizes on contact, a beat that serves the universal economic experience isn’t just editorially valuable. It is strategically rare.

The Convergence

The case for a pocketbook beat collapses a tension that newsrooms have been struggling with for a decade.

We like to talk about political coverage as the bedrock of democracy, and economic coverage as institutional oversight. Fine. But a pocketbook beat forces them into the same room. The thing that most determines how people vote is also the thing they most need help navigating day to day. Civic relevance and audience utility are not competing priorities. They are the exact same beat.

The engagement case writes itself. Pocketbook content is inherently recurring. Prices change. Rates move. Benefits eligibility shifts with economic conditions. Seasonal patterns affect energy costs, food costs, and childcare costs. A newsroom that builds this beat isn’t producing one-off features. It is building a reason to come back every single week—which is the exact habit every local news organization is trying to manufacture with newsletters, push notifications, and loyalty programs. The return-visit engine is already built into the subject matter. You just have to serve it.

The trust case is even stronger. When a newsroom helps you make a decision that saves you money or connects you to a program you didn’t know you qualified for, the relationship changes. It is no longer abstract. The newsroom is no longer just an institution that tells you what happened in the world. It is a tool that makes your life work better.

That isn’t a small shift. That’s the difference between a subscription and a habit.

The Edge

The Philadelphia Fed’s Survey of Professional Forecasters just projected headline CPI hitting 6 percent for the second quarter. Three months ago, the same panel said 2.7 percent. The war-driven spike in energy is rippling through food, through transportation, through shelter. Real wages went negative in April. And the forecasters who watch this for a living are raising their estimates, not lowering them.

The economy is going to be the story of the next twelve months. It is already the story of most people’s daily lives. The question is whether journalism will cover it the way the industry covers everything—as a set of facts reported from a distance—or whether someone will build the beat that actually meets people where they are.

Thirty-one journalists in a room in Athens, Ohio, already know the answer. The moment I told them to stop writing stories and start building tools, they didn’t hesitate. The instinct is there. The permission is what’s missing.

The audience is sitting with a grocery receipt in one hand and a mortgage statement in the other, waiting for someone to help them make sense of the math.

The audience is ready. The framework is there. The only question left is who’s going to build it.

Name one newsroom that’s doing this well. Not doing economic coverage well. Doing economic navigation well. Helping people act, not just understand. I’ve been looking and my list is short. Help me make it longer.

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The journalism industry has a language problem. Not the kind your copy desk catches, either. It’s the kind that hides inside words everyone uses, and nobody bothered to define.

Sustainability. Local. Democracy.

We toss them around at conferences and in grant applications like everyone in the room is in on the same secret. We aren’t. But the word doing the most unexamined work right now, the one we reach for almost reflexively, is legacy media.

I’ll be honest about what got me started on this. Someone referred to a U2 song as a classic the other day, and it made me flinch. Not because they were wrong. Where The Streets Have No Name came out in 1987. By any normal math, it’s a classic. But I was there. I didn’t live through that song as history. I experienced it as a Tuesday. Hearing someone file it away felt less like a compliment and more like a bureaucratic decision. The thing I lived inside of was suddenly being placed behind glass.

That’s exactly what the journalism industry keeps doing to itself.

This is the same trap we fall into when we talk about metrics or funding targets. We rely on the illusion of a shared definition while the entire machine runs on guesswork. I dug into why we keep doing this—and how the industry is optimizing for a baseline it hasn't actually defined—in Why the Journalism Ecosystem is Flying Blind.

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“Legacy media” used to be a pretty specific tool. It pointed at print newspapers and broadcast networks—the places built before the internet. The underlying point was simple: these organizations were designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Fine. That was at least useful to talk about, even if it was a little lazy.

But the word didn’t stay put.

Look at where we are now. Digital-native outlets that launched between 2005 and 2015 are either completely dead or totally unrecognizable. BuzzFeed News, Mic, Mashable—at least the way we used to know them—are just gone. Meanwhile, some of those original “legacy” players adapted and survived. The New York Times has more digital subscribers today than most digital-first startups ever had total readers.

Somewhere along the way, the word quietly shifted. It stopped describing a business model vintage and started functioning as a status marker. It stopped meaning “built before the internet” and started meaning “the ones with the buildings and the mastheads.” It became less about when you were born and more about whether you belong to the old power structure.

That’s rhetoric, not description. And sloppy language leads to sloppy strategy.

Think about the conversations you hear every week. A local newspaper publisher in central Pennsylvania hears “legacy media” and pictures the New York Times and CNN. A tech investor means anything that isn’t algorithmically distributed. A journalism professor uses it to describe advertising-dependent business models, no matter when they launched. A politician uses it to mean “media I want to discredit without naming specific names.” And a 25-year-old podcaster just means everything that existed before they started paying attention.

One term, five completely different jobs. And none of them think they’re using it loosely.

If this breakdown hits close to home, or if you’re currently sitting in a meeting where these words are being thrown around, pass this piece along to a colleague.

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It’s the same disease that infects so much of our internal vocabulary. We use terms that create the illusion of shared understanding while everyone stays safely inside their own silo. When a funder says “we don’t fund legacy media,” what are they actually cutting off? When a platform says “we’re partnering with legacy publishers,” who is actually sitting in the room? The word does real gatekeeping work while pretending to be neutral taxonomy.

It gets even weirder when you look at how journalists themselves handle it.

There is a version of “legacy” that people wear like a badge. The lineage version. You work at an institution that broke Watergate, or published the Pentagon Papers, or has a century of Pulitzers on the wall. In that register, legacy means pedigree. It’s the journalistic equivalent of old money. You don’t have to explain yourself because the masthead does it for you. A Washington Post or BBC credential still opens doors that a perfectly good digital outlet’s credential doesn’t. Everyone knows it, even if we don’t say it out loud.

But there is another version that journalists internalize like a quiet shame. We’re slow. We didn’t adapt fast enough. We lost the audience. The building is half empty. We used to have 400 people in this newsroom, and now we have 90.

In that register, legacy doesn’t mean pedigree. It means decline. And the people who feel that most acutely aren’t the ones who left for digital startups. It’s the ones who stayed. They chose loyalty to the institution and watched the place shrink around them.

A journalist can hold both of those feelings at the exact same time. Pride in the heritage, grief about the trajectory. The word legacy touches both nerves at once, which is why it’s so hard to talk about cleanly.

The pride version works fine when you’re talking to sources or the public. The institutional brand still carries weight out there. But inside the bubble—at conferences, on panels, in Slack channels—the vibe changes. You get this defensive crouch. You can feel it when someone from a major metro daily shares a stage with someone from a scrappy nonprofit newsroom. The nonprofit person has all the moral energy in the room. They’re “the future.” The daily person is quietly calculating whether acknowledging their institution’s resources will read as tone-deaf.

Meanwhile, younger reporters at these same outlets are a different species entirely. They wanted the credential and the training, but they aren’t sentimental about the model. They’ll leave for a better opportunity without a shred of the guilt their predecessors would have carried. Legacy to them is a stepping stone, not an identity.

Here is the deepest irony of the whole thing. The journalists who probably should claim the label most confidently are the ones at regional papers and local television stations who have been doing essential accountability work for decades on shrinking budgets. But they don’t think of themselves as legacy. They just think of themselves as still here. The term feels like it belongs to the big nationals, not to them. The word manages to completely miss the people it most accurately describes while sticking to institutions that have largely moved past the limitations it implies.

We keep trying to paste national frameworks onto regional problems, assuming that what works for a massive brand vintage works for a local operation. It doesn't. If we want to look at how local infrastructure actually survives without the safety net of old money, we have to talk about proximity, not centralized franchises. I mapped out that exact structural math in Scaling Up vs. Scaling Across: The $20 Million Mirage.

So what do we do with it? We should probably stop using “legacy” as an analytical category and just start saying what we actually mean.

Is the organization print-dependent? Advertising-reliant? Institutionally governed? Pre-digital in its cost structure? Nationally scaled? Every single one of those is a real descriptor with real strategic implications. Every one of them points toward specific challenges and specific fixes.

“Legacy” points toward nothing. It’s just a vibe with a footnote.

The journalism industry needs sharper language because it needs sharper thinking. Right now, one of our most frequently used terms is doing little more than letting people sort the world into “us” and “them” without ever having to explain the difference. That isn’t analysis. That’s just positioning.

And if anyone needs me, I’ll be over here not calling The Joshua Tree classic rock.

What does “legacy” mean in your corner of the sandbox? How does your newsroom or organization navigate the gap between pedigree and reality? Drop your thoughts, examples, or pushback in the comments below.

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Dear Friends,

It was just a little over a year ago that I logged onto Substack for the very first time and launched Backstory & Strategy. I’ve structured this anniversary post as a “report to stakeholders” because if you are reading this, you have a vested interest in the architecture of our industry. My pledge back then was a simple one. I wanted to author stories behind newsroom growth, reflections on leadership and trust, lessons from audience strategy, and a look at the human side of building things that actually matter.

In the beginning, I was writing five or six days a week. Within six months, I crossed the 200,000-word mark. That pace was unsustainable, but I don’t regret the output. What I did regret was drowning you in content. So I pulled back, found a better rhythm, and settled into publishing two or three times a week. It turns out that pace is a lot more digestible for both of us.

Substack ranks “Top Posts” by looking at overall engagement, a mix of your likes, comments, and shares. Based on their math, these five pieces resonated the most this year:

• How to Support the Journalists on the Ground in Minneapolis Right Now: On assessing physical risks and funding newsroom safety.

• Unbundling the Pledge Drive: Why the “Viewer Like You” model is broken, and how to fix public media without federal funding.

• The Ghost Market Fallacy: Why CBS and WaPo burn their actual audiences to chase a demographic that doesn’t exist.

• Saved From What?: On why industry “rescues” can act as a tax on the very ecosystems they claim to protect.

• FACE Act & Press Freedom: What the DOJ’s new conspiracy theories mean for reporters covering protests.

But metrics only tell part of the story. Left to my own devices, I found myself repeatedly drawn back to the unglamorous plumbing of journalism. Things like hyperlocal economics, the dysfunction of funder-centric coordination, and product thinking as an alternative to our default, “story-first” editorial mindset.

I work hard to make sure these pieces aren’t just random commentary. They are meant to be the building blocks of a coherent, structural argument about our infrastructure. That is why I keep returning to specific blueprints. The Last Mile series looked at why national JSO tools never reach local newsrooms. The 160x Efficiency Play argued that investing $3,750 per newsroom in coordination infrastructure does more good than throwing $600k in direct grants at elite institutions. I wrote the Sebastopol Protocol as a $330k operational blueprint to professionalize hyperlocal news. And pieces like Too Big to Fail and Categorical Contagion looked at how institutional collapse suppresses confidence across the whole industry, even among models that are structurally unrelated to the one that failed.

There is a running theme here. In When the Diagnosis Becomes the Disease, I argued that constant crisis messaging actually scares away the paying audiences we are trying to attract. The industry keeps telling the public that journalism is dying, and then wonders why they won’t invest in it.

My goal in all of this is not to be a curmudgeon. A curmudgeon complains without proposing anything. I almost always follow a critique with a specific structural alternative, usually with actual dollar figures attached. That isn’t grumbling. That is blueprinting.

I also don’t see myself as a pure, adversarial critic. I try to grant credit where it is due. The Press Forward piece acknowledges that they built something real for funders. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece concedes the acquisition beats an Alden takeover or outright closure. I want to be disciplined about naming what works before pressing on what doesn’t.

If I had to classify what I do here, the most accurate label is probably structural reformer or systems critic. I am operating from inside the ecosystem, but I am trying to apply an outsider’s analytical lens. Think of the difference between a food critic and a restaurant consultant. The food critic tells you the restaurant is bad. The consultant points out that your kitchen layout forces line cooks to cross paths twelve times per service, and that is why your ticket times are slow. I am not questioning the mission. I am questioning the architecture.

So, what can you expect over the next year?

More blueprints. Deeper dives into the operational plumbing local journalism needs to survive. I have no intention of charging for this work. To everyone who has pledged support anyway, thank you for the immense vote of confidence.

But I want to be honest about what I keep circling. There is a coordination failure sitting at the center of this ecosystem that nobody has fully mapped. Funders, service organizations, newsrooms, and technologists are all building in parallel, duplicating effort, missing connections, and losing leverage that only comes from working in concert. That is where Year 2 starts. Not with a complaint, but with the blueprint.

Best,

Yoni

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The Precision Layer

Systems criticism requires rigorous structural accuracy. If you spot a factual error, a broken link, or a miscalculation in any dollar figures or blueprints presented here, please let me know so it can be corrected swiftly.

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I spent this week at Ohio University as a faculty member for the Kiplinger Fellowship program at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. If you’re not familiar with it, the Kiplinger program is one of a handful of nationally prominent journalism fellowships. Since 1973, journalists have competed for slots in a program that brings working newsroom leaders to Athens, Ohio, for an intensive week of workshops, conversations, and the kind of sustained professional development that most of us stopped believing we had time for. Knight Kiplinger, whose family’s generosity makes the program possible, was there most of the week. He was gracious with both his time and his words, and I particularly enjoyed a conversation we had about our shared history at Ottaway Newspapers, even if our tenures there were separated by a few decades.

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I was there representing the American Press Institute. Teaching is core to what we do at API. It always has been. For eighty years, the organization has existed to help newsrooms get better at the work, and direct engagement with working journalists is one of the most important ways we do that. Programs like Kiplinger are exactly where API should be showing up.

This year’s cohort included 31 fellows. I want you to look at this list.

Audra Anderson, managing editor at Cascadia Daily News in Bellingham, Washington. Ann Augherton, managing editor at the Arlington Catholic Herald. Toria Barnhart, deputy editor at The Park Record in Park City. Natasha Barber, managing editor at Star Publications in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Nicholas Bechtel, assistant news editor at NBC4 in Columbus. Katie Brandt, editor-in-chief of Chicago Health Magazine. Chris Coates, senior director of local news at Lee Enterprises. Meghann Garcia, managing editor of the Uvalde Leader-News. Kenneth Garner, publisher of Garner Media Holdings in Marysville, Missouri. Jeff Gaye, publisher of Respect in Cold Lake, Alberta. Dave Gould, president and CEO of Main Street Media of Tennessee. Christopher Gunty, associate publisher and editor at Catholic Review Media in Baltimore. Ashton Hagen, general manager of the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake, Minnesota. Matthew T. Hall, deputy editor of investigations at inewsource in San Diego. Faisal Karimi, an exiled Afghan journalist and publisher of Nowruz Media in San Francisco. Tom Lappas, publisher of the Henrico Citizen. Hyuntaek Lee, an independent journalist from South Korea. Julie Makinen, co-founder and board member of the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation. Jatara McGee, anchor and investigative reporter at WPXI in Pittsburgh. Victor Parkins, publisher of the Mirror-Exchange Media Group in Milan, Tennessee. Geoffrey Plant, editor of the Taos News. Walter Smith Randolph, executive producer of investigations at CBS News New York. Debbie Schimberg, founder and publisher of The Providence Eye. Andy Schotz, editor of The Frederick News-Post. Jen Sieve-Hicks, editor and owner of the Buffalo Bulletin in Buffalo, Wyoming. Elizabeth Stephens, executive editor of the Columbia Missourian and Boone County Journal. Matt Sullivan, chief operating officer of Spotlight Delaware. Becca Tucker, deputy publisher at Straus News. Travis Weik, group editor of the Southern Indiana News Group. Tyra Whitney, news producer at WLS-TV in Chicago. Abel Escudero Zadrayec, founder and director of 8000 in Bahia Blanca, Argentina.

Read it again if you went fast. That list is doing more work than it looks like.

You’ve got a managing editor in Uvalde, a publisher in rural Missouri, an investigative producer at CBS in New York, and a founder running an outlet out of Bahia Blanca. There’s a newspaper owner in Buffalo, Wyoming and an independent journalist from South Korea. Catholic press. Public media veterans. A Lee Enterprises director sitting in the same room as a solo founder in Providence who built her newsroom from scratch.

That range is the point. The problems facing journalism right now are not siloed by format, geography, or business model. And whatever we build next has to work across all of them.

The Workshop

My session was called “The Last Mile: Closing the Gap Between Journalism and Impact.” Regular readers will recognize the framework. The Last Mile is an argument I’ve been developing for months in this newsletter, rooted in a simple observation: journalism has never seriously reckoned with the distance between publication and impact. We publish and assume the work reaches people. It usually doesn’t. Not because the journalism is bad, but because we’ve never treated delivery as a design problem.

I opened with a story from my time at Philly.com. A Saturday when the Inquirer newsroom had an exclusive about a local hospital that had cured a form of blindness in children. Graphics, video, sidebars, the full package. We called in extra staff. We built out pages. And at noon we hit publish.

Nobody read it.

The Phillies, the Flyers, and the Sixers were all playing that afternoon. Our Saturday readers came for sports. A story about curing blindness, with close-up photos of eyes, was not what they were looking for at that moment on that platform. The journalism was excellent. It was also completely irrelevant to the audience we were actually serving that day. That’s not a quality failure. That’s a design failure. And design failures have design solutions.

From there, I introduced the three-part framework that structures the Last Mile argument: Moment, Action, and Channel. The Moment is when the problem hits. Not generally, not eventually. Specifically. The 7 AM headache when “Pete,” your neighbor, is standing in his kitchen trying to figure out why the school bus didn’t come. The Action is the verb. What does Pete need to do? Is he checking, comparing, navigating? If he’s just reading, you’re still in story mode. And the Channel is how the tool reaches him. Not your homepage. Not a story buried on page six. A text message that meets him in his kitchen at 6:45 in the morning.

If an idea doesn’t clear all three, it’s not a tool. It’s just more noise.

The Build

The fellows didn’t just hear the framework. They had to use it.

Each table drew a scenario from what I called the Bucket of Chaos: real community crises stripped down to their operational core. The School Bus Blackout, where routes changed 48 hours before school starts and the district portal is down. The Senior Food Desert, where the only grocery store within walking distance of the senior center just closed. The Water Boil Panic, where an alert went out but nobody knows which blocks are actually affected. The Secret Election, where a polling place is under renovation and no one knows where to vote.

The rules were simple. No articles allowed. You’re building a tool, not writing a story. Prototype the full framework so that Moment, Action, and Channel are all visible. And design for replication, meaning another newsroom in the room could template your solution for their own community.

They had 25 minutes and a resource table full of LEGOs, Post-its, markers, and pipe cleaners. I walked the room, listening for what I call Story Drift, the gravitational pull back toward writing an article instead of building something a person can use. When I heard it, I redirected. What’s the specific moment Pete uses this tool? What does he actually do? How does he get it?

What I Noticed

Here’s what struck me, and it wasn’t in the script.

Every single table built a technology solution. Text alert systems. App-based dashboards. Push notification workflows. Interactive maps with real-time data feeds. These weren’t Silicon Valley product managers. These were editors, publishers, and reporters from newsrooms of every size and description. And yet when asked to solve a community problem, every one of them reached for a phone screen.

An attendee pointed this out to the room and I thought it was an interesting observation. Thirty years ago, I said, if we’d run this same exercise with the same prompts, the solutions would have looked completely different. A phone tree. A flyer inserted into the newspaper. A bulletin board at the library. A partnership with the local radio station to run announcements. Those tools were analog, and they were also effective, because they met people where they actually were.

What changed isn’t just the available technology. What changed is how we think about the problem. Technology has become the default solution set, even for people who spend their careers working in communities where a significant percentage of readers still get their information from print, from church bulletins, from word of mouth at the diner.

That’s not a criticism of the fellows. Their instincts were sound and their builds were sharp. But it revealed something worth sitting with. The Channel in the Last Mile framework is not a platform. It’s not Facebook or an app or a notification system. It’s a conduit. The only question is whether it reaches Pete at the moment he needs it. And sometimes the conduit that closes the last mile is a volunteer with a clipboard knocking on doors at the senior center. Sometimes it’s a laminated card on the counter at the pharmacy. If the problem is that seniors at the community center don’t know where to get groceries, then the laminated card with three phone numbers and a van schedule is the most sophisticated utility tool you can build. It’s not low-tech. It’s the right tech.

The technology default is a form of Story Drift too. Instead of drifting back toward the article, you drift toward the app. Both moves share the same underlying error: designing for the solution you’re comfortable building rather than the problem Pete actually has.

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The Accountability Card

The session ended with what I think matters most. Each fellow wrote down a story their newsroom is currently chasing that gets clicks but leaves Pete exactly where he started. A clicky story. Then they wrote down the utility tool they could build instead, using Moment, Action, and Channel.

They wrote it on two cards. Kept one. Handed the other to the person sitting next to them. That person is their accountability partner. The instruction was simple: call them out next week if they didn’t build it.

I don’t know how many of those cards will turn into real tools. Some will. Some won’t. But something happened in that room that I think matters more than any individual prototype.

Whether these fellows worked in television or newspapers, dailies or weeklies, whether they were exiled from Afghanistan or editing a weekly in Buffalo, Wyoming, they all arrived at the same place. The format differences that usually dominate industry conversations fell away. What replaced them was a shared recognition that relevancy isn’t about how good your journalism is. It’s about whether your journalism is useful. And that the distance between content delivery and genuine utility is the gap most newsrooms haven’t yet learned to close.

Thirty-one journalists walked into a room in Athens, Ohio, thinking about their newsrooms. They walked out thinking about Pete.

What’s the 'laminated card' or 'phone tree' equivalent in your community? I’d love to hear how you’re closing the last mile in the comments.

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The Spring 2026 Impact Report makes a convincing case for funder alignment. It also reveals a massive gap. There is a difference between coordinating money and coordinating the system that money is supposed to build.

Dale Anglin’s director’s letter opens with a line that deserves attention: “What was once a fragmented effort is becoming a coordinated movement.”

That is a significant claim. It is also either demonstrably true or fundamentally incomplete. It just depends on which side of the table you sit on. For funders, Press Forward has built something real. For newsrooms, the coordination Anglin describes is largely invisible.

Press Forward's Spring 2026 Impact Report arrives just as research commissioned by Arnold Ventures, using Press Forward's own data, started saying the quiet part out loud. In March, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s analysis of 559 infrastructure proposals concluded that the field’s challenges are systemic. She argued the only way to be responsible is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.

Read the impact report through that lens and something odd emerges. The report describes an organization that successfully coordinated one layer of the ecosystem. But the layer that actually touches newsrooms? That is still largely unbuilt. This is a story of genuine accomplishment and structural incompleteness published in the same document.

What Press Forward Actually Built

Let’s be precise about the infrastructure. The report uses that word generously, but Press Forward really built three things.

First, they built a funder coordination protocol. This is a mechanism for 130-plus foundations to share info and align strategy. The Public Media Working Group is the clearest example. It is valuable, but it is coordination among funders. It isn’t infrastructure that newsrooms actually interact with.

Second, they built a geographic distribution network. There are forty-four chapters covering 70% of states. But look at the scaffolding. These chapters are housed at existing community foundations. It is operationally impressive, but they didn’t build new institutional capacity. The scaffolding is borrowed.

Third, they built a grantee support ecosystem. Press Forward offers Pooled Fund recipients a range of programs, including a Maynard Institute business cohort, sponsored access to affinity conferences, and the Business of Local Conference. But the centerpiece is the LION Publishers sustainability audits paired with Blue Engine Collaborative coaching for 205 recipients. This is the closest thing to operational infrastructure for newsrooms in the whole report, and the design pattern worth examining.

Everything else—the Summit, the Knight Media Forum workshops, the docuseries—is programming. Programming is fine. But programming doesn’t persist when the event ends. Infrastructure does.

The Ratio That Tells the Story

Of the funding flowing through Press Forward's network, $230 million went to journalism support organizations (JSOs). The Pooled Fund put $20 million directly to 205 of the smallest newsrooms. Those are the two figures the report highlights. But they are not the full picture. According to Press Forward, 800 newsrooms received direct funder-to-newsroom grants from across the 131-funder network, a figure that does not include additional newsrooms reached through JSO partners. The report does not provide a total dollar figure for those direct grants, which makes it difficult to assess how the $230 million in JSO investment compares to total direct newsroom funding. What is visible is that the JSO investment is the largest named figure in the report, and the structural question remains: is that $230 million coordinated, or is it reinforcing duplication?

An important qualifier: much of that $230 million is aligned grantmaking, where foundations give independently, and Press Forward counts the grants. The ratio may reflect the field's existing preferences more than a deliberate Press Forward decision. But that cuts both ways. If the $400 million mostly tracks what funders were already doing, the coordination layer is thinner than the headline suggests.

The report frames this as a feature. JSOs are supposed to create a multiplier effect. This is where I wrote about the General Hospital problem in January. When there is no coordination layer routing newsrooms to the right JSO, every major JSO feels pressure to become a one-stop shop. Pumping $230 million into that ecosystem without addressing the coordination failure risks reinforcing the duplication the field cannot afford.

The question isn’t whether Press Forward intended this ratio. They probably didn’t. The question is whether they treat it as a structural problem to be solved or just an outcome to be reported. The impact report does the latter.

The 800 Number and the Legibility Problem

The report claims ‘nearly 800 newsrooms receiving direct support from our network.’ Press Forward has clarified that this represents direct funder-to-newsroom grants, with no intermediary involved. Newsrooms reached through JSO partners are not counted in the 800 and would make the total larger.

An earlier version of this piece misread that figure as including intermediary-funded newsrooms. The error was mine. But it was an error invited by the report’s own presentation. The impact report describes $230 million flowing to JSOs that ‘provide both funding and capacity-building support to local newsrooms,’ then cites 800 newsrooms receiving ‘direct support from our network,’ without defining ‘direct’ or distinguishing between the two categories. A reader has no way to know, from the report alone, which newsrooms are counted and which are not.

This is a legibility problem, not an honesty problem. But legibility matters in impact reporting. If the field cannot tell from your marquee document how many newsrooms your network actually reaches, through what channels, and at what depth, then the document is not yet doing the work it needs to do.

The LION/Blue Engine Blueprint

The most important thing in this report isn’t the $400 million. It is a design pattern buried on page six. Press Forward seems to have treated it as a program choice rather than a strategic revelation.

They replaced traditional grant reporting with sustainability audits. Instead of asking newsrooms to write reports justifying the money, they partnered with LION to conduct structured assessments. Then they paired each audit with coaching from Blue Engine.

This is what coordination logic looks like when it’s working. Three organizations. Three roles. One newsroom experience.The newsroom doesn’t have to figure out who to call. The system handles the routing. If Press Forward is looking for its North Star, it already built one.

But look at who is doing the routing. LION and Blue Engine are not large organizations. They are being asked to deliver a pipeline to 205 newsrooms because Press Forward designed the coordination and then contracted it out. The design is right. The question is whether it can hold at scale.

The report calls the resulting data 'one of the most comprehensive data sets available.' LION Publishers has published initial findings, and a fuller presentation is forthcoming at the Lenfest News Philanthropy conference. But the impact report itself, the document designed to show the field what Press Forward has accomplished, does not engage with what the audits are revealing at a cohort level.

The Power Question

Press Forward is a funder-designed, funder-governed, funder-staffed coordination layer. Dick Tofel flagged this from the start. He noted how much of this was built from the top down.

The impact report is an answer to critics who said the money wasn’t moving. The money is moving. The chapters are growing. But the governance question the critics raised hasn’t been addressed. It has just been outlasted.

Coordination Is Not a Synonym for Alignment

Funder alignment means foundations agree on priorities. Funder coordination means they share information. System coordination means a newsroom in Cadiz, Ohio, can make one call and get routed to the right resource.

Press Forward has achieved the first two. The third doesn’t exist.

In product terms, they optimized the database but haven’t touched the user interface. The back end is more efficient. The newsroom’s experience hasn’t changed. But Press Forward already built the model that would change it. The LION/Blue Engine pipeline works. The answer to “what comes next?” is the decision to treat that design as the blueprint for the whole system.

Two and a half years and $400 million in, the newsroom in Cadiz still doesn’t know who to call. Someone at Press Forward already designed the switchboard. It just hasn’t been plugged in.

Let’s Talk About This

I have strong views, loosely held. I’d rather be corrected than comfortable.

• To the Press Forward team: You already built the blueprint. What would it take to make that design pattern the default rather than the exception?

• To newsroom leaders who received direct funding from a Press Forward-aligned funder: Did you know you were part of the Press Forward network? Did that connection come with anything beyond the grant itself?

• To the researchers: Do you see evidence that the “system solutions” conclusion was actually absorbed?

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Last week, a hacking group called ShinyHunters hit Instructure’s Canvas platform — the learning management system that underpins course delivery, grading, messaging, and student records for thousands of colleges and universities across the United States. The breach was double: once on April 29, and again days later when students received on-screen notifications that their data had been stolen. Names, email addresses, student IDs, and private messages. Potentially hundreds of millions of people. Finals week.

An EdTech security expert called it “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history.”

The reason it was so big wasn’t a particularly sophisticated attack. It was the architecture. Canvas had become, quietly and almost inevitably, a single point of catastrophic failure — not because any one school made a bad decision, but because an entire sector had spent a decade consolidating onto the same infrastructure without ever reckoning with the systemic risk they were accepting in exchange for convenience and cost savings. (You can follow the live technical updates on the breach at Instructure’s Incident Report page).

If you work in news, this should feel familiar. Because we’ve done the same thing.

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The CMS Monoculture Nobody Talks About

The news industry’s digital publishing infrastructure has consolidated, over roughly the same decade, around a short list of dominant content management systems. Arc XP — born at the Washington Post, now powering hundreds of sites worldwide. WordPress VIP, the managed enterprise tier of the platform that already runs 43 percent of the entire web. Chorus, which Vox Media built and then commercialized. A handful of others.

The consolidation happened for understandable reasons: cost, workflow efficiency, and the genuine difficulty of building and maintaining custom software at deadline. When the Washington Post built Arc in the first place, it was specifically because vendor-provided systems kept failing them on deadline. The irony is that Arc then became the vendor dependency for everyone else.

This is the central trap of an Infrastructure Monoculture: in an effort to escape the fragility of legacy tools, we have all moved into the same high-rent apartment complex. It’s cleaner and more efficient, but we no longer control the locks, and a single fire in the basement can now leave an entire industry out in the cold.

What a Breach at This Layer Would Actually Mean

The Canvas breach exposed student IDs and private messages. That’s damaging. But consider what a comparable breach of a dominant news CMS would expose. We have to stop thinking of a CMS as a simple “text editor” and start recognizing it for what it actually is: a data lake of our most sensitive intellectual and human capital.

• Source communications. Tip lines, encrypted or not, often flow through or integrate with CMS infrastructure. A breach that reaches newsroom communications doesn’t just embarrass an organization — it can identify confidential sources, expose ongoing investigations, or endanger people who trusted a journalist with sensitive information.

• Unpublished drafts. Investigations that haven’t run yet. Stories that name people who don’t yet know they’re being named. Pre-publication content has its own vulnerability profile entirely separate from what’s publicly accessible.

• Subscriber and audience data. News organizations have spent years building direct reader relationships. That data — behavioral, financial, identity — lives adjacent to or within CMS-connected infrastructure at many organizations.

• The operational layer itself. If a dominant CMS goes down — through a ransomware attack or an extended outage — hundreds of newsrooms go dark simultaneously. Not just their archives. Their ability to publish, period.

The Canvas incident was devastating, partly because it hit during finals week. A comparable scenario in news would mean dozens of major editorial teams unable to publish during a presidential election night or a high-stakes breaking news event. In that moment, the failure isn’t just a business problem; it’s a failure of democratic infrastructure.

The “It Won’t Happen to Us” Problem

The EdTech expert quoted in 404 Media’s coverage identified the core failure mode precisely: the shift from distributed, self-hosted systems to centralized cloud infrastructure “happened so suddenly, about 10 years ago,” that institutions never actually evaluated what they were trading away.

The Post’s own experience is instructive here. After commercializing Arc and licensing it to hundreds of publishers, Post engineers eventually determined that Arc XP had become too simplified — a victim of its own success in trying to serve a mass market — to meet the Post’s own evolving needs. They built an internal fork, called Spectrum, to run their own site. The organization that built a platform to escape vendor dependency ended up forking its own commercialized platform to escape itself.

Ben Werdmuller, Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, distills a thoughtful security posture around shared infrastructure into three questions every newsroom leader should be able to answer:

“If something goes wrong with my vendor — whether they’re compromised or they make choices that are no longer in line with my needs and values — can I move to another one without rebuilding my site or losing everything? Will my vendor pick up the phone and help me if something goes wrong, so that it’s not all on my team to fix? And is it a cost, whether in time, team, or resources, that I can easily bear into the future?”

Most newsrooms, if they’re being honest, can’t confidently answer yes to all three.

The Open-Source Alternative That Exists but Doesn’t Scale

There is a parallel universe where this risk is more distributed. Sourcefabric’s Superdesk or the open-source platform Ghost offer full self-hosting control. Werdmuller sees these as a meaningful middle path: “When you’re using an open platform, you can much more easily maintain a mirror elsewhere that you can flip to if something goes awry.”

The honest problem is that even this requires technical capacity that most local and independent newsrooms don’t have. Running your own infrastructure isn’t free. If anything, staff reductions across the industry have made the economics of “managed” platforms even more seductive.

This is the version of the Canvas problem that’s specific to journalism: the newsrooms with the least capacity to manage their own infrastructure are also the most dependent on shared platforms — and the least equipped to respond when something goes wrong. The risk is concentrated precisely where the industry is most fragile.

The Conversation That Isn’t Happening

The broadcast industry has a model for something better. The National Association of Broadcasters maintains engineering standards bodies because they recognized long ago that a transmitter failure or a spectrum vulnerability isn’t just one station’s issue; it’s everyone’s.

Digital news publishing has no equivalent. No industry body is stress-testing the infrastructure that hundreds of newsrooms depend on to function. Werdmuller puts the underlying problem plainly: “News treats the internet as something that happens to it, like an asteroid.”

But he also sees a path out. “Real resilience will only come when the industry can control its own tools and data.” He points to edtech’s Apereo Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation as models. Organizations like Tiny News Collective are early analogs, but nothing yet exists with the explicit mandate of building what Werdmuller calls a “news stack” — a resilient, open infrastructure that newsrooms of any size can take advantage of.

That’s the gap Canvas just made visible. It’s also the gap the industry has the knowledge, the institutions, and the urgency to close — if it chooses to treat this as the shared problem it is.

Is your newsroom prepared for a single-point-of-failure event? I’d love to hear how your team manages vendor risk or if you’re exploring open-source alternatives. Let’s start the conversation in the comments.

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I recently watched an organizational leader I know speak at an event about AI. This person is smart. They are a compelling speaker. They know their sector cold. But an AI expert they are not—not even close. They aren’t even an experimenter, really. And yet there they were, holding forth on AI strategy as if just standing near the conversation somehow made them the expert.

I’m not trying to be mean—I’m saying this because I’ve seen it happen five times since. And I bet you have, too.

Something is happening across every sector right now that has a precise historical parallel, and the parallel should worry you. We are living through a replay of the patent medicine era. The technology is different—the human dynamics are identical.

The Wagon Rolls In

For over a hundred years, traveling salesmen zigzagged across the country selling bottled “miracles,” dietary regimens, and pseudo-scientific cures for everything from tuberculosis to infertility. These weren’t just guys with wagons; they were sophisticated operations.

A typical show would roll into town, set up in the square, and open with entertainment. Music, comedy, magic tricks—a full variety act. The show drew the crowd. The crowd got comfortable. And then the “doctor” would take the stage.

The pitches were good. They had to be. These were people whose income depended entirely on their ability to make you believe, in the span of an hour, that they had the answer to your most urgent problem.

Some of what they sold was harmless—sugar water and herbal tinctures. Some of it was not. Many patent medicines contained alcohol, opium, cocaine, or mercury. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company ran dozens of simultaneous touring shows, selling “Kickapoo Indian Sagwa” as a cure-all. The name itself was a calculated move—it borrowed the perceived authenticity of Indigenous healing traditions and attached it to a product that had nothing to do with them.

This worked for over a century. Not because Americans were stupid—but because the conditions were perfect.

The Five Conditions

Here is what made the patent medicine era possible, and here is why the current AI consulting boom feels so familiar.

The knowledge asymmetry. Back then, how was a regular person supposed to vet a medical claim? They couldn’t. They didn’t have the data or the training to tell the difference between a real doctor and a good actor. Today, most organizational leaders are being asked to buy a jet engine based on the salesperson’s ability to describe the clouds. They can’t tell the difference between someone who has built production systems and someone who has built slide decks. The vocabulary is the same. The confidence is the same. The results are not.

The demand-side desperation. Rural Americans had real health problems and almost no access to real physicians. That gap created the market. Today, leaders across nonprofits, education, and local government have urgent operational questions about AI. The pressure is institutional. And the supply of people who can answer those questions with genuine, contextualized expertise is far smaller than the supply of people claiming to. When you are desperate and the wagon shows up, you don’t demand credentials—you buy a bottle.

The borrowed authority play. Kickapoo slapped an Indigenous name on sugar water. Today’s version is the consultant who name-drops partnerships with AI labs or leans on a job title at a recognizable company that they held for less than a year. Duration of experience is not depth of experience, but from the outside, they are nearly impossible to distinguish. The market rewards the signal, not the substance.

The cure-all pitch. Patent medicines claimed to fix everything—lungs, liver, joints, and disposition. The AI consulting equivalent is the vendor who tells you that AI will solve your revenue problem, your workflow problem, and your staffing problem all through one engagement. Anyone who has actually implemented this technology knows it is specific, iterative, and deeply context-dependent. If someone is selling you transformation in a box, you are looking at Sagwa.

The regulation vacuum. There was no FDA until 1906. There was no requirement to prove a health claim before making it. Today, there is no credentialing body for AI consultants—no license to revoke, no professional standard, no malpractice. The market is entirely self-policing, which means it is not policed at all.

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The Variety Show Never Ended

The medicine show didn’t lead with the sales pitch. It led with entertainment. You had to build the crowd before you could sell to it. The modern equivalent is LinkedIn—or more precisely, the “thought leadership” industrial complex that now runs on it.

Daily posts. Hot takes. Carousel decks with titles like “5 AI Prompts That Will 10x Your Nonprofit.” These are the variety act. The content builds the audience; the audience builds the authority; the authority converts to consulting revenue. It is the same funnel—just faster and with better distribution.

And just like the original medicine shows, most of it is optimized for performance rather than accuracy. The algorithm rewards the pitch, not the medicine.

Here is the part that should make you uncomfortable: much of this content is itself generated by AI. The tools being sold are producing the marketing that sells the tools. The medicine show is now powered by the medicine. A person with no implementation experience can use ChatGPT to produce a carousel deck that looks indistinguishable from one created by an expert. That is a new wrinkle the original patent medicine salesmen would have envied. They at least had to mix the Sagwa themselves.

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How It Ended Last Time

What killed the patent medicine era was not better medicine shows—it was journalism and institutional action.

In 1905, Samuel Hopkins Adams published The Great American Fraud. He didn’t just play whack-a-mole with individual products—he tore down the whole system. He gave people a way to actually judge what they were buying. It helped lead to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which basically just forced people to stop lying on their labels.

Adams wasn’t telling people to stop being sick; he was giving them a fighting chance. He gave them diagnostic tools and pushed for structural accountability. The Act didn’t ban medicine—it just required that the label match the contents.

Reading the Label

We don’t have a Pure Food and Drug Act for AI consulting. We probably won’t get one. But the honest labeling principle still works for any leader willing to apply it. Before you sign an AI consulting engagement, ask these five questions:

Can they show you implementation work? Not a strategy deck—actual systems they built, in actual organizations, that are still running. If the portfolio is all keynotes and frameworks, you are buying Sagwa.

Can they name what AI will not solve? Anyone selling you certainty across the board is performing, not advising. Real expertise comes with boundaries.

Are they building your internal capacity or your dependency on them? The best consultants build you a bridge; the worst ones just build themselves a toll booth. If they can’t tell you exactly what your team will be able to do without them in six months, they aren’t there to help—they’re there to extract.

What is their actual, specific experience with your sector? AI implementation in a newsroom is not the same as implementation in a bank. Someone who has worked across no sectors but speaks confidently about all of them is a red flag.

Will they admit what they don’t know? This is the ultimate tell. In a field moving this fast, anyone claiming they’ve mastered the whole thing is either lying or delusional. That bit of uncertainty isn’t a weakness—it’s the only way you know you’re talking to a human being and not a script.

Have you encountered the AI medicine show in your sector? I’d love to hear it. Drop your story in the comments—the more specific, the more useful to other readers.

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The Burden Is on You

The patent medicine era didn’t end because consumers got smarter. It ended because institutions built the infrastructure to protect people from having to be experts in everything. We haven’t built that infrastructure for AI yet—not for your local school board, your favorite nonprofit, or your city hall.

So, for now? The burden is on you.

But here’s the thing: you don’t actually have to become an AI genius to protect your organization. You just have to learn how to read the bottle. The medicine shows ended when people stopped buying what they couldn’t verify. That lesson is 120 years old—and it still works.

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Here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine you run a small local news organization. You have a beat reporter covering housing, a part-time photographer, and a community editor who’s also doing audience analytics. It’s Tuesday morning and your housing reporter calls in sick — the same day the city council is voting on a zoning change that will displace 400 families.

Who do you call?

If you’re like most local newsrooms, you start improvising. You scroll through your contacts. You text a freelancer who may or may not be available. You post something vague on social media. You cobble together coverage that’s half what it should be, filed late, by someone who doesn’t know the players. By the time you find a body to cover it, the vote is over, the families are displaced, and your “coverage” is just a rehashed press release.

Now imagine a different scenario. You have a map. Not a geographic map — a relationship map. It shows you exactly who in your community covers housing issues, who attends those council meetings anyway, who has built trust with the affected residents, and who has already agreed to call you when something breaks. You built that map six months ago, when nothing was on fire.

That’s pod mapping. And journalism hasn’t discovered it yet.

Where It Comes From

Pod mapping was developed in 2014 by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, originally as a tool for communities experiencing violence and harm — a way to identify, in advance, who you’d call on in a crisis and what you could offer in return. It has since spread to disability communities, mutual aid networks during COVID-19, LGBTQ+ safety planning, and permaculture collectives. City Bureau’s Documenters Network ran a pod-mapping workshop just last week — using it to help community members build mutual support systems with one another. That’s a meaningful step. But the tool still hasn’t been applied to the more fundamental question: how should a newsroom use it to structure its relationships with the community it covers?

The tool is deceptively simple: draw a circle with yourself at the center. In the inner rings, place the people you can count on and who count on you. Note what each person brings. Note what you bring to them. Establish how you’ll communicate. Do this work now, before the crisis, when you’re calm and resourced — not when you’re scrambling.

The core insight isn’t the map itself. It’s the timing and the reciprocity. You’re not building a Rolodex. You’re building a relationship infrastructure — one that functions under pressure because it was maintained under normal conditions.

Journalism has never formally adopted this. It should.

A Census vs. a Covenant

To be fair, the field isn’t starting from zero. Asset mapping — identifying a community’s existing resources, influencers, and information nodes — has gained real traction in community-centered newsrooms. The American Press Institute has championed it. PublicSource in Pittsburgh built genuine relationships by canvassing neighborhoods, documenting gathering spaces, and mapping community connectors before they needed them as sources. The Journalism + Design Lab recently introduced a “Community News Roles” framework at ONA that reframes journalism as a set of actions — documenting, sensemaking, facilitating, navigating — that community members already perform every day, with or without a newsroom’s involvement.

These are good tools. But they share a structural limitation worth naming clearly.

Asset mapping is a census: it asks what exists? It identifies the organizations, connectors, and information nodes in a community. It tells you the landscape. It’s valuable, and most newsrooms should be doing more of it.

Pod mapping is a covenant: it asks who shows up when things break? It doesn’t just identify people — it establishes mutual obligation. The difference is the difference between a contact list and a relationship. A census tells you who lives on the block. A covenant tells you who has your spare key.

Consider what that distinction looks like in practice. Sarah Stonbely, a senior research associate at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, recently used AI to map the information landscape in Charlotte, N.C. Her findings reframe the whole premise: many communities, she argues, are better described as “information oceans” than news deserts. Of the 66 local information providers she catalogued in Charlotte, fewer than half are staffed newsrooms. The rest are podcasts, newsletters, Instagram accounts, faith-based weeklies, sports blogs — and civil society organizations like schools, libraries, and city agencies that fill gaps the press leaves open.

Asset mapping revealed all of that. It’s an extraordinary census. But here’s what the map can’t tell you: which of those 66 providers would answer your call at 11pm on a Tuesday. Which ones would flag a story before it broke. Which ones have already earned trust in the neighborhoods your newsroom hasn’t reached. The census shows you the ocean. The covenant is how you stop drowning in it.

Journalism has built tools for the census. It hasn’t built tools for the covenant. That’s the gap.

Building a newsroom that survives requires more than just better tools—it requires a different mental model. If you’re finding value in these frameworks for the “Last Mile” of journalism, join a community of media leaders rethinking the infrastructure of trust.

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The Reciprocity Gap

Consider what local newsrooms are actually asking of community members when they do engagement work: attend our event, fill out our survey, respond to our callout, trust our coverage. The exchange is largely one-directional, even when the intentions are generous.

Pod mapping introduces a different logic — one borrowed from mutual aid theory — in which the relationship is the infrastructure. You don’t extract value from it when you need it. You maintain it continuously, because everyone in the pod has something at stake.

For a local newsroom, a “coverage pod” built on this logic might look like this:

• A housing beat reporter maintains explicit relationships with three community members who attend every council meeting and have agreed to text her when something unusual happens. In exchange, she gives them early access to her stories for community review before publication.

• A neighborhood newsletter editor and a local public radio station have a standing agreement: when one has a tip they can’t pursue, they pass it to the other. When one needs a quote from a community member they don’t have access to, the other makes an introduction.

• A small nonprofit newsroom maps the connectors in each of its five coverage neighborhoods — not just as sources, but as partners. Those connectors know what the newsroom can and can’t do, and the newsroom knows what crises are coming before they become front-page news.

None of this is revolutionary on its face. Reporters have always had sources. Newsrooms have always had informal networks. What pod mapping adds is intentionality and reciprocity — the explicit acknowledgment that these relationships require maintenance, that they involve mutual obligation, and that they need to be documented somewhere other than one reporter’s head.

That last point matters more than it sounds. When that reporter leaves — and in local news, they always leave — the pod doesn’t dissolve. The map survives.

What a Journalism Pod Map Could Look Like

Step 1: Define your pod’s purpose. Is this a beat-specific pod (housing, education, public safety)? A geographic pod (the northeast quadrant of your coverage area)? A resilience pod (who can help you publish when your staff is depleted)?

Step 2: Map the people. Who already knows things your newsroom needs to know? Who attends the meetings you can’t staff? Who translates — literally or culturally — between your newsroom and communities you underserve? Who trusts you, and who doesn’t yet but could? Stonbely’s Charlotte map is instructive here: the information providers worth mapping aren’t just journalists. The faith-based weekly, the neighborhood Instagram account, the library’s digital literacy program — these are pod candidates too.

Step 3: Define the exchange. For each relationship, be explicit: what does this person offer, and what does your newsroom offer in return? Early story access? Credit? Community review? A standing agreement to amplify their work? Mutual aid has to be mutual.

A word for the traditionalists in the room: offering community review before publication isn’t the same as surrendering editorial control. You’re not giving anyone a veto. Think of it less as “early access” and more as a fact-check for nuance — a chance for pod members to validate their own lived experience before the story goes out. The reporter still decides what runs. What changes is the quality of information she’s working with — and the degree to which the community believes she actually tried to get it right. That’s not a compromise of independence. It’s an upgrade to accuracy.

Step 4: Set communication norms. How do you stay in contact between crises? A monthly check-in? A group text? A shared document? The specific channel matters less than the commitment to use it.

Step 5: Review and refresh. Pods change. People move, burn out, change jobs. Set a cadence — quarterly is reasonable — to review who’s in your pod, what’s changed, and what relationships need investment.

The Pre-Crisis Principle

The most underappreciated element of pod mapping is its insistence on doing the work before you need it.

Most newsroom community engagement happens reactively: a crisis hits, a story demands sources the newsroom doesn’t have, a community erupts in distrust over coverage that missed the mark. The newsroom scrambles to build relationships in the middle of a fire.

Pod mapping treats this as a design failure. The relationships have to pre-exist the crisis to be functional during it. A neighbor you’ve never spoken to cannot meaningfully help you when the flood comes. A community connector you’ve never invested in will not answer your call at 11pm on a Tuesday.

This is the Last Mile problem applied to relationships, not just distribution. Journalism tends to fixate on the pipe — the story, the platform, the delivery mechanism — and neglect the porch, the last few feet where information actually lands in someone’s life, in a form they trust, from a source they recognize. The gap between the newsroom and the community it ostensibly serves isn’t just geographic or demographic. It’s relational. And unlike coverage gaps, which are visible and embarrassing, relationship gaps are invisible until they’re catastrophic — until the community you needed to warn you didn’t pick up, because you’d never given them a reason to.

A Note on Scale

Pod mapping doesn’t scale the way a database does. That’s a feature, not a bug.

The journalism field has spent a decade trying to solve the community trust problem through technology: better analytics, smarter CMS tools, AI-driven personalization. What the research consistently shows is that trust is built through repeated, human, reciprocal contact — not through optimized content delivery.

A newsroom with three carefully maintained pods — one per major beat, 10-15 relationships each — has more genuine community infrastructure than a newsroom with 50,000 email subscribers and no one who will answer the phone.

This doesn’t mean scale doesn’t matter. It means relationship density is a precondition for scale that works. You can’t distribute to a community you don’t have relationships with. You can’t cover a community you don’t have access to. And you can’t maintain access if the relationship is purely extractive.

The crisis in local news is a design failure, but the solution is relational. If you know an editor or a journalist who is currently “scrambling in the fire,” pass this framework along. Let’s build the map together.

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Why Now

The timing argument for this isn’t subtle.

Local newsrooms are shrinking. Beats are being consolidated. Reporters are covering more geography with less institutional knowledge. The redundancies that used to exist — the veteran reporter who knew every alderman, the editor who’d covered the school district for 15 years — are gone or going.

Pod mapping is a response to that attrition. It externalizes relationship knowledge that used to live in individual journalists’ heads. It distributes the work of community maintenance across more people, some of them not on payroll. And it builds the kind of mutual accountability that makes communities invested in a newsroom’s survival — not just as a civic abstraction, but as a concrete relationship they’ve participated in building.

The tool wasn’t designed for journalism. But the problem it solves — how do you maintain the relationships you need before you desperately need them — is exactly journalism’s problem right now.

The field has built tools for the census. It’s time to build tools for the covenant.

The American Press Institute has published extensively on asset mapping for newsrooms — including Letrell Crittenden’s step-by-step guide and a framework for identifying your role in the information commons. Their work is a useful complement to the pod mapping approach described here — and a good starting point for newsrooms ready to begin. A companion Coverage Pod Worksheet — a one-page practical tool for newsrooms — is forthcoming.

Join the Conversation

Who is in your pod?

I’m curious to hear from those of you already doing this work—perhaps under a different name. What does reciprocity look like in your community? What “spare keys” have you been offered lately?

Drop a note in the comments; I’d love to learn from your infrastructure.

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I strive for the same nuance I advocate for. If you spot a factual error, a missing link, or a point that lacks necessary context, please report an error here. Your feedback is a vital part of this publication’s accuracy.

When the Federal Trade Commission announced a July workshop titled “The Dangers of Gender-Affirming Care for Minors,” most of the journalism conversation focused on the obvious: what it signals about the Trump administration’s posture toward trans coverage, which outlets might face scrutiny, and whether the agency could actually reach editorial content. Those are real questions. They are also the wrong ones to be asking.

The more durable question is structural. And it doesn’t require you to have any opinion about gender medicine at all.

Here it is: creator journalists built businesses on infrastructure they do not own, with legal exposure they did not map, on the assumption that platform neutrality was a permanent condition. That assumption is now being tested. What the FTC’s move actually demonstrates is not the danger of covering any particular subject. It is the danger of confusing your distribution platform with your business foundation.

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The Revenue Cut Is the Hook

Substack charges writers a 10 percent cut of paid subscription revenue. That fact, unremarkable when you are thinking about it as a transaction fee, looks quite different when a federal agency is scanning for commercial actors with a financial stake in the content they host.

The Federal Trade Commission Act gives the agency broad authority to pursue unfair or deceptive practices “in or affecting commerce.” The standard is elastic. The agency has stretched it before, against social platforms, against health supplement advertisers, against influencers who failed to disclose paid relationships. The legal theory doesn’t require that Substack wrote anything. It requires that Substack profited from it.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has signaled clearly that he sees his mandate extending well beyond medical providers. An internal memo obtained by The Daily Wire refers to “doctors, therapists, hospitals, and others” as potential targets. That word “others” is load-bearing. It is an invitation to expand the perimeter.

A revenue-sharing arrangement is what puts Substack inside that perimeter. A neutral utility charges a flat fee to move content from one place to another. It has no stake in what the content says or whether it succeeds. A platform that takes 10 percent of every dollar a writer earns is not a utility. It is a financial partner. An aggressive regulator does not need to stretch far to argue that a partner in the revenue is a partner in the practice. That framing does not need to prevail in court to be useful. It needs to be plausible enough to justify an investigation.

No enforcement action against a publishing platform is imminent. That is not the point. The point is that Substack, by design, is a commercially entangled intermediary in a way that creates exactly the kind of regulatory surface area an aggressive agency can exploit. Whether or not they choose to do so, the option exists. And the existence of the option is itself consequential

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Section 230 Does Not Save You

The instinctive response from people with some platform policy background is to reach for Section 230. Platforms are protected from liability for third-party content. That protection is real, and it matters in tort contexts.

It does not apply here. Section 230 shields platforms from civil lawsuits and certain state criminal laws predicated on user content. It does not shield them from federal regulatory action. The FTC is not a plaintiff suing Substack for defamation. It is a federal agency asserting that a commercial practice is unfair or deceptive. That is a different legal category entirely, and Section 230 sits outside it.

The distinction matters because it reframes what the FTC is actually looking at. The product under scrutiny is not the article. It is the transaction the article sits inside. A writer publishing health claims on a platform that takes a cut of every subscription sold as a result is not, in the FTC’s analytical frame, purely a press actor. They are a participant in a commercial chain. Section 230 was never designed to protect that chain.

The FOSTA-SESTA legislation of 2018 is the clearest precedent for how this works. Congress carved out a specific category of harm, sex trafficking, and made platforms liable for content facilitating it regardless of Section 230. The mechanism was legislative rather than regulatory, but the psychological effect on platforms was identical. Craigslist shut down its personals section the day the bill passed. Not because a court ordered it. Because the legal uncertainty was enough to make the business calculation obvious. That is the template. The FTC does not need a FOSTA-SESTA equivalent to produce the same result. It needs to make the uncertainty expensive enough that platforms act first.

This distinction has practical consequences for writers who believe their platform’s legal team stands between them and enforcement. It does not, in any situation that actually matters.

The Realistic Threat Is Not a Lawsuit

The FTC does not need to win in court to achieve a chilling effect. The mechanism is cheaper and more reliable than that.

A Civil Investigative Demand, the agency’s equivalent of a subpoena, requires no judicial approval. It demands documents, communications, and records. Responding to one costs money and time that a solo operator does not have. Even a writer with an airtight legal defense faces the economic reality of mounting that defense without institutional resources. The investigation becomes the punishment before any finding is made.

More likely still: Substack moves on its own. When federal regulators signal hostility toward a category of content, platforms historically do not wait for enforcement. They update terms of service. They add warnings. They demonetize. They make friction. This happened in the opposite political direction during the COVID-era misinformation push, when platforms implemented content policies not because they were legally required to but because they calculated that proactive compliance was cheaper than regulatory conflict.

That dynamic works in any political direction. The writers on those platforms had no vote in the decision and no exit path that preserved their business model intact.

The international record makes this concrete. When Canada passed its Online News Act in 2023, the regulatory goal was explicitly to help publishers by forcing platforms to pay for news content. Meta’s response was to block all news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users. News outlets lost 85 percent of their engagement on those platforms overnight. Small independent publishers in rural areas, where Facebook was often the only meaningful distribution channel, had no recourse and no alternative. The regulation was designed to protect journalism. The outcome for writers was the same as if it hadn’t been. Australia’s experience with its own News Media Bargaining Code added a second lesson: even when platforms did negotiate, they decided unilaterally which outlets counted as legitimate journalism worth bargaining with. Small publishers were largely cut out of deals entirely. The pattern across both cases is identical to the one the FTC action threatens to trigger here. When a regulatory confrontation forces a platform to choose between its business interests and its hosted publishers, it chooses its business interests. The intent of the regulation does not change that calculus.

Is your newsroom or newsletter prepared for this shift? Share this with your leadership team.

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Ghost Is a Different Architecture

This is not a piece about any one platform. Medium’s curation function pushes further toward publisher behavior than Substack’s relatively passive hosting posture, which cuts both ways legally: more editorial involvement makes the platform look more like a publisher, and the writer less like an independent press actor with First Amendment protection standing on their own. Medium also controls the subscriber relationship entirely, so a writer pressured off the platform loses distribution, audience, and income in a single move with no portable business underneath.

Beehiiv, the fast-growing newsletter platform founded by Morning Brew alumni, occupies a different position. It charges a flat monthly software fee with no percentage cut of subscription revenue — a deliberate structural choice designed to compete with Substack’s 10 percent. On that dimension, it looks safer. But roughly a third of beehiiv’s revenue comes from its native ad network and its Boosts marketplace, where it takes a 20 percent cut of transactions when creators pay other newsletters to acquire subscribers. That is a different kind of commercial entanglement, not in the subscription revenue but in the advertising and audience acquisition infrastructure. The regulatory surface area shifts rather than disappears. Any platform that intermediates financial transactions in the content ecosystem has exposure. The specific mechanism varies. The structural vulnerability does not.

Patreon represents a third variant, and in some ways the most instructive one. Like Substack, it takes a percentage cut of creator earnings — 8 to 12 percent depending on tier, with most creators on the 8 percent Pro plan. That alone puts it in the same commercial entanglement category. But in November 2025, Patreon announced a significant expansion of its on-platform discovery features, combining editorial, human, and algorithmic recommendations to surface creators to new audiences within the platform. The stated goal was to reduce creator dependence on social media. The structural effect is something else. By controlling the discovery engine, Patreon — not the writer’s audience — becomes the arbiter of which creators grow. The platform is not just a landlord collecting a percentage. It is now also the algorithm deciding whose work gets seen. On Substack, the platform is a landlord you pay. On Patreon, the platform is a landlord you pay that also controls whether anyone finds your door. That is a compounding of the same structural vulnerability, not a different one.

The contrast that illuminates the structural problem most clearly is between Substack and Ghost, because it illustrates that the vulnerability is not inevitable. It is a design choice. The technical term for what Ghost represents is decoupled architecture: the publishing layer, the payment layer, and the hosting layer are separate, owned independently, and not bundled through a single commercial intermediary.

Ghost is open-source publishing infrastructure. Most Ghost publications are self-hosted, meaning the publisher controls the server, owns the data, and has no ongoing commercial relationship with Ghost the company. There is no revenue-sharing arrangement. There is no centralized host making editorial decisions. A self-hosted Ghost publication does not have a platform in the regulatory sense. The FTC would have to go after the publisher directly, on the merits of the content, where First Amendment protections are strongest.

Ghost Pro, the company’s managed hosting product, has some commercial exposure. But even there the relationship is closer to a web host than a publishing partner. Ghost does not take a percentage of subscription revenue. It charges a flat hosting fee. Critically, the payment relationship on Ghost Pro runs directly between the creator and Stripe. Ghost the company does not sit in the middle of the money flow. On Substack, the platform intermediates every transaction. That distinction matters because it determines who the regulator sees as the commercial actor when it goes looking.

The simplest way to describe the difference: on Ghost, the platform is a tool you use. On Substack, the platform is a landlord you pay. When the landlord gets a notice from the city, the calculation is straightforward. They evict the tenant to save the building.

There is one infrastructure decision that cuts across all of these platforms and meaningfully changes the stakes: the custom domain. A creator who publishes at their own domain — not substack.com/yourcreatorname, but yourpublication.com — owns a portable address. If the platform shuts the valve, they can point that domain to new infrastructure overnight. What would otherwise be a business continuity crisis becomes a technically demanding weekend. Subscriber lists are still theirs. The brand equity does not evaporate. The audience has a place to find them. A custom domain is not a substitute for sound infrastructure choices. But it is the minimum viable lifeboat, and a surprising number of creators have never bothered to set one up.

Self-hosted infrastructure is more technically demanding. It prices out solo creators who lack the capacity to manage their own servers. That access gap is real and worth naming. But for organizations and creators with the means to make the choice, the architecture has implications that go beyond editorial independence in the abstract sense.

The Sustainability Argument Nobody Is Making

The journalism support field has spent years thinking about revenue models, audience development, and organizational capacity. It has not spent much time thinking about regulatory exposure as a sustainability variable.

It should. A solo creator who loses their primary distribution and monetization platform to regulatory pressure, or to a platform’s preemptive response to that pressure, faces a business continuity crisis with no institutional backstop. The journalism support organizations that fund and advise these creators are not currently equipped to help with that problem. Most of them are not even tracking it. They are, in effect, training people to build houses on rented land without checking the zoning laws.

The creator journalism model, in its current form, assumes that the infrastructure layer is inert. Platforms are pipes. Content flows through them. The business risk lives in the editorial and audience-development work, not in the choice of pipe.

That assumption was always debatable. It is now visibly wrong. The pipe has a financial relationship with the content, a terms of service it can update unilaterally, and a calculation to make when a federal agency applies pressure.

If the FTC decides the water is toxic, it does not sue the water. It shuts off the valve. And on most platforms, the creator does not own the valve.

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Is the convenience of Substack worth the structural risk, or is it time for more creators to move toward decoupled architecture? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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Karen Rundlet’s letter at the front of INN’s 2025 Impact Report contains a line worth sitting with.

“We no longer need to validate the nonprofit model. We need to pull the levers that strengthen it. More nonprofit newsrooms is no longer the goal; more resilient nonprofit newsrooms with staying power is. From growth to strength.”

That is the right instinct. It is also, I think, the most important strategic statement any major journalism support organization (JSO) leader has made publicly in the last year. Rundlet is acknowledging that the field’s defining challenge has changed. The era of “more is better” is over. What comes next is harder, less photogenic, and far more consequential.

But there is a question buried inside the phrase “from growth to strength” that the report never asks: whose strength?

Rundlet’s formulation treats strength as a property of the individual newsroom. Give each outlet better fundraising tools, more coaching sessions, access to legal resources, and they become stronger. The logic is intuitive. It is also incomplete. Because strength, in a system this fragmented, is not a property of the node—it is a property of the network.

There are two ways to think about making a newsroom strong. The first is the individual logic: if we give this newsroom ten more tools, they will be strong. The second is the coordination logic: if we build a system where this newsroom only needs two tools because the other eight are handled by the infrastructure, the field is strong.

The INN Impact Report is a detailed, data-rich articulation of the individual logic. It describes what INN does for its members, tool by tool, program by program, session by session. And on those terms, the evidence is real. INN retained 94.5% of its members. NewsMatch generated nearly $70 million for 407 participating outlets in its tenth year, with more than 100,000 first-time donors.

When the LA wildfires and Appalachian floods hit, INN disbursed $600,000 in emergency grants, a program designed to disburse within 72 hours. When journalists faced safety threats, they issued 479 discounted DeleteMe licenses—an 800% increase. These are not symbolic gestures. They are operationally meaningful acts by an organization that takes its role seriously.

But the report also reveals something its authors did not intend. Read through the lens of the structural arguments I’ve been making in this newsletter since January, INN’s own data is the strongest case yet for why the individual logic, no matter how well-executed, hits a ceiling that only the coordination logic can break through.

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The Last Mile, Inside the Building

In January, I wrote about what I called the Fog of Good Intentions: the problem isn’t too many JSOs. It’s uncoordinated duplication.

Think of disaster relief. In a humanitarian crisis, you don’t eliminate redundancy—you coordinate it. The system works not because every organization does something different, but because a dispatch layer routes resources to the right place at the right time.

INN’s Impact Report illustrates the other half of that equation: what happens when resources reach the right organization but can’t complete the journey to the newsroom that needs them.

Consider the numbers. In 2025, INN staff and experts delivered more than 500 office hour sessions. They performed wealth screenings on 100,000 member donors. They launched Audience Studio and convened working groups on newsletter disruption. That is an enormous amount of activity from a team of roughly 22 people serving 524 organizations.

Now consider who is on the receiving end. The report tells us the median INN member organization has 5.5 full-time equivalent staff. Let that number settle for a moment. Five and a half people. That typically means no dedicated development director, no audience strategist, no HR department, and often no one who has done their specific job before.

A one-hour fundraising consultation is valuable to a newsroom that has someone on staff who can take the advice and execute on it. For a newsroom where the editor is also the fundraiser, the tech lead, and the board liaison, that office hour is a contact, not a transformation. The advice is sound. The capacity to act on it doesn’t exist.

This is the Last Mile problem manifesting inside the best-resourced, most trusted membership organization in the field. INN can build the tools, design the training, and deliver the consultation. What it cannot do, at 22 staff serving nearly 500 organizations, is ensure that the resource it provides converts into durable operational change. The math doesn’t allow it.

I suspect they see this. The “from growth to strength” framing only makes sense if you’ve felt the limits of growth. But naming the ceiling would require asking a follow-up question the report avoids: if INN can’t deliver deep support to nearly 500 newsrooms, who can? If the answer is “no single organization,” then the field doesn’t need a stronger node—it needs a different network.

The Concentration Question NewsMatch Doesn’t Answer

In February, I wrote about the 160x Efficiency Play: the pattern where high-capacity organizations keep surfacing in national programs because they’ve mastered the art of being found.

NewsMatch is the closest thing the nonprofit news field has to a genuine public good. Over ten years, it has helped generate more than $475 million. The INN Impact Report presents the headline: 407 outlets participated and generated nearly $70 million.

But the locally-generated revenue is where the concentration question becomes real.

A newsroom with a development director and an existing donor file will leverage that $15,000 national match into a campaign that generates multiples of it. A newsroom where the editor is running the appeal gets the same match but lacks the internal capacity to multiply it. The match is equitable. The ability to capitalize on it is not.

The NewsMatch report says newsrooms increased unique donors by 24%—a meaningful trend. But it’s a cohort-level average. Are the newsrooms at the bottom of the capacity spectrum seeing the same growth, or are the well-resourced outlets driving the average while the smallest ones tread water?

For some newsrooms, the match is the only reason fundraising happens at all. That’s a powerful argument for the program—but it’s also a powerful argument that those newsrooms need something deeper than a campaign toolkit.

None of this diminishes what NewsMatch accomplishes. It is a genuine public good. But it is also, by design, a mechanism that works best for newsrooms that already have the infrastructure to use it.

Eleven Functions and the General Hospital Problem

The INN Impact Report describes a remarkable breadth of programming: fundraising, audience development, peer learning, editorial standards, field research, press freedom, disaster response, startup consulting, rural coordination, wealth screening, and coaching.

That is eleven distinct program areas for a 22-person organization. Now map those functions against the rest of the JSO landscape.

Fundraising support? Lenfest does this. News Revenue Hub does this. LION does this. Peer learning? ONA, SPJ, IRE. Field research? Shorenstein, Tow, API.

I wrote about the General Hospital problem: when every hospital tries to become a Level 1 Trauma Center, we waste billions duplicating expensive equipment. A healthy system has specialized clinics and a referral system that knows when to move a patient from one to the other.

INN’s eleven-function portfolio is the General Hospital problem in practice. When there’s no coordination layer routing newsrooms to the right JSO for each need, every major JSO feels pressure to become a one-stop shop.

It’s worth naming the force that drives this: funding architecture. Foundations fund new programs, not integration. A grant for “our new audience initiative” is fundable. A grant for “we will stop doing audience development and build referral protocols to route our members to the organization that does it best” is not.

To be clear about what I am and am not saying here: INN's eleven-function portfolio is not a strategic error. It is a rational response to a system that hasn't built the alternative. When your members call with a problem and no other organization is reliably there to handle it, you handle it. That's not mission creep. That's institutional responsibility under conditions of scarcity. The critique belongs to the system, not to the people working inside it. But recognizing that the response is rational doesn't mean the system that requires it is sustainable. A 22-person team covering eleven functions for 524 organizations is not a model that scales. It is a model that holds until it can't.

The result? INN provides fundraising consultations. Lenfest provides fundraising consultations. LION provides fundraising consultations. A newsroom with 5.5 staff is supposed to figure out which one to call. Usually, they just call the one they’ve heard of, never knowing a different organization might have been a better fit.

What Isn’t in the Report

Given INN’s position, the absences in the report are notable:

• The Funding Tension: 65% of INN’s revenue ($5 million) comes from restricted grants. While they warn newsrooms not to become overly reliant on institutional philanthropy, they are living the same model.

• The AI Void: There is no articulated position on AI, content licensing, or the operational implications for small newsrooms. For the largest network in the country, this is a massive gap.

• The 76% Flare: More than three-quarters of INN member newsrooms reported facing “major challenges” in the current political environment. This finding is buried. It is a field-level crisis indicator. What does it translate to? Staff cuts? Closures? We don’t know.

• The Geographic Gap: Large swaths of the country where news deserts are most severe have minimal representation. Montana has five members. Indiana has four.

If you found this analysis valuable, please share it with someone who should be in this conversation. The structural problems in the JSO ecosystem won’t get solved by the people already talking about them. We need newsroom leaders, board members, program officers, and state press association directors thinking about this together.

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Strength Belongs to the Network

The INN Impact Report measures INN. It measures what INN did and how many members they retained. By those metrics, they are performing well.

But “from growth to strength” demands a harder question: Is the nonprofit news field getting stronger?

A field where 76% of newsrooms report major challenges is not getting stronger. A field where the median newsroom has 5.5 staff is not getting stronger just because the median held steady.

And that median is precarious. The $1.1 billion rescission of CPB funding means the “anchor tenants” of local news are weakening. When the anchors drift, the civic load shifts to the 5.5-person digital startups that are even less equipped to carry it.

Think about what coordination logic would change. Right now, a newsroom is expected to solve ten different discovery problems while trying to report the news. The individual logic says: “Give them a directory.” The coordination logic says: “Build a system where they make one call and the system handles the routing.”

INN wouldn’t need eleven program areas. It could focus on NewsMatch and emergency response, trusting a referral infrastructure to route newsrooms to the right specialized JSO.

Strength isn’t what happens when you give each newsroom ten more tools. Strength is what happens when you build a system where they only need two because the infrastructure handles the rest.

INN’s Impact Report says the nonprofit model no longer needs validation. Good. Now let’s build the infrastructure that actually lets it scale.

Let’s Talk About This

I have strong views, loosely held. I’d rather be corrected than comfortable.

If you work at INN: I’d welcome your perspective. You know the operational reality in ways I don’t.

If you lead a newsroom: Has this matched your experience? When you needed help, did you know who to call?

If you work at a foundation: Does the funder-driven duplication pattern ring true? What would it take for coordination to become fundable?

Hit reply or leave a comment. I’m especially interested in hearing from people who think I’m wrong.

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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.

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s Philadelphia Creators Summit convenes Friday, April 24 at the Quorum — a full day of programming on brand partnerships, podcast strategy, YouTube monetization, and the business of independent journalism, backed by a $1.5 million Lenfest investment and the Google News Initiative. I am publishing this the day before intentionally, as a contribution to that conversation. What the agenda does not yet include is the compliance and benefits infrastructure that makes everything else on it sustainable. That is what this piece is about.

The journalist covering your city council probably isn’t at a legacy institution. She’s at her kitchen table at 11pm, filing a story a thousand people will read tomorrow, with no legal defense fund, no group health plan, and no safety net if a subject decides to make her life difficult.

This is where local journalism actually lives. Not in newsrooms. In the margins, in the side hustle, in the solo operation running on ambition and the assumption that nothing will go catastrophically wrong.

Something always goes wrong. But that is not actually the point.

Most Side-Hustle Journalists are not trying to stay side-hustle journalists. They are trying to figure out how to make the leap — to turn the audience they have built, the beat they own, and the trust they have earned into a full-time sustainable business. The risk is real and it deserves to be named. It is also secondary to the larger problem: the administrative, legal, and benefits infrastructure required to make independent journalism a viable full-time endeavor is priced entirely out of reach for individuals operating alone.

That is why the leap does not happen at the scale it should. Not lack of ambition. Not lack of audience. Lack of infrastructure.

One lawsuit filed not to win but to drain you into silence. One medical emergency. One bad-faith platform complaint. That’s enough to end a news operation that took years to build. But even without a crisis, the daily weight of operating without payroll infrastructure, without group health coverage, without compliance support — that weight is what keeps talented journalists tethered to a day job long after their independent work has earned the right to be their only job.

We have platforms. We have audiences. We have the content layer. What we don’t have is the Chassis — the institutional infrastructure that separates a sustainable full-time news business from a very expensive personal risk.

It is time to build it

The Side-Hustle Trap

Most innovation in local news is happening at the margins. The Side-Hustle Journalist — the professional with a day job who spends nights and weekends reporting on their community — is not a hobbyist. She is a high-risk startup operating without a corporate HR department, without a legal shield, and without a safety net.

This is not only the watchdog journalist covering city hall. It is the food writer who has become the authoritative voice on her city’s restaurant scene. The culture critic whose newsletter is the only place covering local arts with any rigor. The neighborhood chronicler who knows every zoning fight and school board vote in a three-mile radius. Anyone building an independent local media business, whatever the beat, is running the same institutional risk on the same inadequate infrastructure.

The current system forces all of them to take on full-time institutional risk for part-time rewards. That is not a motivation problem. It is a structural one. And it is why talented voices either quit or never fully make the leap.

The regulatory environment is making this worse. Increased federal scrutiny of the information layer — embodied in policy signals like NSPM-7 — creates new pressure on the smallest, least-protected operators in the ecosystem. Large news organizations have legal teams and a Washington presence. The solo practitioner has neither. Independence has always carried risk. It is becoming more dangerous.

The Solution: The News Creator’s Guild

This idea is not novel. The startup world solved this problem years ago.

Companies like Justworks and Rippling built Professional Employer Organizations — PEOs — that allow small tech startups to access group-rate benefits, clean payroll infrastructure, and compliance support that previously only large corporations could afford. They normalized co-employment as a practical operating model, and thousands of startups that would otherwise have collapsed under administrative weight are running cleanly because of it. The compliance and benefits problem is not unique to journalism. What is unique to journalism is the specific risk profile — libel exposure, platform volatility, irregular income — that no existing PEO has been built to serve.

The Guild is that.

A News Creator’s Guild is a co-employment entity. You keep your editorial autonomy, your brand, and your audience relationship. The Guild handles everything else.

The Front-End (You)The Back-End (The Guild)Editorial ContentLibel Insurance and Legal DefenseCommunity EngagementHealth Benefits and 401(k)Product and Distribution, Payroll, Tax, and HR Compliance

A reasonable objection: an independent journalist could sign up for Justworks tomorrow. She would get payroll and benefits infrastructure. She would not get libel coverage, media liability protection, or pre-publication legal review. She would not get group rates negotiated for a pool of people who share her specific risk profile — because insurance underwriting prices a known, defined population differently than a mixed one, and the more homogeneous the pool, the better the rates. She would not get onboarding built around contributor agreements, IP assignment, or the licensing structures that define how journalism businesses actually operate. She would not get the compliance layer that makes going full-time administratively viable rather than administratively punishing.

The off-the-shelf PEO solves the administrative problem. The Guild solves the journalism problem. Those are not the same thing.

Not Just Survival. Acquisition-Ready.

The protection framing is real, but it is only part of the argument.

Many independent creators are not just trying to survive or make the leap to full-time. They are building toward something larger — a partnership, a licensing deal, a video series, an acquisition. The Washington Post is not the only institution that will be looking for established independent voices with proven audiences. That market is going to grow.

Here is the problem: a creator operating informally — irregular payroll, undocumented revenue, unclear IP ownership — is nearly impossible to acquire or partner with cleanly. The due diligence alone kills the deal. A creator operating through the Guild has audited financials, clean payroll records, documented revenue, and properly assigned intellectual property. She is not just protected. She is not just full-time. She is ready.

The Guild is not a ceiling. It is the foundation that makes every version of the upside possible.

Acknowledging the Ecosystem

We are not starting from scratch. Liz Kelly Nelson at Project C has done more than anyone to map this landscape — the Independent Journalism Atlas now tracks 1,184 creator journalists across platforms, revenue models, and beats, and her Nieman Lab prediction that the creator infrastructure gap will define journalism’s next chapter is the clearest articulation of the problem this piece is trying to solve. The Atlas data directly informs the market sizing argument below. The diagnosis is hers. What follows is an attempt to name what fills the gap — and the Guild needs the Atlas and the community infrastructure Project C has built in order to find and serve its membership. These are not parallel efforts. One makes the other possible.

Project C’s community of 200-plus active creator journalists represents the most concentrated population of serious independents in the country — people who have already done the strategic work of going independent and are now running into the institutional wall. Amy Kovac-Ashley at Tiny News Collective provides the launchpad for new entrants, with a particular focus on the earliest stage of independent operation — the moment a creator is ready to make a first hire, she hits a compliance wall that Tiny News Collective was not built to navigate. Adriana Lacy is building the connective tissue between the creator world and institutional media on two fronts simultaneously — through Field Nine Group‘s growth infrastructure for independent creators, and through Influencer Journalism‘s work connecting newsrooms with digital voices and developing the ethical frameworks that make those partnerships sustainable. The administrative complexity her work generates on both sides of that equation is exactly what the Guild is designed to absorb.

These organizations are the engine, the navigation, and the fuel. The Guild is the chassis. It does not compete with any of them. It plugs into their work and handles the institutional layer they cannot.

The demand signal is already showing up at the platform level. beehiiv launched its Media Collective specifically to offer independent journalists health insurance, legal support, and operational stability. It currently serves around 20 members — a curated, subsidized cohort, not scalable infrastructure. The instinct is right. The architecture is not there yet. A platform-native program with 20 seats is not the same thing as open, platform-agnostic infrastructure that any serious creator can access. That distinction is the entire argument for the Guild.

The question of who builds the Guild is separate from the question of who has built the ecosystem that makes it necessary. Research, programming, and community development are legitimately foundation-funded work — that model produces real value and the organizations above are proof of it. Operational infrastructure is a different category. A PEO requires capitalization logic that philanthropy is structurally ill-suited to provide. If membership is subsidized, the price signal disappears and the mechanism that keeps the model efficient and member-accountable disappears with it. Building the Guild through grants would not just be the wrong funding source. It would produce the wrong product.

This should be built by a market player: an existing PEO willing to serve a new population, or a venture-backed operator who sees the business case. The unit economics are there. Someone has to make the case to them.

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The Unit Economics

Building real institutional protection for a solo operation is expensive. Audited financials, surety bonds, quality libel insurance, individual health coverage, tax preparation — the total runs roughly $10,000 a year for a practitioner doing it alone. Most don’t. That is the actual problem. The gap is not ambition or editorial quality. It is that the math doesn’t work for individuals operating alone, which means the leap to full-time stays out of reach even for creators who have already built the audience to justify it.

Pooled through a Guild, those costs change materially.

Solo cost: approximately $10,100 per year, covering market-rate insurance, individual benefits, and tax preparation.

Guild cost: approximately $3,000 to $5,000 per year, covering an all-in administrative fee plus access to group-rate benefits.

That is not a modest efficiency gain. It is the difference between viable and not viable for the majority of independent operators. The economics work on the operator side too. A PEO captures margin on the spread between member fees and pooled costs, and that margin expands as membership scales — the more members in the pool, the better the group rates and the wider the spread. This is a business that gets more valuable as it grows, not less.

Do the numbers look different from where you sit? If you have navigated benefits, insurance, or compliance as an independent journalist — or if you have built PEO infrastructure in another sector — I want to hear what I am missing.

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The Market

For anyone reading this as a business opportunity, here is the sizing.

The independent media creator population in the United States is large and growing fast. Freelance photographers, independent podcast journalists, documentary producers, and newsletter-based news creators all face identical institutional risks and would benefit from identical infrastructure. Journalism creators are the natural beachhead — the population with the clearest need, the strongest existing community infrastructure, and the most acute exposure to the specific risks the Guild is designed to address.

Within that beachhead, the data is concrete. The Independent Journalism Atlas currently tracks 1,184 creator journalists — the most rigorously sourced count of serious independents available. Project C’s active community adds 200-plus operators who have already self-selected as committed independents. LION Publishers tracks roughly 400 independent local news organizations. These populations overlap, but they share one more important characteristic: they represent only the creators visible enough to have already found existing support infrastructure. The actual addressable population of serious independent journalists operating in the US today is conservatively between 5,000 and 15,000. The supply of displaced legacy journalists entering the independent market is not slowing down.

At an average annual fee of $4,000 per member, the journalism creator beachhead alone is a $20 million to $60 million revenue business at scale. Expand to the full independent media creator population and the market is meaningfully larger. The unit economics work at a fraction of full market penetration. Someone has to make the case to them.

This Is an Infrastructure Play

The journalism support ecosystem does not need another boutique grant program. It needs a resilient, open system that professionalizes the creative class and creates a durable buffer against economic instability and government overreach.

The Guild is not a safety net for struggling operations. It is the infrastructure that makes the leap from side hustle to full-time viable — for the creator who has built the audience but can’t afford to lose her health insurance, for the journalist who wants to go full-time but can’t navigate the compliance alone, for the operator who is building toward something bigger and needs the back office that makes that something possible.

The question is not whether independent journalism is worth protecting. That argument is over. The question is whether the people building it will get serious about the infrastructure before the next wave of talented journalists burns out, gets sued into silence, or stays part-time because the leap was just too expensive to make alone.

The national creator journalism movement has the creators. It has the ecosystem. It has the moment. And this week, that moment has a room — the Quorum, Philadelphia, Friday.

The only thing missing is the Chassis.

Build the Guild.

If this piece landed for you, send it to someone who needs to read it — an independent creator running without a safety net, or an operator who might see the business case. The argument only travels if you carry it.

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The journalism industry has spent nearly a decade telling the public that local news is in crisis. New data from the Pew Research Center suggests the campaign is working. More Americans than ever believe their local news outlets are in financial trouble. The data also suggests something far less comfortable: it might not matter. And it might be making things worse.

The Pew-Knight Initiative’s latest local news fact sheet tracks a set of numbers the industry has been watching since 2018. The headline finding, and the one that generated the most attention, is that 39% of Americans now say their local news outlets are not doing well financially. That is up from 24% in 2018 and 33% a year earlier. The trend is moving in the direction the industry wanted.

Here is what happened over that same period and the years just before it.

The share of Americans who follow local news very closely dropped from 37% in 2016 to 21% in 2025, a decline that began before the crisis campaign hit full stride and accelerated through it. The share who say local news is extremely or very important to their community fell from 44% to 34%. That is a ten-point decline in a single year. And the share who actually paid for local news in the past year fell from 14% to 12%.

Read those numbers together, and a pattern emerges that nobody in the industry seems eager to discuss. Awareness of the crisis went up. Every measure of engagement, perceived value, and willingness to pay went down. Not flat. Down.

The Campaign That Worked (and Didn’t)

The effort to raise public awareness about the state of local news has been substantial, sustained, and well-funded. Northwestern’s Local News Initiative has documented the loss of newspapers across the country. The Pew-Knight Initiative has tracked audience behavior across multiple survey waves. Press Forward launched with hundreds of millions in philanthropic commitments. Rebuild Local News has advocated for federal policy intervention. “News deserts” entered the mainstream vocabulary. None of this work is bad. Much of it is excellent. The research is rigorous. The advocacy has moved real money.

But the theory of change underneath all of this was never just “raise awareness.” It was: raise awareness, and people will act. They will subscribe. They will donate. They will show up. The awareness was supposed to be an input to behavior change.

The Pew data now lets us test that theory. The answer is no. The people who got the message did not change their behavior.

The reasons Americans give for not paying for local news have barely moved since 2018. Half say they can find what they need for free. About three in ten say they are not interested enough. One in ten says it is too expensive. One in ten says the quality isn’t worth it. These numbers are almost identical to what they were seven years ago, before the crisis campaign began in earnest.

These are not awareness answers. They are product-market answers. People are not saying, “I didn’t know you were struggling.” They are saying “I found an alternative,” or “I don’t value this enough,” or “what you’re offering isn’t good enough.” Crisis messaging does not address any of those responses. It can’t. It wasn’t designed to. This is a mission problem, not a capacity problem.

And that is precisely the problem. The crisis narrative is a B2B message. It was built for philanthropists and policymakers. It works in that room. But it leaked into the consumer channel, and in the consumer channel, it is poison. A message that moves a billionaire donor to write a seven-figure check is the same message that tells a potential ten-dollar-a-month subscriber that the product is dying. The industry has a segmentation failure, not a messaging failure. The message is fine. It is just being heard by an audience it was never meant to reach.

What Every Other Industry Already Knows

There is an assumption embedded in the crisis narrative that deserves more scrutiny than it gets: that telling consumers an institution is in financial distress will make them want to support it. The crisis communications profession has spent decades studying this assumption. It is wrong.

Research led by scholars at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has demonstrated that when consumers become aware that an institution is in financial trouble, their response is not to rally in support. It is to disengage. Birge, Parker, Wu, and Yang found that customer anticipation of financial distress can become self-fulfilling: the more consumers believe a firm is likely to fail, the more their behavior makes failure likely. The researchers called this a “death spiral.” They showed it was driven not by the institution’s actual financial position but by the consumer’s perception of it.

Their research focused on retail, where the mechanism is consumers waiting for liquidation sales. In news, the dynamic is different, but the direction is the same. Why would you invest your time, your attention, and your money in building a habit around something that keeps telling you it might not exist in six months? In news, the death spiral isn’t about waiting for a discount. It is about avoiding the investment entirely.

Every crisis PR professional in the country knows this intuitively. When Silicon Valley Bank tried to reassure its customers by being transparent about its financial pressures in March 2023, it triggered a $42 billion bank run in a single day. Andy Gilman, CEO of the crisis communications firm CommCore, analyzed the SVB stakeholder letter for Fortune and concluded that the bank’s own language “screams ‘We’re in trouble’” and “probably added fuel to the fire.” The bank’s attempt at transparency became the accelerant.

The journalism industry does not lack access to this expertise. Brian Tierney, the former co-owner and publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, has spent his post-newspaper career building one of the country’s most respected crisis communications firms. He currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Poynter Foundation Board. His entire professional philosophy is built around helping organizations replace fear-based narratives with possibility-driven ones. At the center of his framework is a question he calls deceptively simple: “What if we won?”

That question is the exact inverse of the one the journalism industry has been asking for a decade. The industry’s question has been: “Do people know we’re losing?” Tierney’s career is built on the premise that this is precisely the wrong story to tell. And yet the institution whose foundation board he helps lead exists to serve an industry that cannot stop telling it.

If this argument is landing for you, it’s probably landing for someone in your network, too. Share it with a colleague who’s been sitting in those rooms where “crisis” is the opening line of every deck.

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The Substitution Nobody Noticed

While the industry was narrating its own decline, consumers were solving the information problem for themselves. The Pew data on where Americans actually get local information tells this story with uncomfortable clarity.

Use of online forums and discussion groups for local news grew from 38% to 52% between 2018 and 2025. Use of online-only news sources nearly tripled, from 15% to 42%. The share getting local information directly from government agencies rose from 30% to 40%. And in 2025, Pew measured news influencers for the first time and found 36% of Americans already using them as a source.

The crisis narrative assumes that when local journalism declines, people experience a void. A news desert. An absence that, once recognized, they will want to fill by supporting the institutional press.

But the data doesn’t show a void. It shows a market. People are getting local information from sources that are not newsrooms: Facebook groups, Nextdoor, government websites, influencers, and newsletters. The “desert” framing was always a supply-side description. From the demand side, the landscape looks less like a desert and more like a road where traffic rerouted while the old bridge was being mourned instead of rebuilt.

The rerouted traffic is moving, but the road is more dangerous. The substitutes are not equivalent. A Nextdoor thread is not an investigative report. A city council’s Facebook page is not accountability journalism. But the industry is selling vitamins using hospital imagery, while most people are just looking for a snack. “Support us because you have no alternative” doesn’t land with someone who feels informed enough already. Telling them the old option is dying doesn’t make them come back. It confirms the decision they already made.

Where are you seeing this substitution play out? Are there communities in your coverage area where the Facebook group or the Nextdoor thread has become the de facto local news source? I’m collecting examples. Drop a comment or hit reply.

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The Uncomfortable Question

The journalism industry has now spent the better part of a decade investing in a single strategic theory: that if Americans understood local news was in crisis, they would act to save it. Significant resources have gone into proving and publicizing the crisis. Research centers have been funded. Coalitions have been built. Reports have been published. The word “crisis” has become so central to the industry’s self-description that questioning it feels almost like disloyalty.

This is not a condemnation of the research or the people doing it. The work is rigorous, and the problems it documents are real. The critique is narrower and more specific: the industry built a message for one audience and let it reach another. It never segmented. It never asked whether the story that opens wallets in a foundation boardroom closes them at the kitchen table.

The data now offers something it didn’t a few years ago: a track record. And the track record says that awareness of the crisis has grown steadily while every metric that actually matters, attention, willingness to pay, and perceived importance, has declined. Not despite the awareness campaign. During it.

The question the industry keeps asking is: Do Americans know local news is in crisis? After a decade, the answer is increasingly yes. The question it has not asked, and the one the Pew data is quietly answering, is whether knowing that makes people more likely to subscribe, or less.

The data suggests less. And if Tierney’s question is the right one, if “What if we won?” is really where momentum begins, then maybe the industry needs to stop telling people what it is losing and start showing them what it makes possible. Not crisis. Not obligation. Not guilt. Utility. Belonging. Ambition. The story of a product worth paying for, told by people who believe it will be here next year.

Nobody subscribes to a sinking ship. But people will line up for a lifeboat that knows where it is going.

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I work hard to get the facts and citations right, but I’m one person working across a lot of data. If you spot an error, reply directly or drop a note in the comments. I’ll correct it promptly and transparently.

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When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced Tuesday that it had been acquired by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the owners of The Baltimore Banner, the reaction across the journalism industry was immediate and nearly unanimous. People exhaled. They posted congratulations. They used the word “saved.”

It is worth asking what, exactly, was saved. And whether the frame itself tells us something uncomfortable about what the industry values versus what communities actually need.

Start with the facts. Block Communications, which has operated the Post-Gazette since 1927, announced in January that it would close the paper after losing more than $350 million over 20 years. The closure announcement followed a 1,133-day strike by the paper’s union, the longest in modern newspaper history, and a series of court rulings that found the company had violated federal labor law. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Block’s appeal. Block said it had no choice.

Then, less than three weeks before the scheduled shutdown, Stewart Bainum Jr., the hotel magnate and philanthropist who founded the Banner in 2022 with a $50 million commitment, flew to Toledo in a snowstorm, had a long dinner with Block CEO Allan Block, and struck a deal. The Venetoulis Institute will acquire the Post-Gazette’s assets on May 4. The purchase price was not disclosed. The institute is not assuming the paper’s existing contracts or liabilities. Staff of 171 will be reduced, and employees will need to reapply for their positions.

That is what happened. Notice what the word “saved” does not describe.

Backstory & Strategy is a newsletter about journalism economics, infrastructure, and the support ecosystem — written for newsroom leaders, funders, and anyone who cares about what local news actually costs and who pays for it. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here.

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Pittsburgh is Not a News Desert.

Before we get to the harder questions, this one needs to be stated plainly. Pittsburgh is a city with more than 40 credible news outlets. That number comes not from a booster but from PublicSource, Pittsburgh’s own nonprofit investigative newsroom, which compiled a guide to local media in January after the closure announcement. The guide includes WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR affiliate, which produces a robust daily news operation. It includes the Tribune-Review’s TribLive operation, which kept publishing through the Post-Gazette’s entire decline. It includes PublicSource itself, a nonprofit digital newsroom that has been doing serious investigative and community journalism since 2011. It includes the New Pittsburgh Courier, specialty outlets, neighborhood publications, and a new effort to revive Pittsburgh City Paper as a nonprofit venture.

Pittsburgh was not going dark. Pittsburgh was going to lose a specific institution, with a specific name, and a specific set of Pulitzers on the wall.

Those things matter, and it is worth acknowledging why. Institutional identity is not just sentimentality. A newspaper that covered the same city for 240 years accumulates something that cannot be rebuilt from scratch: source relationships, institutional memory, the public trust that comes from continuity. The Post-Gazette’s coverage of the 2018 Tree of Life shooting represented something irreplaceable about what a staffed, experienced metro daily can do in a moment of civic crisis. That is the soul of the argument for preservation, and it deserves to be taken seriously before it is challenged.

But “Pittsburgh needs journalism” and “Pittsburgh needs the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette specifically” are two different claims. The industry treated them as identical. They are not.

In Any Other Sector, this is Just a Company Failing.

Imagine a beloved diner that has anchored the same corner for a hundred years. Regulars know the staff by name. The mayor had his first date there. The diner makes the local news every time it nearly closes. Then it does close — not from a sudden crisis, but from two decades of mounting losses, a three-year standoff with its employees, and court rulings that finally made the operating model untenable. Another operator buys the name and the recipes, lets most of the staff go, and reopens with a smaller menu. Nobody calls this a rescue. They call it a transaction, mourn what was lost, and find somewhere new for breakfast.

We understand this logic in restaurants. We understand it in retail, in manufacturing, in media, everywhere except newspapers. The journalism industry cannot look at an institution in prolonged structural decline and say: the market has rendered a verdict, and perhaps the right response is to let the resources redistribute. Every closure is a crisis. Every rescue is a salvation. The civic soul argument — real as it is — gets deployed as a blanket override of every other consideration.

There is a reasonable case that this instinct is at least partially justified. Local journalism produces public goods that markets systematically underprice. A city without serious accountability reporting is more vulnerable to corruption, less informed about its own governance, and less capable of collective civic action. These are not hypotheticals. Research consistently connects local news decline to reduced voter participation, higher municipal borrowing costs, and weaker oversight of local government.

But “local journalism produces public goods” is not the same as “every specific newspaper that has ever existed must be preserved.” The public goods argument is an argument for investment in journalism capacity. It is not automatically an argument for investment in any particular vessel for that capacity — especially a vessel that has been emptied, leaking, and accruing labor debt for years.

A Model Built on a Patron, Not an Endowment.

The Venetoulis Institute has said from the start that it wants to build a replicable model. Bainum’s stated theory is that combining operations across markets creates efficiencies that drive down the cost of local journalism. It is a coherent thesis. But before calling it a model, the industry should be precise about what kind of financial structure is actually in place.

The Venetoulis Institute ended 2024 with roughly $27 million in revenue against $29 million in expenses — a net loss of about $1.5 million, narrowed from prior years but still a loss, still sustained by ongoing philanthropic subsidy from a single source. The Banner has done genuinely impressive things: nearly 80,000 subscribers, a Pulitzer in 2025, and expansion into Maryland’s suburbs. But it has not proven it can sustain itself without Bainum’s continued giving. Now Bainum and his wife are pledging an additional $30 million on top of the original $50 million to fund the Post-Gazette acquisition and expanded operations. The total philanthropic commitment is $80 million, flowing to two metro daily operations that together are not at breakeven.

There is a critical structural distinction that the celebration has blurred. When the Lenfest Institute took over the Philadelphia Inquirer, it did so with an endowment — capital that generates returns independent of any individual’s continued willingness to give. An endowed institution has permanence. An institution funded by ongoing pledges from a living benefactor has a patron. Those are different things with different risk profiles. If Bainum’s priorities shift, his health changes, or the Choice Hotels balance sheet takes a bad turn, two major metro newsrooms are simultaneously in jeopardy. What looks like a model today is, more precisely, a high-net-worth individual patronage arrangement that has not yet been tested by time or adversity.

The moral hazard runs deeper still. The Venetoulis Institute acquired the Post-Gazette’s assets without its liabilities — including several million dollars owed to union workers under the federal court ruling that forced the closure in the first place. A Venetoulis spokesperson has clarified that because this is an asset purchase, they are technically building a “new newsroom from scratch.” That is the legal fiction that makes the rescue possible: a new entity rises from the old institution’s ashes, inherits its brand, its subscribers, and its 240 years of civic standing, but bears none of the obligations the old institution accumulated. The union struck for 1,133 days over health benefits. They won in court. And the “rescue” of their newspaper arrives structured in a way that does not require anyone to pay them what they are owed. The NewsGuild has noted this directly, and the point is not merely legal. If this is the model — a nonprofit conversion that sheds labor obligations along with legacy costs — then what is being replicated is not just an operating structure. It is a mechanism for absorbing the civic value of an institution while discarding the obligations it accumulated to the people who produced it. That is a strange thing to call a rescue.

By the Numbers

$80M — Total philanthropic commitment from Stewart Bainum Jr. to the Venetoulis Institute ($50M for the Banner launch + $30M for the Post-Gazette acquisition and runway)

$1.5M — Venetoulis Institute’s net loss in 2024, its most recent full year, despite growing to nearly 80,000 subscribers — the gap Bainum’s pledge bridges

~$1M — Estimated annual operating budget of PublicSource, Pittsburgh’s primary nonprofit investigative newsroom (team of 16)

1,133 — Days the Post-Gazette union spent on strike before the “rescue” effectively bypassed their legal victories against the previous owners

130 — Separate municipal governments in Allegheny County that currently face a local coverage gap while $30M flows to a single metro daily

40+ — Credible news outlets operating in Pittsburgh as of January 2026, per PublicSource’s own media landscape guide

$60M+ — Annual grant-making by the Heinz Endowments, Pittsburgh’s primary journalism philanthropy infrastructure — now a potential target for Post-Gazette fundraising

$350M — What Block Communications says it lost keeping the Post-Gazette alive over 20 years

The Opportunity Cost Nobody is Calculating.

There is a more immediate problem with the $80 million, and it operates on two levels.

The first is displacement. That $80 million in philanthropic capital did not flow to the 40-plus outlets in Pittsburgh that built themselves from scratch, without nine-figure backing, often serving communities and beats the Post-Gazette had long since abandoned. It did not go to PublicSource — a team of roughly 16 journalists operating on an annual budget under $1 million — scaling its investigative capacity. It did not go to WESA expanding its statehouse bureau. It did not fund a new outlet covering western Pennsylvania’s 130 self-governing municipalities, which is where the actual accountability gap sits. Those investments are smaller, less glamorous, and lack a masthead with 240 years of history. They are also, arguably, more efficient uses of capital per unit of journalism produced.

The second problem is what comes next, and it has received almost no attention.

A nonprofit news organization does not run on a single donor’s pledge. It runs on a diversified funding base — subscriptions, events, advertising, and, critically, institutional philanthropy from local foundations, corporations, and civic donors. That is the model the Banner built in Baltimore. It is the model the Venetoulis Institute will need to build in Pittsburgh. Which means the Post-Gazette, once it is operating as a nonprofit, will be doing something it has never done before: actively competing for Pittsburgh’s finite pool of local journalism philanthropy.

Pittsburgh is not a city without journalism funders. The Heinz Endowments, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, and the Benter Foundation have collectively built one of the more intentional local journalism philanthropic ecosystems in the country. They helped establish Press Forward Pittsburgh, a chapter of the national initiative investing in local news. The Heinz Endowments alone distribute more than $60 million annually across nonprofit grantees. That infrastructure was built to support the ecosystem — the digital startups, the collaborative newsrooms, the nonprofit outlets that grew into the space the Post-Gazette kept leaving behind.

Now those same foundations will be sitting across the table from the Post-Gazette’s development staff. And here is the dynamic that matters: foundations are not neutral allocators. They are institutions run by boards and program officers who operate under their own risk constraints. A grant to PublicSource — 16 journalists, digital-first, a decade old — requires a board to bet on an organization most of their trustees have probably never read. A grant to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a 240-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning institution freshly rescued from closure and led by a well-capitalized national nonprofit, feels like a safe choice. It has brand recognition. It has a story. It has the implicit endorsement of a national news organization and a philanthropist with a proven track record. And now it has David Shribman — the Post-Gazette’s executive editor from 2003 to 2019, a former Boston Globe Washington bureau chief, Wall Street Journal and New York Times correspondent, and Pulitzer Prize winner in his own right — joining the Venetoulis board of directors. Shribman is not just a credential. He is a fundraising asset. He is the civic soul of the old Post-Gazette made flesh, walking into foundation meetings.

Institutional giving is often less about impact per dollar than about recognizable names and reduced reputational risk. The Post-Gazette, even diminished, wins that comparison on paper. The organizations that have been doing the actual work of building Pittsburgh’s news future may not.

The industry celebrated the acquisition as a gift to Pittsburgh’s news ecosystem. It may turn out to be a tax on it.

The Unasked Question.

Pittsburgh was weeks away from finding out what a fully contested, multi-outlet local news ecosystem looks like without a legacy daily at its center. Some outlets would have grown. Some would have struggled. Philanthropic capital that had been holding back — waiting to see if someone would save the Post-Gazette — might have flowed to different organizations.

Consider a different use of the $30 million. A Pittsburgh News Fund, distributing $1 million annually to each of 30 news organizations across Allegheny County and the surrounding region, would have been a radical experiment in ecosystem health. It would have strengthened exactly the outlets operating in the coverage gaps the Post-Gazette left behind. It would have built organizational capacity across the board rather than shoring up one brand. It would have been, in the language the industry likes to use, a systemic investment rather than an institutional rescue.

We will not know what either scenario looks like, because a wealthy man flew to Toledo in a snowstorm and wrote a check. That is not a criticism. His instinct to preserve is understandable, and the outcome is genuinely better than Alden Global Capital or darkness. But better than the worst alternative is not the same as best.

What Bainum did, in effect, was pause an evolution. Pittsburgh’s news ecosystem was weeks away from a forced reorganization — painful, imperfect, and potentially generative. Some outlets would have absorbed the Post-Gazette’s audience. Some would have failed trying. New ones might have emerged. Foundations that had been circling, waiting to see how the Post-Gazette story ended, would have redirected capital. The ecosystem would have reorganized around what Pittsburgh actually needs now, rather than what it had in 1986.

Instead, the clock stopped. The legacy institution survives, smaller and more dependent than before, its labor history laundered through a legal restructuring, its fundraising footprint expanding into the same pool that feeds the outlets that were already doing the work. The industry calls this a rescue. It might also be described as a subsidy for continuity over a bet on the future.

The Post-Gazette is alive. Pittsburgh still has a paper. That is worth something real.

The question is whether it is worth $80 million, structured as ongoing personal patronage, carrying no obligation to the workers who built it, and positioned to compete with the very ecosystem it is being held up as saving. Until the industry is willing to ask that question, it will keep celebrating rescues while the structural problem goes unsolved.

If this piece made you think differently about the Post-Gazette story — or if you think I got something wrong — I’d genuinely like to hear it. The comment section is open.

What’s your read? Is the Venetoulis acquisition genuinely good for Pittsburgh’s news ecosystem, or does the crowding argument concern you? Leave a comment below.

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Something wrong? If you spot a factual error or have additional context that should be reflected here, please let me know. Verified corrections will be noted in the piece.

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The Secretary of Defense went on television and complained about media coverage of the war with Iran. Too negative. Not patriotic enough. The Biden administration got a pass on Afghanistan that this administration isn’t getting. It’s easy to dismiss this as a partisan grievance. But there’s something real underneath it, even if he’s diagnosing the wrong problem.

Most newsrooms can’t cover military conflict the way it deserves to be covered anymore. They don’t have Pentagon reporters. National security correspondents are rare outside a handful of national outlets. The beat that was well-staffed and competitive during the Iraq and Afghanistan years has quietly atrophied over the past decade. What’s left in most markets is wire copy, reactive breaking news, and the occasional rewrite of whatever the Associated Press moved that morning.

So the Secretary’s complaint is legitimate. Just not the way he meant it.

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From 2001 through 2012, a Pentagon reporter wasn’t a luxury; if you were a paper that took itself seriously, it was a requirement. Even regional outlets near bases like Bragg or Hood kept people on the beat to track deployments and the quiet, grinding human cost of those wars. Then the news cycle shifted. Afghanistan wound down. Iraq faded. The reporters retired or moved on. Nobody replaced them. By the time the next conflict came around, the institutional capacity to cover it was gone.

This is where the Secretary’s grievance hits a deeper, more useful truth. When staff tells a newsroom leader they’re overwhelmed, the leader usually reaches for a scheduling tool or a job posting. They think it’s a math problem. But overwhelmed is rarely about the clock. It’s actually code for: I don’t know what the priority is, so everything feels like a priority.

That’s not a capacity problem. That’s a mission problem. And the distinction matters more than most leaders realize.

A newsroom that hires ten more reporters without clarity about what those reporters should prioritize doesn’t become more capable. It becomes more confused. More people chasing an undefined mission just means the confusion scales up faster. You’re pouring water into a bucket with no bottom. Hiring more people just increases the flow. It doesn’t fix the hole.

The venture philanthropy model that has shaped so much of nonprofit journalism funding has made this worse. Funders ask what you need to grow. The answer from newsrooms is almost always the same: more people, more programs, more ambition. Growth becomes the metric. So newsrooms grow. They add beats they haven’t fully thought through. They launch initiatives because the grant was available, not because the mission demanded it.

Instead, staff gets spread thin across a dozen different initiatives that don’t talk to each other. They aren’t drowning because the pile of work is too high; they’re drowning because they can’t see the point of the pile. When your team says they’ve hit capacity, they aren’t begging for an extra hour in the day. They’re begging for a reason to say no to the wrong things. They’re telling you the organization has lost its coherence.

Are you seeing this in your own organization? Is your team telling you they’re overwhelmed? What does that actually mean where you work? Leave a comment or hit reply. I read everything.

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This is where right-sized journalism matters as something more than a slogan. The idea, which I’ve written about before, is simple: the goal isn’t to build the biggest newsroom you can fund. It’s to build the most focused one you can sustain. A newsroom that is smaller but ruthlessly clear about what it covers and why will outperform a larger one chasing everything. The smaller one makes faster decisions. Staff knows what they’re optimizing for. The mission is obvious enough that people can use it as a filter. The larger one spends its energy negotiating priorities and justifying why any given piece of work actually fits.

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This isn’t just a newsroom failure. It’s an ecosystem failure. The journalism support organizations built to help newsrooms succeed have fallen into the same trap. The JSOs that actually work know exactly what they do. They’ve said no to things. They’ve let go of programs that didn’t fit, even when the funding was there. The ones struggling are often the ones that grew because they could, not because growth served anyone’s actual needs. More staff, more programs, more mission creep, and then a genuine confusion about why nothing feels like it’s working. The newsroom capacity problem and the JSO capacity problem are the same problem wearing different clothes.

Organizations move forward by getting clearer, not by getting bigger. That requires a harder conversation than posting job listings. It means asking what we should stop doing. It means admitting that some of the growth was a mistake. It means being honest with funders about what the mission actually is, rather than shaping the mission around what funders want to fund.

Back to the Secretary’s complaint. He wants better military coverage. On that narrow point, he’s not wrong. But the answer isn’t for newsrooms to hire more reporters and point them at the Pentagon. It’s for newsrooms to decide, honestly, whether covering the military actually belongs at the center of what they do. If it does, resource it properly. Staff it meaningfully. Own it. If it doesn’t, stop pretending and let the wire do the work. The space between those two honest answers, the half-hearted coverage that nobody owns but everyone feels responsible for, is where capacity actually collapses.

The word capacity has become organizational shorthand for a problem nobody wants to name directly. Leaders hear time. Staff means mission. Until those two land in the same place, no amount of hiring fixes anything.

Correction notice: This piece references a press conference held by the United States Secretary of Defense regarding media coverage of current military operations. If any details are reported inaccurately here, please reply directly and I will issue a correction promptly.

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There is a specific kind of hubris that usually arrives in a custom font. It is the belief that if you get the branding just right—the proprietary typeface, the ultra-clean interface, the “Smart Brevity” trademark—the brutal economics of local news will simply get out of the way.

Five years ago, Axios launched its “Local” initiative with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for a moon landing. The promise was simple. They would take the “Smart Brevity” that conquered D.C. and New York and export it to the rest of us. They would succeed where everyone else had failed because they had the tech, the brand, and the venture-backed momentum.

Earlier this week, a report from A Media Operator dropped a cold bucket of water on that narrative. Five years in, Axios Local still isn’t profitable.

If this story feels familiar, it should. We’ve seen this movie before. It was called Patch.

The Unit Economics of Corporate Scale

To understand the struggle, you have to look at the mechanics of the venture model. A Media Operator notes that while Axios Local is generating roughly $20 million in annual revenue, it is doing so across 30 cities with a staff of approximately 100 people.

That averages out to about $660,000 in revenue per city.

On the surface, that sounds healthy for a local operation. But once you bake in the salaries of two or three professional journalists per city, the dedicated sales teams, and the centralized product developers in Arlington, the margins vanish. Axios isn’t just selling ads. They are trying to fund a venture-scale corporate headquarters on a local newsletter’s back.

This is where the Patch comparison moves from evocative to analytical. Patch failed because it attempted to “corporate” its way into community trust. They built a massive, centralized machine that required a level of national advertising that local markets simply couldn’t sustain. Axios has better design and sharper writing, but they are fighting the same gravity. They are trying to solve the “Last Mile” of local news with a Ferrari-level overhead.

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Scaling Up vs. Scaling Across

The industry is currently obsessed with “scaling up.” This is the belief that if you aren’t growing to 50 cities in five years, you aren’t ambitious enough.

But there is a fundamental difference between scaling up and scaling across.

Axios is scaling up. They are building a franchise. When you scale up, you inherit a “Corporate Tax.” You pay for the brand, the legal team, and the high-rise mindset. The problem is that local news doesn’t actually want to be a franchise. It wants to be a utility.

I believe the scale has to happen in the utilities, not the headcount.

In my research on the 160x Efficiency Play, I found that the cost of “professionalizing” a newsroom—benefits, HR, legal, tech—is the primary barrier to entry. If you scale the infrastructure in the background (scaling across), you allow a two-person team in any mid-sized market to have the same operational muscle as a 50-person team in Arlington.

When you scale the infrastructure instead of the newsroom, you drive your fixed costs toward the floor. You allow the reporters to focus entirely on the community rather than the corporate reporting structure.

The 8x Conversion Gap

The struggle for profitability at Axios also points to a fundamental misunderstanding of what people actually pay for.

In my own analysis of local engagement data—what I call the 8x Conversion Gap—I’ve found that Americans are roughly eight times more likely to pay for “civic participation” than they are for a standard “news product.”

People will pay to belong to their community. They will pay to solve a friction point in their daily lives. But they are increasingly hesitant to pay for a standardized product that feels like it was processed in a factory. Axios provides “Smart Brevity,” which is a high-quality product. But is it a civic utility? The data suggests that without that deep, local connection, you are just another notification in an overcrowded inbox.

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The Strategy for the Rest of Us

So, what is the lesson for the independent publisher or the small nonprofit?

Don’t chase the Ferrari.

Profitability is the ultimate editorial independence. When you build something that survives because it is essential to its neighbors, you don’t have an “off switch” held by a board of directors in another time zone.

The concrete next step for any publisher today is to perform a Fixed-Cost Audit. Look at your budget and ask how much of your money goes toward things the reader actually sees, and how much is being spent to maintain a professional veneer. We often see newsrooms anchored by centralized CMS licensing or outsourced ad ops that produce a negative margin in smaller markets. If a tool costs more to maintain than the revenue it enables, it isn’t an asset; it’s an anchor.

By focusing on geographic clustering and shared professional services—the core of the Sebastopol Protocol—you can build something that lasts. The “Last Mile” of local news won’t be won by the smartest guys in the room. It will be won by the ones who figure out how to stay in the room without burning the house down.

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Is Axios Local a cautionary tale or just a slow starter? Are you seeing “negative margin” tools in your own newsroom? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

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Wait, did I get it wrong? I’m human (well, mostly). If I’ve missed a detail or you have a correction to the data cited here, let me know.

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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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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.

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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.