The Non-Profit Publisher: A New Economic Model to Save Local Journalism from Extinction

A community stops expecting to be covered at a certain point, usually around the third or fourth round of newsroom layoffs. It doesn’t occur all at once. The crime reporter from the area goes. The beat of education then vanishes. The individual who used to be present at all school board meetings—the one who discovered the budget irregularity that no one else saw—is also no longer there. It’s not quite silence, but it’s close enough that most people can’t tell the difference.

That silence has been spreading for years throughout the United States and Canada. Roughly one-fifth of Americans will reside in what are known as “news deserts” in 2025, where significant local coverage has all but vanished, according to data that has been widely shared among journalism scholars. Over the past 20 years, 75% of newspaper jobs have been eliminated. For-profit publishers have mostly stopped pretending it works in smaller markets due to the harsh math. They leave, combine, or just operate a newsroom’s skeleton until nothing is left that is worthwhile.

“The harsh truth is that, taken in isolation, there is likely no viable economic model for decent news provision in economically struggling cities or rural areas.”
— Lance Knobel, Cityside Journalism Initiative

The nonprofit model, which was previously written off as being too idealistic and reliant on charitable generosity, might be the more practical solution. The CEO of Cityside Journalism Initiative, Lance Knobel, has given this gap a lot of thought. He makes a straightforward observation: struggling communities have either already been abandoned by for-profit publishers or they will soon be. When nonprofit publishers examine those same coverage gap maps, they see a mission statement rather than a market failure. That makes a significant difference in the way you tackle the issue of what journalism is truly for.

The fundamental structural difference is more important than it may seem. The majority of local nonprofit newsrooms offer free reporting to all. There are no subscription tiers, paywalls, or credit card-locked content. The logic is strategic rather than merely ideological. The people who are most impacted by the decisions made at city hall or the school board can actually be reached when reporting is free. As Knobel has noted, the communities that are blocked by paywalls are frequently the ones most affected by what those paywalls conceal. Paid access to civic information seems to subtly alter democracy in ways that most readers are unaware of.

The Toronto-based store An example of this in action is The Local. It was established in May 2019 with the goal of covering the areas of the city that traditional media had routinely overlooked, especially ethnically diverse suburbs like Scarborough, which for years were almost exclusively featured in crime stories in Toronto news, even in areas with lower crime rates than the heavily covered downtown core. No single outlet was the only one to exhibit this narrative and geographic bias. Police stories were simple, inexpensive, and consistently generated clicks, which was a structural issue ingrained in the way journalism had always distributed its dwindling resources. No one had the time needed for anything else.

That is not automatically resolved by the nonprofit model. However, it does alter the incentive structure in significant ways. You have more space to tell the slower, more difficult, and less algorithmically satisfying stories when your income comes from readers who support the work and from a mission rather than a profit. Although it’s still unclear if reader membership alone can support a full newsroom in a mid-sized city, early data from publications like The Local indicates that there is a genuine demand for serious community journalism, despite the conventional business model’s insistence to the contrary.

The more intriguing structural development might be what Knobel refers to as the “multi-local” approach. An increasing number of organizations are creating portfolios—groups of regional newsrooms that share infrastructure, knowledge of audience development and fundraising, and most importantly, financial risk—instead of each nonprofit newsroom thriving or failing on its own. Coverage in a nearby smaller, resource-poor community can be subtly subsidized by a thriving outlet in a major city. Not all newsrooms are required to cover their own costs. All that is required is for the larger whole to remain cohesive. It’s a unique approach for journalism, but not for any other industry with a clear mission.

It’s difficult to ignore a certain irony as you watch this play out. On their own terms, the companies that insisted for the past ten years that only market forces could decide what journalism survives have produced exactly what their detractors had predicted: enormous coverage gaps, destroyed local newsrooms, and communities left to navigate civic life with no one paying close attention. With slower growth and significantly less funding, the nonprofits are starting to close some of those gaps, albeit imperfectly and unevenly, but with a perseverance that the purely financial operators could never quite muster when things got tough.

Local journalism has not yet been saved. If someone tells you otherwise, they are trying to sell you something. However, the nonprofit publisher, which was formerly an afterthought, a charitable endeavor, or a well-intentioned experiment, is beginning to appear less like a temporary solution and more like the most resilient organization in a field that has been rapidly losing institutions. The question of whether that is sufficient is still unanswered. Someone is still in the room, at least for the time being.