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In May, Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, delivered the opening remarks at AJPalooza, an annual gathering of nonprofit local news leaders in its portfolio. AJP is an organization that helps fund local news outlets and provides them with support. This piece is adapted from Berman’s speech.
A few weeks ago, Bob Moore, the founder and CEO of El Paso Matters, was in the courtroom for the sentencing of the gunman who carried out the 2019 Walmart mass shooting in El Paso. Years after the national cameras had moved on, Bob was there.
In his reporting, he described a moment when two Latina women—survivors—crossed the courtroom to embrace and show mercy to the man who had hatefully targeted their community.
Bob wrote: “I’ve been in journalism more than forty years and seen a lot, but what I saw today in an El Paso courtroom had a power I’ve never before experienced.”
He made that moment vivid and durable for people who otherwise wouldn’t have known it was a part of the story. At its best, local journalism captures the complexity and meaning in our communities. Without it, our history—our sense of ourselves as communities—is diminished.
Local journalism doesn’t just preserve memory, it strengthens civic life. Researchers talk about the disappearance of the Middle Ring—the network of people who aren’t your family, and aren’t strangers, but are something vital in between. Local journalism plays an essential role in fortifying that Middle Ring.
It also keeps our institutions honest. At Mississippi Today, Anna Wolfe’s reporting exposed how tens of millions of dollars intended for vulnerable families was misused, funneled into projects championed by powerful and politically connected individuals. When Anna won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2023, for this work, it was a moment of great pride for nonprofit local journalism.
Now that reporting is leading to real consequences. It has fueled broader investigations and recovery efforts, including a lawsuit seeking to recover more than $100 million in misused funds. Last month, in a win for press freedom, a Mississippi judge dismissed the defamation lawsuit related to this story brought against Mississippi Today by the former governor.
When I called Mary Margaret White, Mississippi Today’s CEO, to congratulate her after the case was dismissed, she said something I wrote down immediately: “This is a moment when we need coalition.”
She’s right. Leadership in a moment like this doesn’t happen alone. We need the backstop, the strength, and the security of a coalition. We need leadership that will set ambitious visions and that is undeterred by setbacks. We need allies to buoy the work and us all.
Setbacks in our field can feel destabilizing. Just a few weeks ago, Houston Landing, a well-resourced, high-profile nonprofit newsroom, shut down after just two years. It was a reminder that capital alone isn’t enough. We need community buy-in, a relentless focus on sustainability, and leadership that can carry that work forward.
We are operating at a time of unprecedented pressure on journalism—on its financial viability and on its freedom. This might be a tempting moment to go on the defensive. But it must be a moment to lead with clarity and ambition.
When the American Journalism Project (AJP) first partnered with City Bureau, they were a nine-person team in Chicago, pioneering new ways of engaging the community in creating journalism. One of their novel programs was to train and pay community members to document local government meetings. In 2024, City Bureau had a budget of $4.9 million and a team of thirty, and their Documenters program had been replicated in twenty-three cities. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on missing-persons cases in Chicago.
CTMirror, a statewide newsroom in Connecticut, was a staff of thirteen and a budget of $1.1 million when we invested in them in 2019. Just a few weeks ago some of the AJP team was visiting their newsroom, and Bruce Putterman, the CEO, pulled out an org chart showing their growth since: in 2024 they had a budget of $2.8 million and a staff of twenty-five.
In 2019, Cityside started as a single newsroom: Berkeleyside, with a budget of $800,000 and a staff of seven. Since then, they’ve launched sister news outlets—The Oaklandside and Richmondside—serving new communities with essential, trusted, local reporting. They now have a staff of twenty-nine and are sustaining a budget of $5 million.
In 2019, Mississippi Today was still a young newsroom, with a staff of twenty and a budget of $2 million. I’ve since watched the launch of Verite and the growth of Deep South Today, now a forty-four-person organization building a regional network for nonprofit public service journalism across the South.
This isn’t just survival. On the contrary, these news organizations are leading with ambition, matched by deep investment in their communities. They are demonstrating what’s possible as you continue to grow and lead.
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