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In the spring of 2023, Rachel McDevitt, a journalist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was on vacation when she learned that life at her radio station, WITF, was about to change. She received a text from a colleague, Jeremy Long: “So the big news at the staff meeting is that we have been gifted LNP.” McDevitt knew that LNP was a daily newspaper in a nearby county. She texted back: “Can we return it for store credit?” LNP, with a daily circulation of more than thirty thousand, covered the county of Lancaster, a somewhat sleepy area home to hardwood forests, Amish country, and farmland. WITF had a wider focus across nineteen counties and a weekly listenership of around a hundred thousand. “I just know this is going to go badly,” she wrote. 

McDevitt hosted the local edition of All Things Considered, and she covered climate change and the energy sector, as Pennsylvania sits atop one of the world’s largest natural gas reserves. Sometimes, listeners she met around town recognized her by her voice. “It felt like we were part of a community,” she said. WITF is a listener-supported station; it also receives support from grants and public funds. 

For more than a century, LNP—which covers local business, politics, high school sports, and arts and entertainment—had been owned by a prominent local family, the Steinmans. The deal to combine the organizations arose in the spring of 2022, when Robert Krasne, who was then the CEO of Steinman Communications, a company affiliated with the Steinman family, floated the idea to Ron Hetrick, who was then the CEO of WITF. The newspaper would be given, free of charge, to the radio station; as part of the arrangement, the Steinmans also offered the station a grant of thirty million dollars, spread over five years. 

“To advance their legacy of supporting local journalism and media literacy, the Steinman family sought to pair LNP with another locally based media organization—one with a self-perpetuating community board and a track record of strong leadership,” Krasne told LNP’s digital arm, LancasterOnline. “The family identified the perfect partner in WITF.” Though WITF did not initiate the deal, Hetrick told LancasterOnline that the two outlets were complementary and that the paper would be a boon. The now combined media organizations would be managed by a new nonprofit called Pennon. 

The partnership proceeded quietly at first. But as more time progressed, a feeling emerged, as Leigh Horner, the chair of Pennon’s board, later told Current, a public-media publication, that WITF “really underappreciated the challenge of running a daily newspaper.” On October 3, 2024, three out of the seven people working in the station’s newsroom were laid off, and a fourth was reassigned. McDevitt, Long, and Jordan Wilkie, a democracy reporter, were the only three people left on the editorial staff. “We were just in shock,” Long told me. Jack Panyard, then a breaking-news reporter for LNP, was just as perturbed as his radio colleagues. “I couldn’t believe how many people were knocked off that day,” he said. 

In some respects, the merged outlets remained separate. WITF’s headquarters, in Harrisburg, was an hour’s drive from LNP, in downtown Lancaster. But they shared a complex, overlapping system of oversight: a board for Pennon, a board for LNP that included Pennon and WITF representation, and an entity tasked with administering the Steinman grant. Members of these groups included local executives and media figures—among them David Greene, the longtime host of NPR’s Morning Edition, who had spent part of his childhood in Lancaster. 

According to Cassie Farrelly, Pennon’s senior vice president and chief impact officer, the arrangement had serious problems. On June 22 of this year, Farrelly filed a claim against her employer in the Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas, alleging that Pennon’s board and senior management “failed to protect public grants, private donations, and endowment funds from misuse by predatory donors and an opportunistic Chief Executive Officer, among others.” Farrelly also claimed that her employer had retaliated against her for reporting this as well as other “serious governance, financial, tax, and conflict of interest issues” to the Internal Revenue Service. “Most notably,” she argued in the lawsuit, the deal allowed Steinman-controlled entities to “squeeze millions of dollars from Pennon.”

The Steinman family’s businesses and philanthropy have a legacy in the region. In 1866, Andrew Jackson Steinman took over the Lancaster Intelligencer, and the family went on to amass wealth through iron, coal, and rental properties. When his sons James Hale and John Frederick eventually took the helm of the Intelligencer, they acquired other publications, creating a small media empire in the county, expanding throughout the twentieth century into radio and television. The Steinmans still keep things in the family: Krasne is married to another descendant, Hale Krasne. Beverly—or Peggy—Steinman, James Hale Steinman’s daughter, is the foundation’s chair emerita.

Kathleen Pavelko, who was WITF’s CEO before Hetrick, told me that the Steinmans are “massively influential” in Lancaster County. “And not just because of the newspaper, of course: They’ve been very supportive of early learning, childcare, things like that.” In 2025, according to the Steinman Foundation’s most recent IRS filing, the organization donated tens of thousands of dollars to dozens of local organizations supporting education, mental health, and local history, among other pursuits.

Farrelly’s lawsuit tells another story. By the time she joined, Farrelly—who is forty-nine, with curly brown hair and glasses—had lived many lives, camping her way through East Africa, working at the British consulate in New York, and publishing a thriller under the moniker C.S. Farrelly. She was hired in early 2024 to identify organizational risk, manage strategic initiatives, and oversee parts of Pennon’s impact work. When she looked into the grant agreement—which, according to Farrelly’s lawsuit, had only been shared with a small contingent of the WITF board at the time of signing—she had a series of concerns. In particular, she argued, Steinman Communications hid aspects of the paper’s financial situation during the initial negotiations. According to the lawsuit, at the time of donation, Steinman Communications reported the paper’s value as 7.142 million dollars—a figure cited in an IRS donor acknowledgment form signed by Hetrick. After the transfer, however, according to documents shared with me, Pennon reported a negative net worth for the paper in its own books. Soon, LNP was losing approximately four hundred and fifty thousand dollars every month. 

In a response to Farrelly’s lawsuit filed in court on August 24, Pennon said that its “Board of Directors and senior management exercised due diligence and acted in Pennon’s best interests at all relevant times, including ensuring that all funds used by Pennon were in furtherance of Pennon’s Mission.” A spokesperson told me that “Pennon denies that any agent or employee of Pennon engaged in any unlawful conduct toward Ms. Farrelly or otherwise.” Krasne likewise maintains there was no wrongdoing. “They entered this by virtue of their own free will,” he told me, of WITF. “There was no penalty if they were to walk away prior to formally accepting the gift agreement. All material facts—contracts and other relevant information—were disclosed and vetted by counsel and by independent experts. They had lawyers looking and other professionals looking at this and presumably blessing the gift.” 

But after the layoffs, employees, including Farrelly, began to discuss the organization’s fate. In the spring of 2025, Farrelly brought concerns to the Pennon board, including Horner, formerly the chief sustainability officer at Hershey, the chocolate company. (Horner did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.) Farrelly said she was troubled by conditions attached to the deal that required LNP to stay in its previous office space, bound by a lease that cost more than eight hundred thousand dollars a year and wouldn’t end until 2040. (In Farrelly’s complaint, she alleges that the terms of the lease were “unusually favorable” to the real estate firm that owned the property, and had been set just after Steinman Communications–owned businesses sold buildings to the firm.) 

She also took issue with provisions attached to the thirty-million-dollar grant, including that LNP must maintain a seventy-one-employee newsroom and that the paper must keep its existing print and delivery schedule. The only nearby printer able to meet that demand was Susquehanna Printing, a company owned by Steinman Communications. Per an analysis shared with me, Financial Times Strategies—the consulting arm of the British newspaper, hired by Pennon—found that LNP could save around three million dollars per year by switching to an alternative printer (if the paper slightly altered its delivery schedule). For Farrelly, these stipulations in the grant agreement created a “circular funding pattern”—funds from the grant moved from the Steinmans to Pennon, then ultimately returned to Steinman-related entities.

After Farrelly raised her concerns to the Pennon board, Digby Solomon, an LNP board member, surveyed the deal’s paperwork and identified a series of problems. “My overarching concern,” he wrote in an email to Hetrick that was shared with me, “is that it appears the Steinman family transferred all the business risk to Pennon, and then subcontracted all the back end work to itself at what I am sure is a decent profit to them. It seems like a one-way sweet deal for them at Pennon’s expense.” (Solomon declined to comment.)

That summer, Wilkie, the democracy reporter, sent a letter to the Pennon board, shared with me, expressing his concerns about the company’s finances and the future of his newsroom. “I feel confident that any member of the public who cares to turn a critical eye to Pennon will recognize that things are not going well,” he wrote. 

On September 5, 2025, Pennon notified Susquehanna Printing that it would be terminating its agreement. Later that month, Pennon received an email from Jared D. Bayer at the law firm of Cozen O’Connor: “We expect LNP Media to promptly perform its obligations under the agreements. Susquehanna Printing will hold LNP Media responsible for any failure to do so,” he wrote in a document shared with me. “We look forward to your response.” (In addition to representing Susquehanna Printing, Cozen O’Connor has previously represented Steinman Communications.)

In its court filing, Pennon has since denied that it “knew or should have known that Susquehanna Printing was the only printing company that could publish and deliver LNP’s newspaper in accordance with the grant agreement.” Whatever the case, it’s unlikely that, without the Steinmans, LNP would still be around. “The Steinman family had the opportunity to sell the newspaper but declined because no assurance could be made that the buyer would not turn their treasured asset into a ghost newspaper,” Krasne told me. 

“One very negative alternative,” Pavelko told me, “would be the purchase of the newspaper by venture capitalists.” The Steinmans did hold on to one publication, she noted: Lancaster Farming, an agriculture-focused trade magazine. “It’s the darndest thing,” she said, “but as far as I know it still makes money.” 

The relationship between WITF and LNP was, in the end, short-lived. By October of 2025, LNP had an operating deficit of 1.4 million dollars and Pennon management had considered declaring bankruptcy. David Greene—at the time an LNP board member, who had also joined the group of advisers to Pennon on administering the Steinman grant—reached out to Horner to workshop a solution. Greene proposed forming a new nonprofit, to which Pennon could donate the paper. He left his board position to allow members to consider the idea. Pennon agreed. In December of 2025, Greene appeared on All Things Considered to discuss his new venture—Always Lancaster—and recalled his days as an LNP intern. One day, he said, after reporting on a fire at a local farm, he returned to the newsroom covered in ash. 

By the beginning of this year, Greene—who is fifty, with brown hair and stubble—was serving as LNP/Lancaster Online’s interim publisher, asking for donations. At the Knight Media Forum, in February, he heard Sarabeth Berman, the chief executive of the American Journalism Project, an organization that invests in local media, refer to nonprofit newsrooms as a community asset and a public good. “I really took that to heart,” he told me. He has been engaging “everyone possible” in seeking donors. Greene also said that Jim Brady, who until recently served as vice president of the Knight Foundation, is helping Always Lancaster build its list of potential funders, although he declined to share specifics. The Steinman Foundation is contributing financially, too, although Greene declined to say how much.

Greene, whose home base is “Los Angeles, officially,” has recently been reacquainting himself with his hometown: dinner at Lombardo’s for the bolognese, strolling through Buchanan Park, shopping at the farmers market. Along with other LNP staff members, he has also been trying to engage with the community on a deeper level. One evening in March, LNP staff hosted a listening session at a Mennonite church in Landisville, Pennsylvania, fielding requests such as that of a bespectacled man in a flannel shirt who said he was tired of reading op-eds by “retired guys.”

Today more than a hundred people work at LNP and LancasterOnline. They have now broken their expensive downtown lease. Tom Murse, the executive editor, is especially proud of the work the paper has been doing on the case of Jonathan Luna, a federal prosecutor who was found dead in a Lancaster County creek bed in the early 2000s. (LNP reporters have covered the unsealing of autopsy and toxicology reports and sought new records that might shed light on the unsolved case.) There is consistent business coverage and watchdog reporting on local government. 

In February, Greene wrote a letter published on LancasterOnline outlining his goals for the publication, which had “implemented cost cuts” (after the transfer, LNP switched printers), and declaring that “bold changes” would be needed. “We’ve taken a hard look at every part of our operation,” he wrote, “to ensure we’re on solid footing for years to come.” Krasne, who is now a cochair of the Steinman Foundation, told me that he thinks Greene will be a “breath of fresh air for LNP employees as leadership transitions from Pennon to Always Lancaster.”

In some ways, the challenges for the press in small-town central Pennsylvania are not dissimilar to the ones faced by news outlets across the country. As local newspapers struggle to sell advertising, subscriptions dwindle, and funds for public media dry up, nonprofit endeavors—like the Salt Lake Tribune’s transition, in 2019, and the Chicago Sun-Times’, in 2022—are on the rise. Philanthropists have poured funds into journalism across the United States. Yet these projects can, as WITF and LNP show, come with complications. 

The newsroom at WITF, according to Wilkie, is still down resources and staff. McDevitt has now joined WESA, in Pittsburgh. Long, who now works as the deputy digital director for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, has left journalism behind. Pennon’s management is hoping for a fresh start, too. Recently, after a period of interim leadership, Pennon appointed a new CEO and president, Maximilian Duke, who came from a role at PBS, as well as a new news director. In a press release, Duke said he was drawn to the organization because of its “mission and potential.” But potential, for Wilkie, is relative. “My concern is that a lot of the language from the board in the last several months and internally has been celebrating that the newsroom is rebuilt,” Wilkie told me. “That is the wrong language. They have perhaps resuscitated the newsroom from the damage that leadership of the board did, but they certainly have not restored the news operations to the capacity they previously had.” 

Farrelly, who is still a Pennon employee, has asked in her complaint that Pennon admit it violated Pennsylvania’s Whistleblower Law. The complaint also asks that her responsibilities be restored and that she receive damages and permanent injunctive relief preventing the organization from retaliating against her. 

Reflecting on the fallout from the merger, Greene told me that “everyone involved had all the right intentions.” The radio station and the paper got to a point where people realized it wasn’t the right fit. But: “I’m just happy,” he said, “that both organizations are still thriving and still have an exciting future ahead.”

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