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When the Houston Landing debuted, in February 2023, it immediately looked like a powerhouse in Texas media. Backed by over $20 million in philanthropic funding, it boasted a staff of around thirty, brought together by editor in chief Mizanur Rahman, a respected investigations editor, and top reporter Alex Stuckey, a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist, both from the Houston Chronicle. The Landing’s ambitions gave it the heft of a national operation. It was focused on one metro area, yes—but the Houston metro area contains more people than Tennessee and is larger than Massachusetts. Within its first few months, the Landing broke stories on deaths in Harris County jails and covered the state’s hostile takeover of the Houston Independent School District.
Now, two years after its launch, the Landing is a ship battered by storms. Rahman and Stuckey are no longer on staff—they were fired less than a year after the debut. And, in December, the publication lost a major source of funding. As of the new year, Arnold Ventures—the philanthropic vehicle of Laura and John Arnold, Houston-based billionaires—has declined to continue funding the Houston Landing.
In January 2022, Arnold Ventures committed $4 million in initial funding, to be paid out over three years. From the beginning, the organization referred to the money as seed funding, a catalyst to get the Landing off the ground. But staff at the foundation were enthusiastic enough during the first year that at least some of the Landing’s staff felt optimistic that the Arnolds would eventually re-up their commitment. Indeed, in December 2024, as the first three years wrapped up, leaders at the Landing believed they had secured $850,000 in additional funding from Arnold Ventures. But no contract was ever finalized and, when the Landing came asking about the money in December, Arnold Ventures announced it would not provide any more funding.
“Arnold Ventures provided a $4 million seed grant across three years,” Angela Landers, a spokeswoman for Arnold Ventures, said in a statement. “We are proud to be part of the launch of the Houston Landing and will continue to support nonprofit journalism in Houston and across the United States.” (Arnold Ventures currently funds eighty outlets and has donated more than $60 million to journalistic causes since 2013.)
Of the Landing’s two other major funders, the Kinder Foundation has already paid out its grant for this year, and the Houston Endowment’s grant will run out in October. Their future support for the Landing is unclear.
“We are proud to be a seed funder of Houston Landing and of its success in bringing high-quality independent reporting on local issues to readers in Greater Houston,” said Stephanie DiCapua Getman, director of communications for the Houston Endowment. When asked if the endowment would continue to fund the Landing after October, she said that the endowment has a “thorough evaluation process” it will complete at a later date. “It’s too early to offer a definitive response,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the Kinder Foundation said that it “does not comment on the potential of future funding for any organization.”
For now, the Landing continues to operate full steam ahead, and its CEO, Peter Bhatia, a respected former editor of the Detroit Free Press, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Portland Oregonian, is seeking new funders. This story isn’t a cautionary tale—at least not yet. But the Landing’s experience has been illustrative of the challenges facing upstart nonprofit publications.
One central lesson is the need for a firm editorial identity and editorial strategy. Every for-profit outlet, for better or worse, eventually answers to the market—these publications can value intrinsic goals like impact and utility, but, ultimately, they must turn a profit. Nonprofits, meanwhile, have greater latitude to create their own goals and determine their own metrics of success, beyond the bottom line. At the Landing, that conceptual freedom, that lack of road map, meant that some personalities crashed into one another—and crashed hard.
The Landing began with a group of philanthropic funders, including the American Journalism Project, identifying the right market to make an investment in news. That means that, unlike the Texas Tribune—the brainchild of former Texas Monthly publisher and editor Evan Smith—the Landing didn’t launch with a captain who had a clear idea of where things were going. Just weeks before the publication’s debut, in 2023, personal issues forced the Landing’s original CEO—a former executive at HEB, the Texas grocery chain—to withdraw from the job, and the publication had to scramble to find a new chief. It happily settled on Bhatia, a grizzled newspaper veteran. There was a brief honeymoon, but soon Bhatia and Rahman were clashing. Some of the conflict, certainly, came down to the interpersonal disharmony that afflicts most every newsroom. But there were deeper disagreements over the Landing’s mission—should it focus on deep investigations, or quicker news and dedicated beat reporting? Less than a year later, Bhatia unceremoniously fired Rahman and Stuckey and, later in 2024, axed the managing editor as well: John Tedesco, another respected investigations specialist from the Chronicle, who has since rejoined that paper. (Bhatia declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The dismissals outraged and stunned journalists across Texas; at the Landing, staffers worried for their own jobs. In a sprint-speed organizing push, the newsroom staff formed a union. Understandably.
In March 2024, Bhatia and the publication’s leadership chose to voluntarily recognize the new Houston Landing NewsGuild. In the Landing’s own coverage of the unionization, Bhatia said, “I’m pleased we’ve reached this point, which has included clarification of who will be in the unit and who will not. The unit is now confined mostly to our reporting staff and a few others who work closely with them. This agreement follows the wishes of many of our other employees to remain outside of the bargaining unit.”
But negotiations over an initial contract have turned tense at times. And they have not been cheap. To negotiate with the guild, the Landing brought in Steven M. Moss, a top-shelf corporate labor attorney. That meant that, instead of just journalism, the outlet’s funders were also paying attorneys’ fees.
Despite the turbulence, the union leadership was clear that its membership remained committed. “As members of the Houston Landing NewsGuild, our primary mission has always been building a workplace where our members are empowered to produce meaningful, community-focused journalism,” the guild said in a statement. “We take great pride in the work we’ve accomplished so far and remain steadfast in our commitment to this mission.”
How much the discord at the Landing comes down to individual personalities will be hashed out in the years to come (multiple former and current staffers I spoke to half-joked about writing memoirs about the publication’s rocky first year). But there are some structural challenges the Landing faces that go beyond any one person.
One of those challenges has been the relationship between major funders and the editorial product. Unlike most other nonprofit journalism outlets, the Landing’s major funders all have seats on the organization’s board. The three largest—Arnold Ventures, the Kinder Foundation, and the Houston Endowment—each had a representative on the six-member board.
Multiple people familiar with the interactions among the three funders—and the ripple effects through board meetings down to Bhatia, the Landing’s editorial leaders, and the rest of the staff—said they had created confusion about the outlet’s identity, mission, and strategy.
Another source of friction has been the disconnect between the values and practices of nonprofits and those of nonprofit journalism. Much of the staff the Landing hired to fundraise had nonprofit and philanthropic backgrounds. But reporters felt that the nonprofit professionals didn’t understand journalism; meanwhile, the business staffers felt that reporters were difficult and unhelpful when it came to raising money.
Stuckey, the investigative reporter who was let go, said that business-side staff at times suggested fundraising and partnership efforts that the newsroom deemed inappropriate.
Despite all the problems, the Landing has broken an array of stories, and its metrics are impressive. According to data shared by Manny García, the current editor in chief and a former editor of the Austin American-Statesman, February was the Landing’s fourth-best month in terms of website traffic, with 380,000 page views. The outlet’s main newsletter, The Launchpad, has twelve thousand subscribers. The Landing’s education and immigration coverage has been particularly impressive: its reporting on the upheaval in the Houston school district, which is being run by a state-appointed superintendent, has prompted promises of action from Texas lawmakers. And the Landing’s coverage of Colony Ridge—an underserved housing development that Republicans as high-profile as President Donald Trump have alleged is a den of undocumented-immigrant gangs—injected some much-needed reality into the conversation.
The Landing’s leadership is actively courting new funders.
If the Landing eventually folds, the most painful fact of the saga will be that everyone—from the largest funders down to the most junior reporter—originally got on board because of their conviction that Houston deserved another news outlet. Current and former staff at the Landing universally agreed that, whatever comes next, the wealth of scoops the Landing broke prove that Houston needs high-quality, nonprofit local news, and that there’s a robust return on investment in more journalism in the city. Now their job is to convince new donors of that.
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