Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Vanan Murugesan, the executive director of Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom in Minneapolis, said that the subscriptions and donations his newsroom received in January of 2026 “would have covered the last six months of last year,” as his newsroom worked around the clock to cover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and the protests that followed. Not all the subscriptions were local; many came from across the country. 

Murugesan is part of a wave of leaders in local news in the US who are refining a model of nonprofit news—a model that barely existed in America twenty years ago. The Institute for Nonprofit News, which was founded in 2009 with twenty-seven members, now includes four hundred and seven news organizations in its annual survey. 

Talking on the latest episode of our Journalism 2050 podcast, released today, Murugesan discusses the benefits and drawbacks of for-profit versus nonprofit newsrooms with Joshi Herrmann, founder of the UK’s Mill Media, a for-profit local news startup that began in Manchester and spread to five more cities. Herrmann was radicalized as a for-profit news advocate by a visit to Google’s annual Newsgeist gathering in Arizona in 2017, where he took the universal lament of “the local journalism model cannot be mended” as a challenge rather than a given. “I think ‘market driven’ is a better description than ‘for profit,’” Herrmann said. “The point about being market-driven is that you are very responsive to what people want.”

Recent events have proved just how much nonprofit outlets like Sahan Journal matter to constituents. The Nieman Lab rankings of local-newspaper and public-media Web traffic, released last week, showed that the biggest gains in audience came from outlets focusing on immigrant communities being targeted by ICE. Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), still recovering from the total withdrawal of federal funding from local broadcasting, saw attention and ratings soar even before the violence of January. This increase in attention, driven by ICE activity, is mirrored across the country. NepYork, a nonprofit outlet covering Nepali communities in New York, saw a more than tenfold increase in traffic in October. 

Sahan Journal saw a 190 percent rise month over month in November of 2025, even before the announcement of Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown. Murugesan estimates his journalists and editors then at least tripled their output. “We produce anywhere between ten and twelve pieces a week in terms of content, and we are close to thirty a week for the past four or five weeks,” Murugesan said on the podcast.

Murugesan noted that Sahan Journal’s reporters come from Minneapolis and are working on stories that directly affect their community, even their own streets. “That’s an extra layer of complexity,” he said. 

At the same time, “big money” solutions for journalism’s future have proved the most fragile. The billionaire-funded model of the Washington Post has failed spectacularly, with owner Jeff Bezos unable to commit to his own journalists under political pressure. Centralization of ownership and control—under one or two companies that are publicly aligned with a presidency hostile to the concept of a free and competitive press market—has undermined CBS News and weakened other broadcasters. Even Apple News is under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission. The public media model has been weakened, while the “philanthropy” of technology companies such as Meta and Google has waned as the possibility of regulation has receded. 

For smaller news organizations, this vacuum may open up opportunities to radically rethink funding. One practical issue facing local independent news providers—particularly in the United States, where the local becomes national in a matter of seconds—is how to build dynamic systems to take advantage of spikes in support. The GoFundMe model of support for causes that catch the public’s attention is in some ways the antithesis of the failed “micropayments” model rightly rejected by most newsrooms. Larger campaigns and one-time donations made during a time of crisis are the very opposite of charging on a transactional pay-per-article basis. 

In the meantime, local news providers can learn from one another in creative ways, as they respond to the needs of residents. “There are some conditions out there in some areas,” Murugesan said, “where you can write the most amazing articles, and the market does not allow it to be successful. And that’s when a nonprofit can step in. Not maybe for perpetuity…but can at least step in, provide the initial investment, and show what impact looks like.” Essentially, the market-driven and nonprofit pioneers can converge on the same territory: providing impact in local communities and developing wider channels for individuals and “small money” as well as charming philanthropies into donating.

There’s no time to waste. Debates about the future of American journalism have, for the best part of twenty years, rested on the fragility of business models and griping about the pace of innovation. These binary debates now seem outdated, at a time when the free press is under attack and communities under threat need reliable news. The real question now is whether we have enough models for independent journalism to evade the next crackdown—wherever it occurs.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.