Nonprofit news is betting on unorthodox ways to grow

Local public and nonprofit news organizations are getting creative about surviving an industry that keeps getting smaller. They’re buying or launching smaller publications, joining forces with community groups, and looking for ways to grow.

At Chicago Public Media, the bet is that public media needs to reclaim its role as a public square—much as it helped create a public forum after broadcasting took off in the 1960s. This October, the company plans to launch a digital platform on Chicago.com where residents of five of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods can gather with neighbors, according to CEO Melissa Bell.

“We really believe that today is the day that we can start to set an agenda,” Bell said. “We need to think about the infrastructure that supports people in a way that is truly locally based and locally owned.”

Bell spoke on a panel on Thursday about public and nonprofit media at the 27th International Symposium on Journalism, hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. She was joined by executives from news organizations in Austin, San Antonio and Salt Lake City who are experimenting with new ways to strengthen local journalism and prepare for what comes next.

The new platform in Chicago may be best defined by what it isn’t: a news website. Chicago Public Media won’t deploy reporters to cover the five neighborhoods, Bell said. Instead, journalists will participate hopefully alongside local businesses, nonprofits and civic groups, with the goal of connecting residents to the resources already operating in their communities.

The initial rollout will include Avondale, Bronzeville, Edgewater, South Shore and the city of Evanston — “vital neighborhoods across Chicago that have very different flavors,” Bell said — with the hope that the project will serve as a pilot for similar public-media platforms around the country.

The idea comes as social media has become a primary gateway to news for Americans, even as the major tech platforms aren’t necessarily designed to serve the public interest. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that 56% of U.S. respondents had used social media for news in the previous week. Chicago Public Media is developing the project with New Public, a nonprofit research and development studio.

“This is a tool for the city of Chicago, and we are merely the stewards of it,” Bell said.

Other media outlets are reaching out to smaller but established outlets and forming local media coalitions. The Texas Tribune, which was founded to cover state politics in Austin in 2009, has expanded into regional reporting across the state. In 2025, the company launched the Waco Bridge and acquired the Austin Monitor and relaunched it as the Austin Current.

Both publications rely on the Tribune’s statewide coverage and follow its code of ethics and AI policy.

“Those are very different communities, with different kinds of experiences and growth trajectories and challenges,” Hartman said. “But they both are really focused on telling stories that are better told because we have both the state newsroom and the local newsroom following that storyline.”

In this new environment, even paywalls are coming down. In 2025, The Salt Lake Tribune removed its paywall, giving up $2.6 million in annual digital subscription revenue—about 20% of its total revenue. CEO Lauren Gustus said the decision reflected a belief that the Tribune’s journalism should be accessible to as many people as possible.

“As a nonprofit, we didn’t think that it was equitable or fair to ask people from Utah who may not be able to afford to pay for news to do so,” Gustus said. “It was really about what do communities need from us and how can we serve them in that need.”

The Salt Lake Tribune, which was founded in 1870 and became a non-profit in 2019, spent a year preparing for the transition. And that showed results, Gustus said: more than 90 percent of subscribers stayed on as monthly donors.

A recent partnership came less than three months ago. In July, Texas Public Radio and San Antonio Report joined forces to make the largest nonprofit newsroom San Antonio.

Ashley Alvarado, president of Texas Public Radio, said that after decades-old calls for the federal government to defund public media, in 2024 those threats became real while both companies were studying to merge.

“We looked at how the two newsrooms really complemented each other,” Alvarado said. “And we also were able to – which is a luxury for a smaller nonprofit newsroom – to make the investment to do market research.”

Alvarado cited the Future of Public Media Initiative, a joint effort by the Poynter Institute and Boulder-based Public Media Company, which is studying how communities across the country want public media to serve them. The initiative plans to release recommendations in early 2027 on how public media organizations should operate over the next 50 years. The research could be a resource not only for public media outlets but for any journalist, Alvarado said.

“People are seeking connectedness. They’re seeking moments of awe.They’re seeking a way to have information come to them,” Alvarado said. “And so with the public media work that Poynter and Public Media Company are doing together, it’s an opportunity to do a bit of a reset and also to think not just about the services we provide but the models on which we run.”