“Some hard and important lessons”: One of the most promising local news nonprofits looks back — and ahead

It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News.

Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs and chase profit over meaningful journalism. The Trust has grown at a remarkable clip since its founding in 2021, expanding to a $50 million media business with 65 newspapers across three states, founding a newspaper from scratch, and buying a printing press along the way.

The nonprofit has saved dozens of beloved community newspapers from closure or predatory ownership. (In Maine, for example, the Trust swooped in to pay a reported $15 million for a group of newspapers likely to have fallen under chain ownership or into David Smith’s hands otherwise.)

Those high hopes and exalted status make it all the more painful that the Trust has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and closed two of its two dozen newspapers in Colorado, while its subsidiary in Maine has laid people off and seen several respected and long-tenured editors depart in recent months. (The Trust says no “reporting” positions were affected by the cuts. Newsroom-side roles, however, were affected.)

The Trust is not the first, or only, nonprofit organization to face this critique. Six-figure executive pay at other support organizations and within various local newsrooms — especially those making layoffs — have raised eyebrows for awhile.

Asked about the salary disparity, Hansen Shapiro noted that nonprofit organizations, including the Trust, use compensation studies and board oversight to determine executive salaries.

Nelligan, meanwhile, finds criticisms of executive compensation to be more persuasive outside the nonprofit world. He guessed CEO pay at the National Trust for Local News was “in the bottom decile” of compensation for other $50 million companies.

“I think in operating nonprofits, obsession [with executive salaries] is really misplaced,” Nelligan said. “The fact that we can’t compensate extraordinarily talented people at their market rate actually drives poor outcomes in the nonprofit sector.”

Another cause for concern is that employees at the National Trust’s 19 newspapers in Georgia do not receive health benefits. This is true even at the new newspaper spun up from scratch by the Trust itself, The Macon Melody, Nieman Lab confirmed.

The Trust said there was no comprehensive benefits package in place when it acquired its Georgia newspapers. (It does offer vision care and life insurance.) Giving Georgia journalists comprehensive benefits is “a goal,” but the Trust declined to specify a timeline for when it might happen.

Hansen Shapiro emphasized in our interview that an “important learning” for the Trust has been that “talent is a superpower, and an ingredient that I think we underestimated.” So we asked the obvious question: Why the low pay and lack of benefits in some newsrooms?

Hansen Shapiro acknowledged the frustration, but said the Trust was attempting to avoid expanding too quickly, then being forced to make layoffs.

“In any kind of compensation or cost conversation, we’re thinking about long-term implications, ” Hansen Shapiro said. “You don’t want to get in a position where you hit a business bump and all of a sudden, you’re not able to support the size [of] newsroom that you had before.”

Some “hard” lessons learned

Asked which of the Trust’s newspapers were profitable, chief portfolio officer for the National Trust for Local News Ross McDuffie noted that “portfolio sustainability is the goal — not individual profitability.” In other words, the papers that are doing well financially help support those that are not.

“Relatively prosperous, growing communities like Macon and Portland help make it possible for rural places like Bethel and Fort Valley to have their own sources of news,” McDuffie said, referring to the Portland Press Herald and The Macon Melody. “That portfolio construction helps us achieve a vision of equitable and resilient local news, nationwide.”

That’s critical given that rural communities have been among the hardest hit by the loss of newspapers, and digital-only news sites haven’t grown quickly enough to fill the gap. Of more than 650 digital-only news sites in the United States, more than 85% are in metro areas.

“For the over 100 million Americans living in rural areas and small cities, the best chance to sustain quality local news is the local newspaper they already have,” Nelligan said.

The Trust’s first acquisition, Colorado Community Media (CCM), was profitable when the Trust acquired the group of two dozen newspapers in 2021. Four years later, that is no longer the case, as Inside the News in Colorado columnist Corey Hutchins has reported. At least some of the newspapers in Maine that were profitable when private owner Reade Brower sold to the Trust were no longer profitable by the end of 2024.

Rising costs of print coupled with a steeper-than-anticipated decline in print advertising set the stage for the cuts. (The strained financial situation in Colorado helped convince the Trust to buy a printing press and take control of its own costs.)

“Our news brands are providing useful, beautiful, and impactful local journalism,” McDuffie said, “but we haven’t finished building the healthy local businesses required to fund that journalism for the long term.”

Shared services will help, but are they enough?

Many in the local news industry, starting with Hansen Shapiro, believe sharing services between different local news organizations is essential to cut costs and nudge the field toward sustainability.

“Shared services” typically refer to back-end and business supports that undergird the newsroom — HR systems, tech stacks, circulation, marketing, payroll, and so on. And while networks, nonprofits, and even the philanthropic initiative Press Forward have zeroed in on shared services as a means to do more local journalism with fewer resources, a model of centralized services for many newsrooms can sound an awful lot like the model of a classic newspaper chain.

The Trust has tried to differentiate itself from that model, saying it’s trying to “solve for an ownership incentive problem” with its nonprofit status and journalism-first approach.

Though shared services — and the associated savings — are central to the Trust’s promise to newly acquired papers and the communities they serve, McDuffie acknowledged that the Trust has been “slow to invest in shared services and address operational challenges in our states.”

The result is that savings associated with shared services haven’t kept pace with the declines in print advertising revenue or higher printing costs. Digital revenue growth has also been “more gradual than projected,” McDuffie said.

When it comes to achieving sustainability for local news, Hansen Shapiro said, “I don’t think there’s any sort of magic bullet.” Instead, she sees a set of tradeoffs to be navigated and reevaluated (what services can be centralized? How long can the Trust sustain the high cost of print? How quickly to accelerate to digital?) in a constantly shifting landscape.

The National Trust for Local News presents itself to donors, acquired newsrooms, and the local news industry as “the good guys” in local newspaper ownership. In many ways, the nonprofit qualifies. But it’s common to see tension between local news outlets and their more removed, and often better-paid, national counterparts. (Tensions can even arise when local journalists feel decisions are being made in a different city just a few hours away.) That has been true in National Trust newsrooms.

Local newsrooms may resent national input, often for good reason. No one Nieman Lab spoke to claimed the Trust was stepping on the editorial scales.

Instead, the most common source of frustration was a lack of transparency from the Trust. Without it, local news executives who knew their communities and businesses felt stymied and underutilized. Some have been annoyed by suggestions to take actions the newspaper was already taking, or by questions with answers they felt should be obvious to anyone with glancing familiarity with their news sites. Some of the “efficiencies” the Trust said it would implement to save costs, for example, were already in place.

The Trust is running up against a common “mantra,” as a recent Poynter column put it, that local news organizations are best “owned and run by those closest to the local communities.”

While that’s uncontroversial in terms of editorial control, the Trust is one of multiple prominent and well-funded nonprofits arguing it’s not necessarily the case when it comes to sustainable business operations. Another high-profile example is the American Journalism Project, a “venture philanthropy” launched in 2019 that though not an owner-operator, invests in “business and operational capacity” and provides its nonprofit local news grantees “operational and strategic support.”

Hansen Shapiro was adamant about the importance of local editorial control. But “there’s a real romanticization of local ownership,” she said. She sees an opportunity for national owner-operators like the Trust to take some of the load off local owners trying to do the impossible alone.

How to define “closure”

Across Maine, Georgia, and Colorado, the National Trust for Local News has primarily cut roles and products associated with print.

“We have to continue to rationalize our operations to reflect the reality of decreasing print demand and increasing digital demand,” McDuffie said. “That is an important step toward providing high-quality local journalism for the long term.”

“We don’t define moving from a printed product to a digital product — as we’ve done with several titles in Maine — as a closure,” he added. “Our North Star is better local journalism serving more communities, and we will continue to transform toward that, learning and improving. We’re committed to learning from the field around us and speaking openly about our plans.”

Investing in journalism’s digital future sounds reasonable; the future of news is online. Why, then, the pushback? Why the exodus of newsroom leaders?

The Trust has been cautious, even guarded, about sharing too much about its decision-making, finances, and, occasionally, its funding. The tendency has sometimes hurt its ability to communicate its plan to its own newsrooms and, externally, to local communities.

The contradictory pillars the Trust embraces as its mission — conservation and transformation — place it in a bit of a bind. When an organization that defines itself as a rare force for local newspaper conservation makes cuts in service of local news transformation, it can sting for people who were won over by the hope of conservation — and feel as if it’s just one more broken promise from a national actor claiming to champion local news.

“We learned some hard and important lessons in 2024,” McDuffie said. “Part of being a nonprofit is speaking openly about that.”

Nelligan described the cuts and changes as part of a well-established plan to shift the Trust’s resources from “print distribution to digital journalism.”

“Transformation is what makes conservation possible,” he said.

Asked about recent critical coverage of the Trust, Hansen Shapiro was reflective.

“I see it as a manifestation of our collective desire for there to be some kind of magic something, where all of the painful tradeoffs that have had to be made don’t have to be made anymore, and where there’s some perfect model [with] no tradeoffs, and we’re exempted from all the challenges,” Hansen Shapiro said. “That’s just not reality.”

“There’s so much trauma around loss in this industry,” she added, “that it’s very easy to take a loss frame, as opposed to, ‘Okay, we’re going to have to make some hard tradeoffs, but that’s so that we can serve in new ways, and create new products and hire people to serve communities — maybe not with a print product, but with a newsletter or with SMS.’”

“The pieces in place, the challenges sketched out”

Hansen Shapiro has sought to build the Trust to outlive her leadership. (“Having studied a lot of organizational life cycles,” she said, “the founder syndrome is real.”) She leaves, she told Nieman Lab, with “the pieces in place, the challenges sketched out.”

“I believe the Trust is now well-positioned for its next phase of growth,” she said, “and personally I felt I had contributed what I could to its development.”

The National Trust is currently being led by an operating committee that includes board member Keith Mestrich, a financial services executive and former CEO of Amalgamated Bank, and cofounder and board chair Marc Hand, the CEO of Public Media Venture Group. The search for Hansen Shapiro’s successor is “actively underway,” according to the Trust. The nonprofit says it is looking for a leader with a deep commitment to its mission and experience managing similarly sized organizations through transformation.

“We had a visionary leader in Elizabeth, and she’s been extraordinary,” board member and former WNBA president Lisa Borders told the Press Herald. “Now, we’re moving from inspiration to execution.”

As it looks ahead, the National Trust for Local News is clear-eyed about the uphill battle it faces, and the stakes.

“For local newspapers, the most predictable outcome of the digital era is failure,” Nelligan said. “Cheating that fate is challenging, costly, and important.”