The Colorado Sun embraces a democratic nonprofit model that looks a lot like a co-op

For at least 15 years, local-news visionaries have been thinking about ways to build a media organization owned and governed by its staff and members of the community. The idea is to create a news cooperative — that is, a co-op, similar to a food co-op or a credit union. Members might contribute money or labor, and in return they’d have a say in hiring and coverage.

I followed efforts to build such a co-op in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where longtime journalist Tom Stites wanted to test out a concept he called the Banyan Project with a site called Haverhill Matters. Unfortunately, years of anemic fundraising went nowhere, and in January 2020, the local organizers shut it down.

“What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, includes a chapter centered on The Mendocino Voice, in rural Northern California. What drew us there was that the founders, Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, were planning to convert their nominally for-profit site into a co-op. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” Maxwell told a crowd at an event that I attended at a brew pub in Ukiah in March 2020. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.”

COVID, however, wrecked those plans. And though the Voice continued to provide crucial local coverage, Maxwell (Baumann left for personal reasons during the pandemic) started making plans to morph the site into a traditional nonprofit. The Voice was acquired by the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation in 2024. And when Ellen and I recently interviewed Bay City president Katherine Ann Rowlands on our podcast, she was less than enthusiastic about the co-op model.

But now there’s something that at least resembles a local-news co-op — The Colorado Sun, a digital startup whose ownership model has changed several times since it was founded by 10 refugees from Alden Global Capital’s Denver Post in 2018. The Sun is also among the projects we profiled in “What Works in Community News.” Before I get to what’s new, let me share some of the backstory.

When I visited Denver in September 2021, the Sun was operating as a public benefit corporation — that is, a for-profit company legally mandated to serve the community. The project was also working with a nonprofit organization so that individuals and foundations could make tax-exempt donations to support the Sun’s journalism.

At that time, the Sun’s founders were trying to manage a governance challenge. The organization was owned by the nine founders who had stayed (one had left), but it already had a staff more than twice that size. Co-founder Larry Ryckman, then the editor and now the publisher, told me, “We would like there to be a path to ownership for them.”

Ryckman began working out a solution two years later, when the Sun jettisoned its hybrid model and went fully nonprofit. Even then, he told me in an interview for Nieman Lab, he was making plans to involve the staff in the governance, transforming the Sun into a democratically run enterprise. He expanded on that idea when he appeared on our podcast in July 2024, telling Ellen and me that the Sun had brought in a consultant to help them become a “self-directed nonprofit” with a five-member governing board, three of them staff members and two from the community. He told us:

It’s really important to me that the employees and journalists of The Colorado Sun have a voice and a vote in how things are run. So it’s been exciting. I really don’t know of another large news outlet out there that has our structure. There might be a very good reason for that, I will tell you. Time will tell. But in all seriousness, journalism needs new models. We need to experiment with new models. Clearly, the old models are failing before our eyes.

So what’s new? Earlier this month, Tara Francis Chan of the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri reported that the Sun now has a fully functioning governing structure in place. It’s complicated. The staff votes on board members. The board, as I described above, comprises three non-executive staff members and two community members who set strategy and approve the budget. The executive operating committee is a four-member group that runs the organization on a daily basis. The board can remove Ryckman from the executive committee, but only the committee itself can fire him.

“The benefits of this are that our employees have a voice and a vote,” Ryckman told Chan. “And the downside is our employees have a voice and a vote, right? Democracy can be messy sometimes.”

After all these years, we still don’t have any examples of a true local-news co-op. And as I learned in reporting on the Banyan Project, they are wickedly difficult to set up. But shared governing responsibility by the staff and, in the case of the Sun, members of the community is becoming a reality — and that’s at the heart of what the co-op model is all about.