News

Mending Local News in a Crisis

Columbia Journalism Review · Emily Bell · last updated

How nonprofit and for-profit business models can complement each other when big-money media fails.

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. 

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