Mending Local News in a Crisis
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.
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.
Related Knowledge Center: Local media
The hollowing out of the local news ecosystem has been well documented; in some communities, efforts are underway to reverse the growing news desert.