What went wrong at the Houston Landing?

In May, the Houston Landing shut down less than two years after its ambitious launch, laying off all 43 employees.

The announcement that the board of directors had voted to close the nonprofit news outlet generated national attention, and many questions. The big one: How does a local news startup that appeared so promising — one endowed with well-staffed newsroom and business operations, and more than $20 million in seed funding — fail?

In conversations with more than a dozen former Landing staffers, and additional nonprofit news observers and leaders, I heard about a news outlet with an unclear identity, led by a CEO who struggled to unify the organization. Leadership lacked the fundraising and nonprofit experience to achieve the lofty ambitions set out for the Landing. It spent quickly from the outset, and could not generate revenue to sustain its size.

The factors leading to the Landing’s closure may be unique. But the outlet’s challenges — how to balance the pursuit of impact with building an audience; how to carve out a niche among more established local outlets; how ample seed funding can become a liability — are relevant to other news nonprofits.

“We tried to be too much, too fast, for too many people,” a staffer and member of the Landing’s union told me.

That research came out of AJP’s Local Philanthropy Partnerships program. (The Houston Endowment and Arnold Ventures are both listed by AJP as local philanthropy partners.) The city is home to several existing newsrooms, including the Houston Chronicle. The report, however, recommended starting a new, nonprofit Houston newsroom. The three local funders opted to move forward with that solution.²

The Houston Endowment and the Kinder Foundation each committed $7.5 million. Then there was $4 million from Arnold Ventures, $1.5 million from AJP, and $250,000 from the Knight Foundation. The nearly $21 million in seed funding was expected to support the organization from 2023 through 2025.

The vision for this exceptionally well-funded local news startup was ambitious from the outset. It would be one of the largest nonprofit newsrooms in the country, per AJP’s January 2022 announcement.

That announcement named a six-member search committee to choose the Landing’s CEO and editor-in-chief. The Houston-based funders chose the search committee members, AJP chief investment officer Michael Ouimette told me, including three representatives from their own foundations: The Houston Endowment’s Stern; the Kinder Foundation’s Rich Kinder; and Arnold Ventures’ Jeff Cohen, a former Houston Chronicle editor who oversees the philanthropy’s media portfolio and serves on AJP’s board of directors.³

The search committee selected Scott McClelland, retired president of Texas supermarket chain HEB, as the Landing’s CEO. With McClelland, they made two more early hires: Mizanur Rahman, who had been the Houston Chronicle’s investigations editor, as editor-in-chief, and Emily Keeton as chief operating officer.

In September 2022, though, McClelland stepped down unexpectedly. A few months later, he was replaced by Peter Bhatia, who had spent decades in editorial leadership roles at daily newspapers.

The Landing’s board of directors held its first meeting in November 2022. The board had four of the same members as the search committee: The three funder representatives (Stern, Kinder, and Cohen), and Anne Chao, manager of the Houston Asian American Archive at Rice.⁴

It was a mistake for the Houston Landing to put major funders on its board, someone with knowledge of the early hiring process told me.

“The worry is that you make decisions out of fear that [funders] are not going to renew their initial grants,” they said. That “really erodes your independence.” (This person understood that the grants had been made with the possibility of renewal. Multiple staff described Bhatia assuring them that funders would renew the grants at some level, as recently as this year; other reporting confirms that at least some staff at the Landing expected some level of funding renewal.)

At least one funder, Arnold Ventures, had already decided not to renew its grant months before the board voted to shut the Landing down.

The board composition also raises a governance issue, the person added. “The Landing had a situation where it had a board within a board,” they told me. “It was very clear that the power rested with [funder representatives Stern, Kinder, and Cohen]. The other three didn’t have nearly as much voice or power.”

Peter Bhatia came to the Landing after a long and celebrated career in legacy newspapers — most recently, as the top editor at the Gannett-owned Detroit Free Press. He led newsrooms to 10 Pulitzer Prizes. Bhatia and Landing board member Jeff Cohen were industry contemporaries, serving as editors and executives of metro dailies in the same era. Bhatia had never led (or fundraised for) a digital-only nonprofit newsroom. He was not from Houston, though editor-in-chief Rahman had deep ties to the city.

The person with knowledge of early hiring recalled being excited about Bhatia’s journalism background. (They said another candidate considered for CEO was a retired executive from a Fortune 500 company.)

In hindsight, though, this person thought choosing a CEO who wasn’t familiar with Houston and didn’t have fundraising experience was a mistake. “We could do the greatest journalism possible, but if you’re not fundraising, that makes your sustainability very, very difficult,” they said.

Bhatia is a “man of integrity,” Joseph Turner, the Landing’s former director of marketing, told me. But he lacked “clarity, and vision, and leadership…in contrast to other CEOs that I had worked for.”

Former Landing staffers I spoke to said Bhatia never became deeply established in Houston and wasn’t an effective fundraiser.

“These nonprofit CEO jobs [are] more than 50% fundraising,” one nonprofit news expert told me. “Clearly, that either wasn’t happening or wasn’t successful.”

This was a “classic example of what one bad apple can do to an entire organization,” one reporter told me. (The same reporter compared the Houston Landing’s board to the shadowy Lumon Industries board in the TV show Severance.)

Bhatia declined requests for an interview and did not respond to detailed written questions. “Houston Landing faced several challenges, but I’m immensely proud of the impact it made during its short time,” he told me in a statement. “We were honored to deliver high-quality, nonpartisan journalism to the greater Houston community. Although there is conjecture about why Houston Landing closed, ultimately, it came down to financial performance. The Houston Landing team gave it our all to make it a success.”

A week later, he emailed me with another statement.

“I gave my all in working to make Houston Landing a success and for it to endure. I accept my responsibility for unsolved issues on my watch, but I was working against some circumstances from the beginning that made it extremely difficult,” Bhatia said. “I will not engage in personal disparagement of anyone associated with Houston Landing and I remain very proud of the work done by the staff in the last year. We made remarkable steps forward.”

“A local news solution must be staffed to produce enough to have impact,” the 2022 AJP slide deck noted. It imagined a newsroom staffed with enough journalists “to generate a critical mass of content that both serves every community in the way that it needs, and commands attention from local decision-makers and funders.”

The report budgeted for a 44-person organization (including 26 newsroom staffers) in the first year, growing to 61 people (including 37 newsroom staffers) by year four.

The Landing didn’t grow at quite that clip, but it staffed up relatively quickly. At launch in 2023, it had more than 30 “reporters, photojournalists, editors, digital specialists” and others. Six months later, the staff topped 40, and eight new hires were announced in fall 2024.

Salaries were generous, by industry standards. According to the Landing’s 2023 990, Bhatia’s salary was $450,000; Rahman’s was $245,455; and other C-suite staff made well over $100,000.

The Landing’s revenue in 2023, per the 990, was $3.2 million. Expenses were $5.8 million, with executive compensation and other salaries making up more than two-thirds of that.

I asked Ouimette if, from AJP’s perspective, the Landing’s proposed pace of scaling up and spending was a strategic mistake. He said no: “The size and complexity of the Greater Houston area’s population and the strength of its philanthropic and business sectors validate both the need for and viability of strong nonprofit local news serving Houstonians.”

The AJP report also specified a target “original output frequency” for the newsroom: 140 stories per week, produced by a staff of 65. (The report noted that the more than 200-person Chronicle had an output of 555 stories per week.) At that rate, the Landing would have published 7,280 stories in a year.

The Landing, with its staff of 40-plus, published 936 stories in 2024.