What you can learn from other newsrooms’ wayward decisions

The instability of corporate media has spurred journalists to launch hundreds of newsroom startups in the past decade.

Building any kind of news startup is exhilarating. You’re all in on the mission, you’ll shape the business model and the beats, you can pick your colleagues, and you get to write your own job description.

For nontraditional newsrooms there’s an added layer of excitement. These teams will also be rethinking how ownership, power, and decision-making can operate from the ground up.

Over the course of my RJI Fellowship the same mistakes have come up again and again from those I’ve spoken with. So, no matter the sort of newsroom you’re building, here’s seven startup mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Believing you’ll build the perfect workplace

Many news founders set out to build newsrooms that have a clear revenue model, actively engage communities, and respect and support journalists.

The good and bad news is you will not succeed perfectly. No one has ever built a perfect workplace where there isn’t some frustration or stress about finances, beat structures, compensation and benefits, workloads, or interpersonal relationships.

This was a surprise for many teams, including Minnesota-based Racket. 

“We’re building our own newsroom. How can there be problems with the thing that we made?” laughed co-founder Em Cassel. “We always are having conversations about, ‘Is this working? Is there a way to make this easier? Is someone shouldering more of the work than everyone else? Is stuff being distributed evenly?’”

Instead, have your team acknowledge your newsroom won’t be perfect and simply aim to build something better than what has come before. 

Another way to think about it is that you’re solving more interesting problems, according to Chaclyn Hunt, a leadership team member at Invisible Institute.

“I like the problems here,” said Hunt. “How do you work things out on a personal level? How do you do it in a way that feels good? How are you producing strong work according to your values? [I like it more than] how do you deal with your boss?”

2. Doing things because you ‘should’

There are many things you absolutely must do when you launch a newsroom: legally incorporate (and set up bylaws or other governance documents), get a bookkeeper, purchase insurance, and decide on a payroll and benefits provider, to name a few.

But many decisions are just traditions, and you should constantly ask, ‘Why are we doing this?’

“We spent so much time early on looking for an office,” said Athens County Independent’s co-founder Corinne Colbert. “We wasted so much time. Then we realized we’re kind of putting the cart ahead of the horse here. We don’t even have a product. So who gives a shit if we have an office, and shouldn’t we worry more about paying ourselves?”

Abigail Higgins, a co-founder of D.C. publication The 51st, describes all these decisions as the “beautiful and difficult thing” about building a new startup.

“There isn’t a right way,” Higgins said.

3. Not asking around about finances (compare, compare, compare!)

Every newsroom is different, but learning from how other newsrooms choose to spend their limited funds can help you make the most informed decisions possible. So don’t be afraid to ask for a quick phone call or send a short email with one or two specific questions — you’ll be surprised how much other founders want to pass on some of their learnings.

Here’s a few financial mistakes in particular to ask about and be wary of:

• Being contractors for too long: Before being ready to set salaries, many newsrooms have people working as contractors. Aside from legal limitations, balance the logistical need with the culture this may start to create. At Invisible Institute when everyone was a contractor early on it was chaotic and people tracking their time led to building a culture they didn’t want.
• Setting unsustainable salaries or benefits: Knowing that other newsrooms have chosen to take pay cuts in recent years to stay afloat, consider at the outset what the minimum financial support your team needs, rather than the ideal. The Appeal admirably set Thriving Wages to reflect our values, but this reduced our limited runway. Racket, Hell Gate, and Defector also started with low salaries and increased each year based on revenue.
  Also, think long term about increases and compounding interest: At Invisible Institute non-leadership staff have been receiving cost-of-living increases so the pay gap has been closing drastically.
• Overpaying for insurance: Racket overpaid in their first year by about $20,000. “It was a huge amount of money. We just did not know how much insurance we needed,” said Cassel. “The insurance f**k up was massive and very frustrating, because you’re like, ‘Well, we just flushed that money away.’” 
• Giving everyone financial access: One newsroom allowed all of their team to access their financial accounts. After a team pitched a project they spent considerable money on it — before it was officially greenlit by the leadership team. Make sure only a small number of staff have access to your accounts with clear secondary approvals.

4. Setting and forgetting policies and workflows 

First, make sure your policies and processes are written down. The newsroom described above that faced challenges over a project’s approval struggled because they hadn’t documented how a project is approved.

Second, don’t think these policies and processes will last forever.

In the first year or two, most startup teams are running on sheer adrenaline. This energy can help support workflows and practices that aren’t sustainable in the long-term.

This happened with Racket’s workloads, when two of the co-founders were doing the vast majority of work on weekly features that left them exhausted.

“You can kind of suffer through almost anything for a certain amount of time. Then you’ll look around and be like, ‘No, actually, I can’t do this for another 2 years, we need to figure out a solution,” said Cassel.

These sorts of crisis points, when tensions will inevitably rise because policies or processes need updating, are not a failure but an inevitable part of a business maturing.

To head this off, lay out in your first year when and how specific processes and policies will be revisited. Even a simple sentence will allow everyone to have a clear understanding of what needs to be done when change is needed.

5. Adapting from friends to colleagues

It’s easy to blur the line between work and life when startups become all encompassing. But as you grow you need to establish organizational boundaries because “the magic just does not scale,” said Hell Gate’s co-founder Nick Pinto.

“Navigating the transition from friends who sort things out over beer to institutional protocols for channeling conflict and resolving decisions is complicated, ongoing and takes time. I wish we had sorted some of that out sooner and more thoroughly,” said Pinto.

This was an adjustment for Defector during their pandemic-era launch as well, when  their whole team was constantly online and making ad hoc decisions.

“There were just bad habits around people chiming in [late at night] and being like, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we did it this way?’ And then the three people who are awake are like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great.’ And then everybody else wakes up and they’re like, ‘Wait a second, that’s not how you do things,’” said co-founder Jasper Wang.

Wang said they eventually made it clear that business decisions must be made during work hours at their regular meetings every few days.

If you find yourself chatting with a co-founder outside work hours ask yourself, are we having a ‘how’s work going conversation?’ or are we having a ‘how are we running the business conversation?’ The latter needs to involve your team.

6.  Skipping simple accountability and conflict resolution structures

Setting out strategies and processes for editorial, audience engagement, and revenue are critical.

But these aren’t the only standards newsrooms should set. Startup teams should define what is (and isn’t) reasonable to expect from one another in terms of communication, accountability, and conflict resolution.

When The Appeal first launched we received advice to develop HR processes now, because by the time we would need them it would be too late — advice that ended up being correct. The same thing happened with Canopy Atlanta, which had to pull together a process when a problem arose.

“You don’t want to be building your conflict policy when you’re in that moment of crisis,” said co-founder Mariann Martin, of Canopy Atlanta, 

Try to develop a simple conflict resolution policy and disciplinary process by the end of your first year. You can also establish accountability norms in low-lift ways with:

• User Manuals: Ask questions like “How do I want to be held accountable for our work, our mission?”
• Community Guidelines: Answer questions about how the team agrees to show up and enter into conflict, i.e. “In our newsroom we show accountability by…”
• Communication Charter: Build accountability into thinking about the where, when, and how staff communicate.

By starting now, the team will be more comfortable with these approaches by the time you ever have to use them, creating a foundation of trust.

7. Delaying hard conversations

Delaying a hard decision because of the challenges and pain it will cause will only make those greater.

This was the case for Atlanta Community Press Collective, when executive director Matt Scott knew he had to let someone go.

“We spent a lot of money continuing to pay their salary and paying for lost time amongst the team to try to fix a situation that I knew wasn’t going to work. It was costlier to try to fix it, than to acknowledge that this is a problem and it’s untenable, emotionally and organizationally. We stalled growth. We could have hired people earlier, but we stopped growth while we were going through this,” said Scott.

A similar situation happened at RANGE.

“We spent way, way, way too long surfacing the problem, and then we spent way too long at every stage addressing the problems,” said co-owner Luke Baumgarten. “I don’t think it’s merciful to drag these things out anymore. I had to get a lot more comfortable with conflict. And I only got more comfortable with conflict when I realized this was a failure to confront a problem head on.”

Save yourself, others involved, and your newsroom from even more pain and have the conversations now.

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Next month, I’ll be launching my RJI Fellowship project that will include a 70+ page guidebook on best practices for addressing many of these mistakes, as well as example policies, templates, and recommended vendors shared by many of the newsrooms quoted in this article.

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Cite this article

Chan, Tara Francis  (2026, Jan. 21). Mistakes news startups make – and how to avoid them. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/mistakes-news-startups-make-and-how-to-avoid-them/