Support for journalists who want a voice and a vote in their newsroom, plus the first newsroom database launches

Powering News, a suite of resources for non-traditional, worker-friendly newsrooms, has now launched.

The free resources (including a 100+ page guidebook) will help these innovative news organizations — coops, staff-led nonprofits, and democratic newsrooms where journalists make the critical business decisions — navigate their early startup days, troubleshoot challenges as they grow, and raise the profile of this rapidly growing corner of the journalism industry.

Launching a national database

At the heart of Powering News is the newsroom database, which is based on the first national survey of non-traditional, worker-friendly media. 

More than three dozen coop, staff-run nonprofit, and other democratic newsrooms are listed, with detailed looks inside 24 and counting (your newsroom can join the list here).

This database peels back the curtain on the array of their newsroom structures and decision-making approaches. It also illustrates how quickly they’ve risen. More than 20 of the listed newsrooms launched in the last five years.  

Powering News also includes

1. Quiz: Start here if you’re trying to figure out if a coop, staff-run nonprofit, or democratic structure might be right for your team. You can also learn more about each of these models, what it takes to start each one, and see some case studies.
   
2. Guidebook: This 100+ page practical guide is filled with real insights from more than a dozen non-traditional, worker-friendly newsrooms. It lays out what you need to know about launching a newsroom from governance to finance, but also delves into thorny issues like decision-making, compensation, hiring, goal setting, accountability, and conflict resolution.
   
3. Templates: Newsrooms have shared copies of everything from their operating agreements and bylaws, to freelance agreements, decision-making charts, and HR policies.
   
4. Recommended support: If you need professional help, newsrooms have shared more than 90 vendors they recommend. Whether you need a CMS, HR partner, bookkeeper, broker, or mediator this list is a great place to start.

Who is this for

Powering News is for the journalists and news leaders interested in innovating their newsrooms, and the people who support this work:

• Potential and existing co-founders of non-traditional, worker-friendly newsrooms. Most of the resources are designed to help these innovators build more sustainable organizations.
• Traditional news leaders who can learn from emerging best practices across the industry. By seeing the fresh approaches these newsrooms take to goal setting, compensation, accountability, and conflict resolution, the standard of what we offer journalists can change.
• Media reporters and funders who will benefit from a more accurate understanding of the growing size and diversity — as well as the nuances within — this flourishing field. 

What’s still to come

The research that went into Powering News illuminated a vast swathe of needs to support these newsrooms. The hope is to continue building out these resources, particularly the guidebook, templates, and vendors, with additional wisdom and recommendations from more newsrooms (so please get in touch). Plus, now that there’s a better understanding of the existing landscape, we can consider the best way to bring these newsrooms into a community of practice to create a network or develop peer learning.

Why this matters

Building a non-traditional, worker-friendly newsroom is infinitely rewarding but almost as infinitely challenging. Not only are you starting a company, but you’re often creating relatively unique governance, decision-making, editorial, revenue, and people & culture processes from scratch. 

“It’s so vital for us to start developing resources like this so that everyone doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time,” said The 51st co-founder Abigail Higgins. “Also, there isn’t a right way… both the beautiful and difficult thing about building is you get to design your own newsroom. You get to do what you want to do, and you get to make this what you want to make this.”

Yet, as business leaders keep getting “big money bombs”, as one founder put it, to try the same failed models and build the same toxic cultures, there’s been little operational or financial support for these journalist-led startups. (That’s why I’m so excited about Defector’s Shared Services Project, which collaborated on Powering News.)

“It’s just easier to implement the thing that you know, versus saying you know what? That actually didn’t work. Let me try to do something different,” said Invisible Institute’s María Inés Zamudio.

The hope is Powering News can help guide news entrepreneurs who want to do something different.

“I’m a rule breaker, but let’s break more rules and build things that work, not build things that exist,” said Canopy Atlanta’s Mariann Martin.

Plus, there’s no one better positioned to do just that than journalists.

“Journalists are the most creative thinkers and problem solvers I know,” said Range co-founder Luke Baumgarten. “Journalists become journalists because they want to challenge the status quo… That mindset can become a really powerful tool for building something qualitatively different from other newsrooms.”

With more non-traditional, worker-friendly newsrooms than ever before, it is a critical time to identify, support, and celebrate this sector as a growing source of sustainability — because even newsrooms struggle to be what they cannot see.

Who made this

Tara Francis Chan is the Director of Operations at The Trace and co-founded The Appeal, one of the nation’s first staff-run nonprofit newsrooms. The Appeal team’s many successes and challenges in building this model inspired this project. 

Tara speaks regularly on innovative operations and people-centered leadership. She is a 2022 Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Media alum and a 2024 INN Emerging Leaders Council member. You can see more of Tara’s work in For All We Care, a framework for balancing care and accountability, created during the Executive Program in News Leadership and Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Thank you

Thank you to the 2025-2026 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellowship, Kat Duncan, and Randy Picht for making this project possible. A huge thanks to Defector’s Shared Services Project and the many valuable resources from U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Democracy at Work Institute and Sustainable Economies Law Center.

I’m so grateful to the many newsrooms who donated their time to contribute to this project: 404 Media, Athens County Independent, Atlanta Canopy, Atlanta Community Press Collective, Autonomy News, Coyote, Defector, Hell Gate, Invisible Institute, Kaheāwai Media, Racket, Range, Tone Madison, and The Colorado Sun.

Lastly, my deepest thanks to the incredible individuals at many of these newsrooms who inspired, tested, and generously supported this project, especially Jasper Wang, Ethan Corey, Corinne Colbert, Luke Baumgarten, Mariann Martin, Eric Falquero, and Andrew Fan.

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Cite this article

Chan, Tara Francis (2026, Feb. 26). Announcing Powering News: Free resources for worker-friendly newsrooms. Reynolds Journalism Institute. https://rjionline.org/news/announcing-powering-news-free-resources-for-worker-friendly-newsrooms/