Coops, staff-run nonprofits, and democratic newsrooms are saving jobs by making tough decisions together

Losing your job is awful. It’s one of the most stressful occurrences that can happen in a person’s life. And, as corporate and venture capital-backed media seeks ever higher profits, it’s become more and more common for journalists to be laid off, even multiple times, over the last decade.

It’s no surprise then that non-traditional newsrooms — where journalists have the ability to make critical business decisions — have responded in creative and sacrificial ways in order to prevent layoffs in their newsrooms.

At the Invisible Institute, if they can’t ever make a full payroll the leadership team collectively agrees to lower their salaries to the staff level, which happened a couple of times a year in their early years.

At The Appeal, a staff-run nonprofit newsroom, the team voted to take a 50% pay cut for months when a funder unexpectedly failed to renew a grant. And last year, The Colorado Sun, also a staff-run nonprofit, did not give out raises so they could “tighten their belts a bit.”

“If people take empowerment seriously, it leads people to make decisions for the good,” said RANGE founder and co-owner Luke Baumgarten, who was recently furloughed.

Changes in power make teams open to new options

This summer, when RANGE, a coop newsroom based in Spokane, Washington, ran into financial difficulties, Baumgarten volunteered to furlough himself. It was a decision his colleague co-owners then signed off on.

The ability for newsrooms like RANGE to embrace these choices could be because there’s no need to clamor for power.

“When people have power, in a situation where everybody is designed to have power, and that’s the agreement we’ve all made together, people tend to make more selfless decisions than what I’ve seen in hierarchical structures where people fight to the death for their jobs,” said Baumgarten.

“It’s like, the less power you have, the more you try to cling to the power you have been able to create. And the more it feels like we’re all just trying to figure this out together, the less people cling to power.”

A couple of times in the past, some RANGE co-owners had chosen to skip paychecks when money was tight. But this year was different.

For Baumgarten, the issue came from cash flow issues in the coop that owns RANGE and had been working tirelessly to find a solution. One Monday in mid-May, he was looking at the books at 5am when he realized “the easiest way to fill the gap was to lay myself off”. Not only was Baumgarten the oldest person on staff and the best prepared to weather the financial strain, this would allow the day-to-day of the RANGE editorial team to not be disrupted, he saw this as his responsibility.

“I was part of the leadership team that got us into this mess,” he said. Two other leaders — Val Osier from the newsroom and Sara Kersey from the coop’s operations team — took voluntary furloughs shortly after.

Those furloughs kept day-to-day operations running, and bought the leadership team enough time to secure a line of credit that stabilized the coop’s cash flow. All three returned and were back on payroll by early September.

Sticking to your values makes decisions easier

In 2023, Athens County Independent had what co-founder and editor-in-chief Corinne Colbert calls the “retreat from hell.”

The newsroom, which was barely a year old, was looking at running out of money midway through the year.

“There were people [on the board] who were pushing really hard for, ‘You need to let people go.’ And the entire staff is in there, going, ‘No.’ I’m sitting there, doing math in my notebook, going, ‘Okay, what can we afford to do here?’” said Colbert. “So, we decided that we were going to have to cut pay.”

It was a difficult decision for the Athens County Independent team because their goal is to provide a living wage to make journalism a viable career, “and a viable career means you can pay your bills.”

The team then asked one another, “What can you afford to live on?” As a result, some staff took a bigger pay cut than others. 

“Because the option was to let somebody go and that was non-negotiable. This is our team, and we would rather take less money than cut somebody loose,” said Colbert. 

“I think that particularly for this type of newsroom, having that core belief [of where you want to go] makes a big difference. Because if you’re building this kind of business, and you wobble, you’re kind of screwed,” she said. “I think about all those people at conferences who are like, ‘Well, we started out like this, but then things got hard, and so we did this.’ So basically you had a principle, and when it got hard, you went the easy route and let go of what you wanted originally rather than finding a way to make it work so that you could continue to be who you said you were.”

Colbert advises that newsrooms “know who you are, what you want, and what you stand for”. “When it really comes down to making the big decisions, it makes it a lot easier and being ready to say, no, I would rather not have this than do that,” she said.

“When people say, ‘How did you do this?’ It’s our team and our values are our superpower. This is our secret.”

Last year, the team finally earned the same salaries again and this year, they returned to their full salary they had planned for 2022: $35,000.

Be transparent and then creative with what you cut

Several times a year, Canopy Atlanta, a democratic community journalism nonprofit, will walk staff through the organization’s finances. Critically, they’ll share their financial runway and where the organization is health-wise which allows staff to look for employment elsewhere if they need more stability.

“So people can make decisions, right? If you’re struggling financially, you want them to know that,” said co-leader Mariann Martin.

That transparency has helped them when they hit a “tight, tight funding spot” so their staff weren’t caught completely unawares. 

The leadership asked themselves what the organization’s core functions were, and thus what could be cut, with the goal of creating a more flexible organization. While they had to lay some people off, they aimed to keep people part-time.

“These were all conversations that we had both at the leadership level and then individually with staff to determine what best met their needs,” said Martin. “But primarily, the decision was to cut hours, rather than to keep people full time.”

In the last few months, hours for several team members have been able to be slightly increased.

Non-traditional structures enable newsrooms to survive and thrive

For Baumgarten, RANGE’s structure as a coop is indistinguishable from ability to make it through such a difficult financial position, not just as a still-publishing newsroom but as a team of journalists supporting each other.

“The structure is what helped us survive. I’m an even bigger believer of this model having lived this,” he said, noting the team’s shared responsibilities and sacrifices.

“As a team, we’ve built such a resilient culture. We survived because of how much we believe in the structure and each other. I’m really excited to get to a point where we’re going to do some profit sharing and actually give people some of the well deserved fruits of their labor,” he said. “Once things start rolling, I’m really excited to see how this culture that was forged in real hardship responds to abundance.

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Cite this article

Chan, Tara Francis (2025, Nov. 24). Newsrooms embrace pay cuts for the greater good. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/newsrooms-embrace-pay-cuts-for-the-greater-good/