'Hard but never lonely': Reflections from the Co-Leadership Learning Hive

By Harry Backlund

Starting a local news outlet is a serious challenge. It can mean investing huge amounts of time and energy, staking your credibility on stories about your own community, and hustling constantly for the resources to keep doing it. It makes sense, then, that roughly 30% of TNC members have chosen to launch outlets as a team and adopted co-leadership and worker-owned models where leadership is shared by multiple people.

Over fall and spring of 2025–26, I facilitated a Learning Hive for a group of 10 Tiny News Collective member organizations that lead this way, whether as co-founder pairs, teams, or worker-led or co-op models. I spent eight years as a co-executive director on City Bureau's founding team, in an era when co-leadership was much less common, and I was excited to learn from a new generation of leadership teams and look for patterns across our experiences.

Over three workshops and ongoing Slack conversations, we traded notes on co-leadership practices, built relationships of mutual support, and distilled takeaways for anyone considering — or supporting — a co-leadership model.

Here's what we learned:

1. Co-leadership grows on a foundation of trust

Nearly every co-leadership team in our group emerged from a relationship that already existed, whether as colleagues, friends or organizing partners. Several members had been through something together — a paper being bought by a hedge fund, an NPR affiliate shutting down a local news site — and saw their structures as a way to hold each other accountable not to repeat the past. Trust in each other, and in a shared belief in what's possible, were at the foundation of these operating structures.

2. Co-leadership is not structureless

A flatter structure doesn't mean a free-for-all. Nearly every organization in the Hive had roles with distinct authority — one person trusted to edit, another to build a team, fundraise or build systems. In fact, I heard co-leadership teams who were getting especially good at structure, because shared expectations and clear processes are so important when accountability is shared.

Co-leadership runs on relationship skills like deep listening, communication and self-awareness at least as much as anything taught in traditional management training. That came up constantly: partners doing "post-mortems" after a stressful story, explicit norms like "tell me when you need to leave to pick up your kids." Personality tests, even astrology, had a role to play, too — not as science, but as a shared framework for talking about how people relate to each other.

4. Co-leadership allows teams to experiment quickly when uncertainty is high

A common critique of co-leadership is that competing instincts must eventually collide. With no single decision-maker things inevitably get messy, right? In my experience, yes, that's basically true — but it also misses the point. Teams choose co-leadership because they think their collective intelligence will make certain calls better than any individual. And they chose a structure that forces them to slow down and do that. The lack of a clear-decision maker in certain cases isn’t a glitch; it’s the goal.Most of the teams in the Hive had something in common that made this especially important: They were working to be accountable to their communities, including communities that traditional media had historically harmed or ignored. That means having a process where you air the big decisions out and where defaulting to a quick decision by a singular decision-maker is explicitly what you do not want to do.

No one thought that co-leadership was an ideal system, and everyone was wrestling with challenges. Here were a few common ones:

1. Evolving a co-leadership structure takes a lot of work

Like everything else in a start-up, leadership structures have to evolve as the organization changes. But intentionally updating a co-leadership structure can be uniquely tough because the co-leadership relationship itself has to authorize its own evolution. All the approvers have to approve the new way of approving, and the time it takes to sort all that out is time that doesn’t go toward your work.

2. ...and not taking the time is also costly

Multiple organizations described adapting processes on the fly, for example, as a way to hit a particular deadline efficiently or to break through a moment of decision fatigue. Over time, these ad-hoc changes can pile up and make the structure less transparent and intentional.

3. Collaboration burnout has to be managed

Co-leaders in the Hive also noted that collaboration can be its own source of burnout: constant group discussion about structural questions that crowds out the individual craft of reporting or editing. That wasn’t inevitable. Organizations shared a lot of specific smart ways to manage it, building shared shorthand and lightweight frameworks that allow for meaningful deliberation without dragging on. But it did have to be managed actively.

4. Leadership evaluation is a doozy

Performance evaluation is hard for any small organization; it's harder for a team of co-leaders, especially for staff outside the co-leadership structure who want to know their bosses are accountable, too. No one in the Hive had yet solved for this with a clear leadership evaluation process, and the need for it increases as teams grow.

What could be done going forward

Our conversations in the Hive were refreshing because they cut through a lot of the myths about co-leadership. Co-leadership is far from a perfect system, but it isn’t naive either. It's an operating model with strengths and weaknesses, ones that are usually well-suited to teams working under uncertainty, where experimentation and shared accountability matter most.

If you’re a support organization, or a funder or a board member that wants to invest in the success of the model, here are some areas that could use support.

Tailored and ongoing professional development. Local news has lots of leadership programs; none focus on collaborative leadership specifically, leaving leaders in this fast-growing model to figure it out as they go.
A shared library of decision-making frameworks, built and tested across organizations to streamline collaboration and mitigate burnout. Powering News is one early resource, offering templates and resources for non-traditional worker-friendly newsrooms. As co-leadership grows, the resources will need to adapt and mature to keep pace.
Succession planning practices for teams of multiple leaders, not just an individual executive.
Board governance practices suited to co-leadership structures — including for the performance evaluation of leadership teams.
And of course, investment and funding that meets the values and approaches of these new entities where they are. Curiosity and an openness to this model from funders are especially important, as these organizations don’t look like the outlets that have come before.

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Thanks to the organizations that shared their experiences and insights in the Hive.

Harry Backlund is a co-founder and chief strategy officer of City Bureau. Previously, he launched and was the publisher of Chicago's South Side Weekly, where he currently serves on the board.