Helping news entrepreneurs and their communities flourish everywhere

🚗 TNC is taking the show on the road with events in San Francisco, New York and D.C.

By Amy L. Kovac-Ashley

Tiny News Collective is hitting the road. This fall we're producing our first-ever in-person events in three cities: San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. Our Collective has grown to more than 100 members, and every day more visionary entrepreneurs reach out with exciting new ideas for filling information gaps in their communities. It’s the right moment to get out of our inboxes and into a room together.

The backdrop is a tough one: news outlets shrinking and closing, consolidation among what remains, political polarization and rampant misinformation. Against that, the founders in our Collective are writing a different, more hopeful story for local news. So we’re bringing people together to talk about tiny newsrooms: what makes them different and why we think they're critical to the future of journalism and democracy. 

We'll also share insights from our new research on what it takes for a tiny newsroom to launch and last and what we're learning from this grassroots movement.

I have the honor of being the emcee for each of the upcoming events titled, “From the Ground Up: The Founders Reimagining Local News”:

• San Francisco, Wednesday, October 14, 6 to 8 p.m., KALW (220 Montgomery St.):
  Members Soleil Ho of COYOTE Media and Daphne Magnawa of News Relay Network will join News Futures lead steward Darryl Holliday. Register to join us here.
• New York, Tuesday, November 10, 6 to 7:30 p.m., Ford Foundation (320 E. 43rd St.):
  Gary Pierre-Pierre, a TNC board member and founder of The Haitian Times, will be joined by members Ambreen Ali of Central Desi, Annemarie Dooling of The Platia and Michael Schulson of The Lighthouse Washington Heights. Register to join us here.
• Washington, D.C., Tuesday, November 17, 6 to 8 p.m., True Reformer Building (1200 U St. N.W.):
  Members Eric Falquero of The 51st and Henok Mengistu of Ethiopique will join Tom Rosenstiel, author of “The Next Journalism.” Register to join us here.

We're being intentional about venues, choosing partners that fit our values and our mission. Thanks to KALW, Ford Foundation and True Reformer for their partnership. These events also have a purpose beyond good conversation. They're about raising awareness of what Tiny News does, how we show up for our members and how we make a difference in this challenging environment. Doug Keller, our development director, will be there, too, to help me lift up these founders, their stories and the communities they serve.

We know we can't be everywhere, and we wish we had a van to travel around the country like Honolulu Civil Beat’s “Wavemaker” (pictured above) — of which we're a little jealous. Next year we'd love to get to more places in the heart of the country such as Kansas, Illinois or Minnesota. 

Meanwhile, whether you're a journalist, a founder, a funder or just someone who cares about your community and its information, we'd love to see you there. Please pass the invitation along to anyone who'd enjoy the conversation.

TNC News

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

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, Harry Backlund 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. Harry 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 he was excited to learn from a new generation of leadership teams and look for patterns across their experiences.

Over three workshops and ongoing Slack conversations, Harry and the founders 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 they learned together.

5 Questions with Caroline Hwang of Synonym Magazine

For our latest “5 Questions with” feature, we checked in with Caroline Hwang, founder of Synonym Magazine. The volunteer-run magazine shares stories that embrace the complexity of immigrant and diasporic food culture around the world. Since launching its first issue in 2023, Synonym Magazine has hosted international breakfast events, cookbook swaps and other events that engage its community in California.

Synonym Magazine recently released the fifth edition of its magazine, titled “Sweets,” and relaunched their website. With all these new developments, we spoke with Caroline about this new chapter and also why she started the magazine.

“I found that so much food and culture media came from a white lens, even when covering food from another culture,” Caroline said. “Having grown up as a third-culture kid, that hit a lot of triggers for me. I wanted to bring ownership back to the communities and cultures where these stories began, and to explore foodways and cultures through migration, colonialism and adaptation. My goal was to create a place for these complex stories to be shared, so underrepresented communities could feel seen and connected.”

Read the whole profile here.

Founder Shoutouts

Launches, birthdays, awards and grants 🎉

🥂 Petaluma Voice had a belated launch party this month (the outlet launched in April), with 100 attendees, including the mayor, police chief, city council members and candidates for office. The event led to a surge in subscribers, paid memberships and donations, with more than $3,000 raised. 

🚀 Health Nation News Media recently launched as a “health and science news organization focusing on racially and culturally-inclusive online journalism, including news, features, Q&As, interviews and more.”

🍰 Connect Puerto Rico celebrated its second birthday by looking back at the people who inspired it, the programs that helped build it and the other newsrooms that showed them what was possible. 

🎂 The Roseville Reader celebrated its second birthday by listing stories that had an impact, and noted it had nearly doubled its newsletter subscriber base over the past year. 

🏈 Black Belt News Network received a grant from the Alabama Press Association Journalism Foundation to host a high school sports intern this fall. They hired Rudy Evans (pictured above with camera), a junior at Selma High School, to gain hands-on newsroom experience photographing high school sports, writing stories and conducting interviews.

🏆 Branden Andersen of Newsberg was named as a finalist for the BBB Great West + Pacific Torch & Spark Awards. As BBB wrote, “Each finalist represents a different journey, but they all share a commitment to building trust through the way they lead, serve customers and show up in their communities.”

💰 The Los Angeles Center for Investigative Journalism received a grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources to hire Joshua Shimkus to cover orphaned oil wells in the San Gabriel Valley.

Landmark moments ✨

🎤 Black by God | The West Virginian produced its first ever “Dear West V. Awards” show this summer, based on the viral songwriting challenge last spring to write a love letter to the state. The show was so successful that they are planning another one for the winter. Plus, Black by God will be featured in a new NYU Libraries digital archive of online news outlets based in underserved communities.

🗳️ The VP Chicago created its first voting guide for school board elections on the South Side and Far South Side. This November marks the city’s first election for a fully elected school board. The guide includes not just information about the key issues and candidates but provides ways for readers to stay engaged after Election Day.

🫎 Mat-Su Sentinel published a voter guide for Alaska’s Statehouse and Senate candidates. To compile the guide, they first asked voters across the region to send in their top questions for candidates. The most frequently asked questions became the basis for a candidate survey. Their answers make up the voter guide.

🎭 Scene in Boston is preparing for Season Two of its podcast series about the theater scene in Boston. They also published their first-ever guide (in print and digital!) to the entire season.

💗 Fault Line News, one of our newest members, had a story about The Dinah, the largest festival for queer women in the world, republished in Q Voice News, marking the first time they had a story republished.

Making the scene at the sustainability summit 🌊

We had a great time meeting up with folks at the Independent News Sustainability Summit in San Diego! 💖

Speaking up and speaking out 🗣️

📚 Nancy Flores of Austin Vida moderated a virtual Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend panel, “Reframing the Headlines: Latinx Perspectives in Book Length Journalism” on September 24, discussing immigration, citizenship and identity.

🤝🏽 Garnet Henderson of Autonomy News has a book deal with Melville House to write “Leave No Means Untried” about how anti-abortion disinformation has shaped our laws and culture, and how this playbook is being used to attack other freedoms.

🛒 Bryan M. Vance of Stumptown Savings was featured in Portland Monthly’s fall issue in a piece about the history of Portland grocery stores, and in an Instagram post from PNW Passport. Plus, Stumptown set a goal of hitting 8,000 newsletter subscribers by year end and met the goal more than three months ahead of schedule.

🎙️ Claudia Amaro of Planeta Venus moderated a panel on communication at media day at Leadership Wichita, and her work as a bilingual journalist and entrepreneur serving the Latino community in Kansas was featured in a project celebrating 40 years of the Wichita Foundation.

🌾 Crystal Good of Black by God | The West Virginian will help lead a workshop on October 1 at ComNet26 in San Diego titled, “From Stereotype to Strategy: Reframing Rural for Communications and Funding.”

Stories with impact 💥

🏨 Petaluma Voice had two recent stories with impact: one on a developer abandoning a controversial luxury hotel project downtown and another on a mayoral candidate who faced a temporary restraining order from an ex-boyfriend.

🗣️ Annemarie Dooling of The Platia published an interview with a former Kensington neighborhood resident who candidly spoke about the way that cycles of substance abuse and poverty have affected his life. She plans to publish more interviews like this in the future.

⚖️ Oxford Free Press published a story about how Miami (of Ohio) University professors would be part of a lawsuit settlement with Anthropic for taking content from their textbooks for its AI products, with the estimated compensation being $3,000 per work.

🫶🏽 Health Nation News ran an in-depth interview with journalist Alex Miller about caregiving for his father who was aging in place with dementia, glaucoma and other health issues.

🏷️ Stumptown Savings ran two stories related to Portland’s grocery stores: one on how Portland grocery store prices hit a record high recently, and another on a nonprofit that’s been feeding the hungry, and will soon open a grocery store built to keep money and food in the neighborhood.

🍴 Southpoint Access is running a special feature asking residents to send in recipes and food stories and traditions to create a “community cookbook.”

Resources

Reporting Grants from New America’s Better Life Lab
The Better Life Lab invites journalists and storytellers to apply for its 2026 multimedia reporting grants. They are looking for (and funding) stories on solutions to the care crisis — from child care innovations to investments in family, disability, elder and end-of-life care. Grants are about $1,000 each. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

Travel Grants from the Neal Pierce Foundation
The foundation supports journalists covering under-told stories about ways to make cities and their metro regions work better for all their people. The travel grants of up to $1,500 enable journalists to travel to cities within the U.S. to produce one or more stories for publication. The awards, selected through a competitive review process, cover travel expenses necessary for on-the-ground reporting. Apply by October 13.

Fund for Indigenous Journalists from International Women’s Media Foundation
The Fund’s Indigenous Journalists & Allies: Reporting on Missing & Murdered People/Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, Transgender People (MMIP/WG2T) initiative directly supports Indigenous journalists’ and allies’ reporting on the violence that targets members of Indigenous nations, both on sovereign ground and in urban settings in the United States. Indigenous and non-Indigenous journalists of all genders affiliated with media outlets, as well as freelancers, are invited to apply. Applications accepted on a rolling basis.

Latino Media Summit at CUNY 
October 15 in New York
The summit explores emerging opportunities, shares practical solutions and fosters collaboration to strengthen journalism and better serve Latino communities across the country.

Covering Immigration with Care: A Mental Health Reporting Project Webinar from Poynter
October 21 at noon ET
Learn how to report on the effects of immigration on mental health with greater context, accuracy and care. This free webinar explores trauma-informed interviewing, ethical storytelling and practical reporting strategies. Learn how to connect individual stories to policy, services and support systems, and hear from experienced journalists covering immigration.

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Big Blast from Tiny News. Be sure to follow us on social media to keep up with the latest from TNC and our amazing group of founders!

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The Big Blast Credits

Written by Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, Doug Keller