By Elaine Díaz Rodríguez
What does it take to build a news business? The standard answers include having an editorial plan, a business plan, a tech stack and some seed funding. We agree that all of those are foundational steps. And we also invite you to complicate that narrative.
This spring, we officially kicked off an ambitious new project. We’ve brought on Ashley Woods Branch, a seasoned coach, practitioner and news founder, to lead research into formalizing some promising trajectories for early-stage, community-rooted newsrooms in a way that mirrors the iterative, non-linear way our founders build their organizations. This project is supported by a generous grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
Standard startup business benchmarks often assume that entrepreneurship is an aspirational straight line with a list of predetermined checkmarks. But the journey for our 90+ members is anything but linear. Because we’ve kept our services intentionally high-touch and focused on two specific moments in their journey — preparation (pre-launch) and early building (early post-launch) — we’ve witnessed in real-time the messiness of reality. It is a rhythm of soft launches and technical "funks." Something breaks, something resonates, and founders are forced to pivot. We also see the burnout, the intentional pauses and the eventual breakthroughs.
We are obsessed with qualitative data. Over the last few years, we’ve collected a massive amount of it, including coaching reports, membership applications, program applications, you name it. We’ve intentionally allowed our members to express their vision in their own terms, rather than forcing them to conform to pre-established quantitative boxes.
Now, we are adding scientific rigor to that "obsessive" collection. We are moving from anecdotes to evidence and testing assumptions, with the hope of finding patterns that will evolve into narratives. We want to know: What does it take to launch a thriving newsroom when that launch is the organic result of the right groups of leaders stewarding a community?
We already know that revenue growth is important. But money alone won’t solve every newsroom problem.
Inspired by Trabian Shorters’ asset frame, we look at our founders through the lens of their aspirations and contributions, not their deficits. Shorters teaches us that if we define people by their problems, we stigmatize them and only provide short-term fixes to deficits. How many times have we heard in industry conferences that news leaders lack financial acumen framed as a permanent chronicle condition instead of a very specific opportunity to grow? Or that people who go into journalism are just "bad at math"? By the way, where is the quantitative representative data to back up this stereotype?
Our early research shows that the most successful newsroom leaders bring a complex "asset mix" to the table long before the first dollar drops, and that these assets are usually overlooked by funders and investors. We’re committed to naming and studying these because they are the quiet, underlying forces that explain why some organizations thrive while others struggle to find their footing.
Some of the early success signals we’ve identified come from a mix of these indicators:
- Technical capital: These are the raw, gritty operational skills that allow a founder to build with creativity under constrained circumstances. We see more founders coming from outside traditional journalism backgrounds, and their "outside" skills are also massive assets. The community organizers are excellent event planners; the HR experts are master team builders; the veterans bring a commitment to public service that didn’t end when they took off the uniform. They know how to build because they’ve been building things their whole lives.
- Social capital: This is the "trust equity" a leader has built within the community they serve over years or even generations. In a world where journalism is often viewed as an extractive outsider, social capital is the only bridge strong enough to legitimize you. That is part of why artificially incubated projects led by "transplant" leaders often fail; they may have the technical capital and the seed funding, but they lack the social credibility that only founders with deep roots and connections with the community can provide.
- Narrative capital: The ability to offer a lens that corrects historical misrepresentation. It is the power to offer products that make the newsroom's existence a necessity for the community’s dignity and their sense of self. When a journalistic product cannot find an audience or when the audience is disengaged, that might be a sign that the product, or some part of the process, is not fulfilling a necessity or making a specific community feel “seen.”
In the next couple of months, you can expect a lot of public thinking from us. We won’t be doing "benchmarking" in the traditional sense. We aren't here to rank our members or tell them they are "behind," but we also know that they want to understand their journey as part of a larger context. That’s why you can expect a series of foundational trajectories that show promise.
Our data will help founders distinguish between typical early-stage slowness and real red flags. For those who haven’t launched, we want to provide clear signals of "minimum readiness" — identifying what “good enough” looks like before a launch so that early missteps are understood as recoverable learning curves. That reduces the pressure of launching for the sake of launching and helps avoid prioritizing speed over thoughtful planning. For those already in the field, it offers context-aware comparisons that account for stage, size and model — recognizing that place-based models might be fundamentally different from topical or identity-based ones — so that benchmarks are used for orientation and not for judgment.
Later this year, we will share these growth patterns with the industry. Our goal is to provide a roadmap that feels human, grounded, but most importantly attainable for the current and next generation of local news leaders.
TNC