A Note from Kara Meyberg Guzman, Board Chair

Since 2020, the Tiny News Collective’s board and staff have worked to build the organization from an idea and set of experiments to a fully fledged nonprofit that is ready to scale. 

With the hire of Amy L. Kovac-Ashley as our first executive director — and significant funding from the Knight Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund — the Tiny News Collective opens a new chapter.

In the past two years, we’ve helped launch and support 25 newsrooms across the country. With new permanent leadership at our helm, we’re ready to expand our three-person staff and support many more news entrepreneurs in the months and years to come.

The Tiny News Collective focuses on founders from communities not served by traditional media. Our work to help first-time entrepreneurs launch newsrooms that serve their communities will help reshape our country’s media landscape into something more local, equitable and useful for residents. 

I’m thrilled to welcome and support Amy as the Tiny News Collective’s next leader and build a more supportive, collaborative path for news founders as we grow.

With gratitude and excitement, I begin my journey with TNC

By Amy L. Kovac-Ashley Earlier this year, I stood before about 80 thinkers and doers in the journalism industry and asked them to imagine the best future for local news. I challenged them to think beyond the next year, the next election cycle, the next decade and to take the

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 A Note from Lillian Ruiz, Vice Chair

When I joined Tiny News Collective as a board member in 2020, I remember feeling energized by all of its possibilities. There are so few places where a “tiny” entrepreneur can find support. When that same entrepreneur is in the news space, you can double if not treble that difficulty. We so often neglect that it is the very smallness of these outlets that allows them to connect deeply with their communities and develop profoundly symbiotic relationships – ones that are almost impossible for larger organizations to replicate. This relationship and this category is an extremely potent opportunity to be nurtured, and a tremendous responsibility. This past year we grew to 25 member organizations – those numbers reflect not just new media owners, but also dozens of communities now served with quality information, who weren’t being served before. 

At the Collective, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to find more and more supporters to help us carry out the work of changing the media ownership landscape. It’s thanks to our biggest internal supporter and leader, Heather Bryant, that we have been able to make it to this current point. One where we are a robust community with incredible offerings to make news entrepreneurship possible for those who otherwise would not have found an expression for their own leadership, creativity and deep commitment to the places they call home. Heather’s thoughtful and empathetic leadership not only helped us grow our impact, but it has set us up for our latest milestone: bringing on Amy L. Kovac-Ashley as executive director.

Like Heather, Amy’s compassion and commitment to this mission, and to our members, has been evident in all of our conversations with her. As we prepare for this new chapter of mission-led growth and supporting our members’ needs, we are so thrilled to be working with another incredibly talented leader who brings empathy, candor and thoughtfulness to her approach and who recognizes the immense opportunities ahead. We can’t wait to see all that she’ll do!

Grateful and inspired: Turning the page to the next chapter of TNC’s story

By Heather Bryant It’s a fascinating experience to write a statement about a leadership change and feel this much excitement, but I find myself smiling as I write this. For all the things that are difficult about the field and industry of journalism, there are still bright spots, and,

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