Local Roots, Regional Strength

Across much of the South, shrinking newspapers and disappearing wire services have left communities with fewer sources of reliable local information. Deep South Today is trying to fill those gaps through a network that combines locally controlled newsrooms with shared business, technology and audience resources. Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau spoke with the organization’s president and CEO, Warwick Sabin—a former journalist, publisher and Arkansas legislator—about the network’s expansion, its approach to sustainability and what its model might offer other community news organizations.

Your career has moved among journalism, publishing, civic organizations and elected office. What connects these different chapters for you?

For me, it’s about service to the community and also chasing my curiosity. I was originally determined to be a journalist.

I grew up in a journalism household. I’m curious about a lot of subjects, and journalism gives you the opportunity to research—to be presented with a new subject that you have to learn about and figure out, and people you have to talk to about those issues. I enjoy that exploration and learning, and trying to convey it to other people.

The public-service element of journalism is also very attractive to me. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve come to appreciate how having access to credible information empowers people, empowers communities and enables people to solve problems.

I think journalism performs that function well when it’s done correctly. As I navigated through my career, I was presented with opportunities to work and serve in government, as well as to be involved in nonprofit initiatives and, ultimately, to run nonprofit organizations.

In those venues as well, it’s about listening to people, collecting information and using that information and those connections to solve problems—hopefully for the betterment of the community and society at large. I feel like that’s the through line in my career.

As you said, you started in journalism. You served as publisher of The Oxford American. What did that experience teach you about the difficulty of sustaining ambitious journalism today?

Well, there’s a long story there. I’ll try to be succinct. I started with The Oxford American as an avid reader and subscriber. I just loved the magazine so much.

When it ended up in Arkansas, where I was living—it had originally started in Oxford, Mississippi—I was excited that it was there. It went through some financial troubles, and I volunteered to help save it, initially by suggesting that it convert to a nonprofit. This was back in 2003. I helped find it a home at a university and raise some money to get it off the ground again.

Several years later, money was embezzled from the organization, and it was bankrupt and in debt again. They came to me, and I volunteered to be the publisher of the magazine, although I had never been on the business side of journalism. I did it as an unpaid volunteer until I got the magazine into good enough shape that I could quit my other job and become the publisher full time, because I did enjoy it, even though it was very challenging.

This was in 2008, when the country was entering a recession and operating a print publication was really troublesome. People were trying to figure out how to transition to digital without losing all their advertising revenue and subscribers.

It was a fraught time, but it taught me a lot, and I learned that I enjoyed the business side of journalism. We did a lot of creative and innovative things. We launched events before events were popular, got into video and actually won a National Magazine Award for video during the second year that category was even in existence.

That was fun. We did a lot with a little, and it’s still instructive in how I run my organization today.

Unlike others I’ve spoken to, you have served in government, specifically in the Arkansas House of Representatives. How did being inside government change your understanding of what political and public-service journalism gets right and what it misses?

I’m not sure it changed a lot. I was elected to the legislature while I was publisher of the magazine, and I entered the legislature with a strong appreciation for the value of journalism and what it could mean—not only in helping communicate what the government is doing, but also in holding elected officials accountable.

What was most new and surprising to me during my experience as an elected official was how difficult it was to get attention for the work happening in government. As a serious policy junkie, I thought that if I had a good idea, if I had a good bill or if I was making progress on something, the newspapers, radio stations and TV stations would want to cover it.

They would want people to be informed about it. But the media was stretched thin. It was stretched thin then, and trying to get any attention whatsoever for those kinds of issues was very, very difficult.

Another lesson I took from that is that people often think elected officials may welcome the destruction of local media because nobody is holding them accountable anymore and they can do all the corrupt things they want to do.

Interestingly, when local media erodes, it’s often the elected officials and politicians who miss it most. There is a symbiotic relationship. They need avenues to communicate with their constituents and the electorate—and sometimes, selfishly, just to brag about the work they’re doing.

There is an interest among them in keeping local media alive and vibrant.

What persuaded you to return to journalism and become, I believe, the first president and CEO of Deep South Today?

To be very honest with you, it was an opportunity that was suggested to me.

When Deep South Today was getting started, the first thing its leadership did was recruit a president and CEO. Deep South Today was born from two newsrooms that had similar supporters. They came up with the idea that these two newsrooms could be supported by one centralized business entity, and they went out and looked for somebody to get it started.

When the opportunity was presented to me, it sounded perfect. They wanted somebody who had experience in journalism on both the editorial and business sides, someone who understood nonprofit management, the world of philanthropy, the South in particular and the political dynamics here.

It checked all the boxes for me. I checked all the boxes for them, and it has been a joy to do this work at a time when it is so critical in this region.

Deep South Today is a network of locally rooted newsrooms rather than one regional publication. Why is that distinction important?

I think it’s important in a lot of different ways. We are trying to do this work regionally, in different states, and my understanding is that we’re still the only nonprofit network of newsrooms operating in multiple states.

Scale is important because the places where we’re doing this work in the South are under-resourced. There isn’t a lot of population density. To achieve the same kinds of efficiencies and economies of scale that you get in a big city on the East or West Coast, or in a place like Texas, you really need to aggregate the population.

Right now, we’re in three states. Mississippi has a population of 3 million, Louisiana has a population of about 4.5 million and Arkansas has a population of about 3 million. You put that together and you get the equivalent of a major metropolitan area somewhere.

That’s the scale you need. However, because these are different states, they are also different communities. They have very specific interests and identities, and we want to make sure the newsrooms are rooted in and authentically connected to the communities they serve.

We don’t try to homogenize the brands or the content. We don’t tell any of the newsrooms what to publish, so they have full editorial autonomy. Yet they all benefit from centralized infrastructure that makes the most of every dollar and ensures that the organization can be sustainable and grow.

That leads perfectly to my next question. You have Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current. You’re sharing resources, but the newsrooms also need to serve their local communities. Which functions are most useful to centralize, and which editorial or organizational decisions should be made at the network level or the local level?

To simplify it, all editorial decisions are made at the local level. There are no top-down dictates about what to cover or how to cover it. There are opportunities for the newsrooms to share ideas and collaborate, and we’ve created a lot of capacity for them, which I’ll get to in a second.

What to centralize is mostly intuitive. We’ve centralized all our finance functions, human resources and technology, which can get very expensive. We’ve also centralized some of our audience functions. That’s a little more complicated because, although we have a centralized effort, we also have dedicated audience editors in each of our newsrooms who liaise with and take advantage of the centralized hub.

The resources we’ve created at the network level to support our newsrooms include the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center, which we established in partnership with The New York Times. It puts dedicated investigative reporters in each newsroom, alongside dedicated data reporters and local investigations fellows from The New York Times.

We’ve also created Deep South Today Studios, which is our multimedia effort. We make video and audio resources available to the newsrooms. But it’s more about how we serve the newsrooms than any kind of mandate to operate or publish in a certain way.

The Current was an existing newsroom that joined the network. How do you provide it with greater capacity without making it feel absorbed or standardized according to a Deep South Today mindset?

I feel like we’ve accomplished that. The Current joined the Deep South Today network last September.

It’s still called The Current. It still has the same logo and website address. If you were a reader of The Current, I don’t think you would have noticed any difference in how the information is conveyed to you. It has the same editors, the same writers and the same email newsletter going out regularly.

What we have done is strengthen The Current in significant ways. We’ve basically doubled the size of its newsroom in less than a year. We helped it expand beyond Lafayette, Louisiana, to Lake Charles, Louisiana, which means it is now covering most of southwest Louisiana.

We’re a much stronger organization financially than The Current was by itself. Its reporters and editors have received higher salaries. We’re a unionized workforce, with one payroll and one union across the entire organization.

The Current benefits from that, and it gets all the support from our hub, which means its staff can focus all their time and energy on reporting and journalism. I would say they get all the good and almost none of the bad.

In May of this year, you announced that you’re going to launch Arkansas Today. Why did you select Arkansas as the next place for Deep South Today to build a newsroom?

It’s not a coincidence that I have a lot of experience and background in Arkansas, but that’s also not the reason we decided to go there.

The decision was really the product of a lot of quantitative research, including landscape analysis and surveys, as well as qualitative analysis through listening sessions. We surveyed the population and worked to understand what the needs in Arkansas are.

The simplest way I would put it is that Arkansas is where Mississippi was 10 years ago, when Mississippi Today got started. Mississippi Today is our flagship newsroom and our largest newsroom. It started 10 years ago as the first nonprofit newsroom in the state. It is now by far the largest newsroom in Mississippi.

What was happening in Mississippi 10 years ago was that the legacy statewide newspaper was in decline. A lot of local papers were also declining or going out of business, along with local radio stations. There was a profound need for sources of local news and information.

Since that time, the Associated Press no longer has a presence in Mississippi. Mississippi Today has evolved to become something like a wire service for local news outlets across the state, whether they’re nonprofit or commercial. We provide all our content for free, which allows those outlets to focus their energies on their local communities while getting statewide content from us.

When you look at Arkansas, it’s very much the same. You have one statewide newspaper that has been in decline. You’ve seen a huge decline in the number and scope of local media outlets around the state, most profoundly in its fastest-growing region, northwest Arkansas, where Walmart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt and other large companies are headquartered.

In that part of the state, you probably have the least amount of local news. You can imagine the demand and need when you have a fast-growing area that doesn’t have local news. Arkansas has also lost the Associated Press, just as Mississippi did.

We see an opportunity to fill the gaps, report news that isn’t being reported and serve as a wire service for local papers around the state. We also want to work collaboratively with existing media to make sure we’re not duplicating efforts that are already happening, but instead filling gaps and complementing the existing ecosystem.

We’re doing profiles of community-based local news organizations, examining how they can be sustainable and how they’re filling gaps. But sustaining a regional nonprofit news network is difficult when you’re not in a major hub with a lot of wealthy funders. What is the financial equation that keeps you afloat?

It’s a combination of things.

I mentioned scale, and I think scale is important because it reduces the per-unit cost of producing journalism. It also gives us access to more sources of revenue. As we cover more ground, our revenue is diversified among sources such as institutional philanthropy at the national, regional and local levels.

We also have our membership program, which is our individual small-donor revenue. It’s akin to having subscribers, except that, because we’re a nonprofit, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we inspire individual support from people.

We also have an earned-revenue strategy built around advertising, events and other sources. You can imagine that when you have a two- or three-state geographic footprint, you have access to more and different kinds of advertisers who want to reach audiences in a way that can be very bespoke.

The advertising can be highly targeted, or it might come from a bank with branches in all three states. Our scale also allows us to reach national advertisers who think it’s worth investing in advertising with us.

We’re able to attract more revenue, reduce expenses and put more resources into journalism rather than business infrastructure. If all these newsrooms were separate entities, they would have completely redundant infrastructure.

We have one set of those functions serving multiple newsrooms.

I don’t want to harp on this, but grants can be temporary, and funders can favor new initiatives over routine reporting. How do you build durability into that system? Is it just scale, or do you have other initiatives?

I don’t think anybody can perfectly solve the problem you’ve identified, which is a real one. Funders can be fickle. They can change their minds or move on to different issues or priorities.

It’s one of those things where you’re on a treadmill and running nonstop. You’re always looking for new and additional funders. You’re looking to inspire different kinds of funding from different places and different people.

I don’t think you can ever give up on philanthropy as a pillar of what we’re building to support and sustain local journalism. To me, that would be like a museum, university or performing-arts institution giving up on philanthropy.

These institutions are civic infrastructure within our communities. They are things we all know are valuable and need to be sustained. Nobody would tell a university, “You’re going to have to figure out a way to run your university without philanthropy.” That’s an outrageous thing to think about, demand or contemplate.

People understand that these are civic institutions that aren’t necessarily going to be sustainable on a for-profit basis, so they look for philanthropy. Funders change their minds when it comes to all those different kinds of civic institutions, and they’re going to do the same thing in journalism. But it’s up to those of us who are running these organizations to find ways to support them.

You mentioned your partnership with The New York Times, a major national contributor to your network. What must remain under the direction of local journalists in that relationship?

We were very clear when we were setting this up—and The New York Times has been a great partner—that this is the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center.

It exists within our organization. The employees are our employees, and the direction comes from inside. Importantly, I went out and raised the money to fund the project.

The New York Times contributes a lot because it has the Local Investigations Fellowship, and it places a fellow in each newsroom. It also contributes editing time and expertise, as well as co-publishing all the stories. You can imagine the reach The New York Times has compared with the reach we have.

The benefit for The New York Times is that we’re on the ground in a part of the country where it either doesn’t have people or has very few people. This allows the Times to have greater depth of reporting in a place where it’s difficult to report. As The New York Times grows, it sees a benefit in putting its brand in front of more people, and we provide that opportunity in a part of the country where it didn’t previously exist.

It really is a good partnership, but the content is directed by our editors on the ground as part of our center.

I’ve heard a lot about collaboration among independent or community-based news organizations, which was almost unheard of many years ago, when news was much more proprietary. Organizations were chasing scoops and wanted to avoid sharing resources with competitors.

Before I let you go, I’d like you to look into your crystal ball and talk about the five-year plan that will keep Deep South Today successful. I’d also like you to broaden the lens and discuss what other community news organizations can do to achieve the kind of reach and success you’ve had.

Our plan has several elements. We want to continue to sustain and grow our existing newsrooms because there is still a lot of opportunity to do more in places like Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

That applies not only to the geographic scope of our coverage within those states, but also to topical coverage and different beats.

By creating more value for our audiences and being available to them in more formats—such as video and audio—and across multiple platforms, we can build a broader base of support and signal our value to the community.

We’re also still looking to grow geographically. There are other communities in the Deep South that are news deserts where we can more efficiently meet the need for local news. Increased scale will continue to help keep us sustainable.

We see what we’re doing as a model for what could work in other parts of the country that are similar to our region, whether it’s the Upper Midwest, Appalachia or the southwestern United States, where you don’t have population density.

You have fewer resources, so you’re trying to do more with less. I would encourage everyone working in those areas to think about how existing newsrooms could come together in a network or, at the very least, share resources.

It’s the redundancy and duplication of effort that make it most difficult to sustain these entities over the long term.