Nieman Foundation at Harvard
When Gary Lee was 12 years old, he read about a scholarship program that would change his life. A Better Chance enabled him to attend the prestigious Phillips Academy, and helped propel him to a career in journalism for national publications like The Washington Post and Time Magazine.
Lee first read about the scholarship program in The Oklahoma Eagle, which was founded in 1922, a year after the Tulsa Race Massacre, making it one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country. “As the first newspaper that I read from cover to cover and was loyal to, it is The Oklahoma Eagle that initially made me want to become a journalist,” Lee told me. Decades later, the newspaper would pull him back home. In 2021, the 100th anniversary of the massacre, Lee returned to his hometown to serve as the Eagle’s managing editor.
Just as the Eagle transformed Lee’s life, now, Lee will play a key role in transforming the historic publication. In December, a coalition of local Tulsa philanthropy and media organizations and the American Journalism Project (AJP) announced the Eagle would expand and transition to a nonprofit by becoming part of a new Tulsa Local News Initiative.
Beyond its support of individual publications, the initiative is designed to facilitate more collaboration among all organizations in the local media ecosystem, Berman said.
The initiative has launched a search for its first chief executive officer. Lee, meanwhile, as founding executive editor of the Tulsa Local News Initiative, will now oversee both the Eagle and the new newsroom.
The effort will, in total, create around two dozen new journalism jobs. The Eagle will hire an editor and three reporters — until now, Lee has been the only full-time employee. (Two of those three reporting job openings appear to be live, focused on the Northside and Health and Healthy Living, respectively. At the time of publication, I counted 18 open positions on the initiative’s hiring page.) That added capacity will allow the Eagle “to expand its readership, its reach throughout the city, in ways that it had not been able to do before,” Lee said. “We will continue the same mission, except broaden and deepen it.”
Why a new newsroom on top of so many existing outlets? “In this case, our perspective was that it needed to be a really robust strategy — that it needed to be both investing in news organizations that have the trust of their community, that have strong audiences, and that there was a gap that needed to be filled, that…no one player was well-positioned to do,” Berman said. Specifically, the community listening process identified a need for more accountability, investigative, and service journalism that would serve a general audience in a digital-first style.
A new organization will also have the benefit of bringing more journalists to Tulsa, Berman said.
“People across the city were lacking things that they felt that they needed in a news publication,” Lee said. “They didn’t see reflections of themselves enough. They didn’t see enough good news. They did not see enough critical analysis of public officials…We’re using those ideas to create the vision for the new nonprofit publication,” which will be “a daily digital publication that will be serving readers across the city.” Reporting by the Tulsa Local News Initiative will be free to access, and republishable.
The nonprofit model, in Lee’s view, will form a better foundation for the Eagle’s and the new newsroom’s relationship-building and listening across Tulsa. He plans to hold regular meetings with people and groups across the city “so that we’re continuously getting feedback whether we’re doing the right thing, whether we’re reporting on the right issues, and to develop trust.”
“As executive editor of both publications,” he said, “it’s exciting for me to observe the mission of a paper that’s been orientated more towards the Black and people of color communities, and to couple that with a vision for serving readers across the city.”
For more than 80 years, The Oklahoma Eagle has been owned by the Goodwin family; now, owner James “Jim” Goodwin will serve on the broader nonprofit’s board. Among his earliest memories: Around age six, his father assigned Goodwin to clean the printing press on Saturday mornings — making “those metal shavings [from the Linotype] disappear,” and scrubbing the metal rod that the paper ran through “so that you could almost see your reflection in it.” It wasn’t the easiest job. “The exasperating experience was, if you’ve ever tried to clean ink off a metal rod with kerosene, the more you rub, the more smeared it got,” he recalled. But Goodwin had an incentive to be quick and thorough in his work: he wanted to make afternoon showings of Westerns at the local Black-owned Dreamland Theater. “If I did not clean the press adequately and in time, I would miss my movie, or at least the beginning of it,” he said.
(Though he doesn’t remember this, Goodwin was told that at an even younger age, as a four- or five-year-old, he attempted to emulate the newsboys hawking the Eagle, bellowing its name — while holding the wrong publication, the Tulsa World. He couldn’t read yet.)
As an adult, Goodwin saw the publication through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings — twice. He helped fund it in part through his own business as a lawyer. In his mind, the transformation to a nonprofit is the best choice for the publication’s future sustainability, preserving the historic legacy of The Eagle within a broader, stronger business operation.
“This opportunity made sense to me,” Goodwin said, “and showed me a way to keep the message going — keep The Oklahoma Eagle afloat, in a way that’s more powerful than I’ve been able to do during my reign.”
The values of the Tulsa Local News Initiative resonated with Goodwin’s convictions. “The mission of the project was in keeping with my desire that the interests of marginalized people be represented,” he said, “whether they be Black, white, Indian, or even poor white — that someone had to speak up for those people who otherwise have no spokesperson.”
“I wanted to make sure that those interests were protected and spoken for,” he said.
