Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Imagine you’re the team behind a locally-owned legacy newspaper serving a small New England town and the surrounding region. Say that for more than two centuries — 225 years — your publication has stayed in business to deliver news to and for this community, supported primarily by print advertising. Having reached such a milestone as a quasquibicentennial, no small feat for a local newspaper in the 21st century, you’re thinking about the changes that might be necessary to keep the lights on for years to come.
This was the situation of the New Hampshire-based Keene Sentinel. In a commemorative note, publisher and owner Tom Ewing noted that “only four other news organization[s] in the country, and none in New Hampshire, have reached a 225th year of continuous publication under the same name.”
In recent years, leaders at the Sentinel became convinced that surviving the next 100 (or 225) years will require additional community support. So the Sentinel began weighing three concrete options: Converting to a nonprofit; establishing an endowment; or embracing a hybrid model — partnering with a fiscal sponsor to create a nonprofit arm that can accept tax-deductible donations, expanding its capacity for accepting philanthropic support while remaining a for-profit organization.
Alongside the fund, the Sentinel is building its first community advisory board. Both initiatives are being spearheaded by former Sentinel president Terry Williams, who retired in 2023 but who continues to help steer strategy as a consultant. Williams sees the fund and community advisory board as complementary, calling the advisory board a “key component” of building a successful fundraising campaign. Williams envisions its members both as potential direct contributors and as Sentinel ambassadors. The Sentinel’s decision-making process, and hopes for the hybrid model, may be helpful to other local news outlets considering a similar evolution.
The Sentinel ultimately opted against a full nonprofit conversion for two primary reasons, Williams told me. First, the team “thought it would be wrong to be competing for dollars in an aggressive sort of way” with other local nonprofits — especially because the Sentinel covers many of those nonprofits. “We’re sensitive to the fact that I think it would be more challenging for us editorially to be covering nonprofits that are in the same arena as we are in terms of fundraising,” Williams said.
While establishing a fund still involves making local appeals, Williams called it “probably the least harmful approach.”
“We’re being relatively strategic about it,” Williams explained. The campaign is mostly targeting “specific donors who are what I would describe as extremely supportive of the Sentinel.”
“We’re not looking at a huge net here; we’re looking at a smaller group of folks that we think…somewhat understand the importance of local journalism in the mix of the community,” Williams said, adding that the Sentinel also plans to pursue national grants and philanthropy.
The hybrid model, in short, felt like “a more proper balance for a small community like ours.”
Second, the Sentinel worried about limits around political activity accompanying nonprofit status. The Sentinel has been described as “one of New England’s feistier independent daily newspapers” and it wants the freedom to stay that way. Specifically, Williams said, the Sentinel’s publisher didn’t want the newspaper to have to stop publishing editorials in support of political candidates.
Establishing an endowment, meanwhile, “just seemed out of reach,” Williams said. The Sentinel would have had to raise a large sum (in the millions) and extract only 4-5% per year. That approach brought up some of the same concerns about competing with local nonprofits. “To get to the millions of dollar level that you would need to have in order to kick out meaningful contributions [from an endowment] to the newsroom, we’d be battling with the hospital and others that are trying to either expand or improve and things of that nature,” Williams said.
Instead, the Sentinel opted to emulate a closer neighbor, The Berkshire Eagle, by launching a journalism fund. (The Sentinel’s fund is fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Report for America.) As Williams sees it, this fund offers the best of both worlds; it gives the Sentinel a centralized, more formal hub for tax-deductible donations, but doesn’t put reliance on philanthropy at the center, the way he thinks a full nonprofit conversion would have.
This year, the fund’s first, the Sentinel has a “modest” fundraising goal: $75,000. In 2026, they’ll raise the goalposts to $100,000, and again to $125,000 in 2027.
The Sentinel’s editorial operating budget is currently about $1 million. The biggest source of revenue at the newspaper is print and digital subscriptions, followed by revenue from events, digital advertising, and niche publications (which are grouped together) and print advertising. The Sentinel only began fundraising — which covers just 4% of the Sentinel’s newsroom budget (including national grants) — during the pandemic-driven advertising slump. Williams described the philanthropic learning curve as steep and the newspaper’s first fundraising efforts as somewhat “ad-hoc.”
With the launch of the new nonprofit arm, on top of that 4%, the Sentinel hopes the fund alone can cover about 8% of newsroom operating costs this year, and reach 13% by 2027. In the long term, “ultimately, getting to 20% of the newsroom operating costs would be a huge accomplishment and would go a long way toward the sustainability of the operation,” Williams said. “But that’s not going to happen overnight.”
Williams couldn’t comment on whether the Sentinel is breaking even and said profitability is not the most important measure of success to the Sentinel’s owner. Ewing “views the newspaper as a community service, not as a profit producing operation or profit-driven operation,” Williams said. “I think we are very fortunate to have ownership like that.”
The Keene Sentinel has a relatively large staff — about 17 journalists — for a community of its size. The city of Keene has about 23,000 residents and the Sentinel also covers the broader Monadnock Region, which has a population around 85,000. “I feel like [publisher Ewing] has drawn a line in the sand that you can’t go below a certain number and really do your job,” Williams said.
Even with enviable mission-driven local ownership, Williams noted, “we have to be on a more sustainable path than we’re currently on, or this won’t work.”
So how does the community advisory board fit in with the fundraising endeavor?
First, well, Williams hopes the board members will be supporters themselves. He also believes creating “ambassadors” for the newspaper will benefit the fundraising campaign, and the newspaper itself. The board — which will start with roughly 25 members serving three-year terms — will meet two or three times a year with Sentinel staff to give “candid commentary” on how well the Sentinel is meeting its mission.
“The folks that I’ve lined up to do this, I think, will be not bashful in sharing their opinion about that,” Williams said.
He’s begun by approaching people he knows to be “friends of the Sentinel.” He especially wanted to recruit “some key people that were well-respected in the community” who are, in many cases, already “quiet donors to a variety of things” that are important to local civic life. He’s opened up recruitment further to some Sentinel readers, and thinks there’s some self-selection for people who value and understand the importance of local news, “whether they think we’re doing a good job or not.”
Williams has also done “some direct outreach to younger folks, because a lot of our readers look a lot like me, and a lot of our advisory board members look a lot like me.” He’s tried to recruit at least four or five younger board members; these members may interact with the Sentinel to an extent, but “they’re not legacy readers,” he said. They will bring critical perspective for the advisory board, whose members “will want to know not only if we’re meeting our mission, but are we serving as diverse a community as we can?”
To mold effective Sentinel ambassadors, Williams sees it as crucial to “expose them to some of the best work that local journalists are doing.”
That’s why Williams and the Sentinel team opted to fly a pair of Texas journalists, Uvalde Leader-News managing editor Meghann Garcia and assistant managing editor Melissa Federspill, to New Hampshire for an event launching the journalism fund and advisory board. (Garcia and Federspill reported on and oversaw coverage of the 2022 school shooting in their community, and its aftermath.) About 70 people ended up attending the launch on a brutally cold night. Williams described the event as deeply moving.
“[The Uvalde Leader-News reporters] just poured their hearts and souls into coverage of this,” he said. “I was really proud to have them tell this story. It’s not our story, but it’s an amazing journalism story, and I think people were impacted by it, and felt and got that message.”
Williams envisions at least one event like this per year as a part of the Sentinel’s fundraising campaign. Introducing advisory board members and other community members to the work that goes into local journalism, he hopes, will help them understand its value — and move them to support it in their own backyard.
“We as an industry do a crappy job” of explaining how local journalists do their work, Williams added. “We bury it.”
But when you tell that story, as Garcia and Federspill did, “people start to really realize the importance of local news, and then they start to wonder, well, what the hell happens if this goes away?”
