A few years ago, I was given some advice I resented: You need a business partner.

Once I cooled off, I realized that counsel, which arrived in a LION sustainability audit, was wise if difficult to achieve. Try finding a grant for a business partner. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Not getting “operational” money is, of course, a complaint not limited to news organizations, nonprofit or otherwise. Program officers are generally disinclined to pay for your overhead. But let me propose something radical: If we’re saving journalism, it’s going to require overhead.

I ultimately did take the advice and hired a business partner. And you can draw The Current’s likelihood-of-survival curve in two parts: before Johanna and after Johanna.

Hers was not a revenue job, although that’s the gig I posted. She’s an operator, skilled at devising systems, designing processes and creating the conditions where people can do their best work. “People think creativity thrives in chaos. But it thrives in a system,” is how Johanna puts it. And she’s totally right.

Understandably, the journalism support industry invests handsomely in creativity — new business models, news products, technologies, ambitious reporting projects — but neglects the operational systems that sustain innovation and impact. To date, media funders and journalism support organizations have mostly approximated the work of business partners by way of consultants and workshops. While helpful, they aren’t sufficient.

Recently, that’s begun to shift. Points in case: the first round of Press Forward grants made with virtually no programmatic restrictions, or the LION grants attached to the aforementioned sustainability audit program.

There have been rumblings of ideas to address this at scale, and there are plenty of very good reasons why it’s difficult. By and large, though, we’ve stopped short of investing directly in dedicated journalism business talent. And that pool has evaporated alongside all the other journalism jobs.

Most journalism founders come from a journalism background. A 2024 Project Oasis report on the European media landscape put the number at 75%. Fewer than half had any business management experience. That jibes with what I see here in the U.S. It certainly tracks with my own experience: Apart from running The Current, I have no training in business.

It makes sense, of course. Running a journalism business — any business, really — is hard and requires passion. And people who are really passionate about journalism tend to be…journalists.

The next natural step is a concerted effort to recruit operators, executives, publishers and other positions not strictly defined by producing content or dollars. We have Report for America, why not MBAs for the American Press?

In 2026, journalism will realize it has a business talent problem. If it doesn’t, many of the hundreds of news startups launched in the last few years aren’t going to be around for very long.