(This originally appeared a Linkedin article)
Newspaper veterans keep trying to rebuild newspapers.
The impulse is rarely stated so bluntly. But you hear it in most strategy sessions about “saving local news.” Funding and analysis focus on a town-square-style local news bundle that newspaper veterans are determined to sustain for shared identity.
I actually agree with the civic benefits of a single, professionally-curated website, newsletter and social feed that approximates what’s happening in a place. I benefit from such efforts, even if I don’t share the deep emotional connection that people who loved the best years of local newspapers do.
Yet single-mindedness squeezes out other ideas. This blind spot is illustrated in the way the term “multi-local” is currently being discussed and digested by journalism insiders.
Inspiring work from American Journalism Project and new initiatives from Texas Tribune and regional hubs under The Colorado Sun were all identified under the “multi-local” moniker in a recent piece by Nieman Lab, the Harvard-connected news industry watchdog. Then former Wall Street Journal-publisher and ProPublica founding president Dick Tofel wrote about the risks faced by multi-local organizations that own several town-square news sites — think Signal Cleveland or Deep South Today. When only back-office functions link them together, he observed, there’s reason to worry about the ghosts of failed newspaper chains of the past.
Whether or not they mean it, this sounds like what I call “newspaper blindness”: they leave room for only one definition of a local news organization, one in which multiple topics are stitched together to curate a snapshot of local discourse. I understand the resistance to accept that the vast majority of Americans have their feed curated by social media algorithms. These platforms overwhelmingly serve as the digital town square, so this losing focus on how information is distributed obscures the far more important focus of what information is gathered in the first place.
Tofel’s narrow use of “multi-local’ obscures a different — and, I argue, more novel — species of multi-local organization: the topic-driven multi-locals. These news orgs, such as States Newsroom, Open Campus and Technically, which I founded 16 years ago and lead today, are quietly growing and routinely overlooked as outliers.
If we move past newspaper blindness, this cohort looks like an exciting complement to the vibrancy of the nonprofit, town-square models that dominate local news discourse today.
Multi-local 2.0: Topic-driven networks
When I hear multi-local, I think of beats that travel, not just brands that spread:
| Topical Network | Core subject | Local nodes |
| Chalkbeat | K–12 education | 8 communities |
| Open Campus | Higher-ed accountability | 17 partner newsrooms |
| Inside Climate News | Environment & climate | 19 states and regions |
| City Cast | Daily urban podcasting | 13 cities |
| Eater | Food culture | 23 metros |
| Technical.ly | Entrepreneurship, jobs of the future and tech policy impact on local communities | 7 ecosystems |
| States Newsroom | State government policy and politics | 50 states |
These outlets share more than back-office functions across geographies; they share subject-matter expertise. That opens up a variety of newsroom benefits that result in better coverage for communities.
- Reporter muscle-building. Technical.ly’s Pittsburgh reporter might spend one day reviewing our workforce development coverage across our regions, then swap AI-policy and quantum computing sources with her Delaware colleague the next. OpenCampus reporters are embedded with local newsrooms but get subject-matter training. That kind of bench depth is almost impossible for a single-community newsroom to hire or train alone.
- National data, local angle. Chalkbeat can convert federal test-score releases into 10 city-specific explainers nearly overnight. Inside Climate News can use previously deployed workflows to map EPA methane data onto parish-level health records in Louisiana. The States Newsroom model blends owned sites, and newsroom partnerships.
- Economies of learning, not just scale. A common CMS and HR stack can save money, yes — but the bigger win is a shared glossary, training curriculum and source list. The expertise moves horizontally while the accountability remains vertical, down to the neighborhood. For that reason alone it puzzles me that we overlook this category.
Tofel, the commentator and ProPublica founder, whom I deeply admire, asked whether multi-locals should consolidate brands or emphasize uniqueness.
For topic networks the answer is increasingly a single national masthead for authority (Eater, OpenCampus, Technical.ly, though the States Newsroom is an exception), which can then collaborate with fully local newsrooms. One rule we have at Technical.ly is we never compete with any single-market organization; Instead these are easy collaborations.
The key is that the organizing principle is “subject first, place second.”
Why funders should care
Most exciting to me is how readily I see this style of multi-local news org fitting into a growing community news stack.
In a model pioneered by Report for America and refined by OpenCampus, Technical.ly is exploring reporter “colocation,” in which we work with an existing local newsroom to place, train and support a reporter with our expertise.
More than back-office functions, these kinds of multi-locals become a menu from which an expanding local news environment can choose. Need environmental coverage? Well, there are several news orgs experienced in that vertical to help you. Care about the fate of higher education in your community? Call OpenCampus. If your community cares about entrepreneurship, jobs of the future and AI policy, Technical.ly is your natural partner.
Consider this from a funder’s perspective: Multi-local news orgs are a sure-fire way to bring subject matter expertise on important issues to a community, while also elevating that region nationally. The Heinz Endowments has an organization-wide priority to boost economic opportunity in Pittsburgh; its support helped us maintain a full-time reporter based in the city.
The multi-local approach also lets national funders ensure crucial issues get necessary local depth. For example, an investment by the WES Assefa Fund supported the Technical.ly newsroom’s work to publish additional and in-depth immigration coverage for employers and career paths across multiple geographies. It came on the heels of our multi-year, economic-mobility focused THRIVING series, which won last year’s LION’s national Journalistic Impact award.
All the while, multi-locals are at our best when we do not compete but instead do credible work with other local news outlets via partnership and journalism collaboratives. Technical.ly’s FOIA requests and ongoing coverage of a ransomware attack on the City of Baltimore led to several other news outlets and an internal investigation.
NPR’s California Newsroom told Nieman Lab it wants reporters who “remain local while still feeding their best work up the chain.” Topic networks already model that path: Journalists can stay in Waco, Boise or Wilmington and still tackle national-caliber investigations.
What’s your next step? A call to action
If you are a funder, widen your aperture. Underwrite topical multi-locals alongside civic-generalists; insist they partner with place-based outlets instead of parachuting in.
If you are a publisher, look for beat areas where you can’t afford full-time expertise — climate, housing, tech, health — and explore franchising that coverage from a topic network.
If you are a journalist, consider that your next big impact might come not from moving up-market but from moving sideways into a multi-local vertical where your specialty knowledge serves dozens of towns.
Multi-local should describe more than a cluster of mini-newspapers. The 2.0 version blends the intimacy of local reporting with the rigor of a national beat desk. That hybrid is already thriving in pockets around the country. Let’s name it, fund it and let it scale.