In April 2026, Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, delivered the opening remarks at AJPalooza, an annual gathering of nonprofit local news leaders in our portfolio. This piece is adapted from her speech.
It’s great to be together here in Fort Worth, the home of our co-hosts, the outstanding Fort Worth Report.
Fort Worth is the perfect backdrop to gather, because in many ways the city mirrors the energy of our work. It’s one of the fastest-growing large cities in the United States. It’s a highly diverse city, both demographically and ideologically, and becoming more so every year. And it’s a place where Democrats and Republicans still find ways to come together around shared civic priorities.
In fact, in the most recent election, two competing candidates for the Texas state legislature — one Democrat and one Republican — issued a joint statement in support of the Fort Worth Report and local news. They wrote: “We ran against each other, and while we disagree on many issues, we agree on this.”
And they aren’t alone. All across the country, Americans overwhelmingly agree: local news matters. And the extraordinary talent in this room is proof.
This is a room of people who are not just bemoaning the loss of local news — and not just talking about its future — we’re building it together.
And what we’re building isn’t just an industry. We call it a movement for good reason. It’s a movement of people who are reimagining local news as a public good. And when I look at that movement today, three themes stand out: impact, ambition, and the future.
First, the impact of this work.
Across the country, your journalism is changing lives. Last July, the country watched as devastating floods swept through Kerr County, here in Texas. In the aftermath, Texas Tribune reporters spent months helping Texans understand what went wrong — and what more could have been done to warn residents in time. That reporting helped inform a special legislative session in which tens of millions of dollars were invested in preventing future flood disasters. Their reporting has prompted bipartisan commitments to change how the state pays for flood infrastructure when the Legislature meets again next year.
On a very different issue, we’re seeing many local newsrooms across the country report on the rapid expansion of data centers as new technologies reshape local economies. Spotlight Delaware reported on a proposed data center that would consume as much energy as the combined demands of every household in the state. That story went viral, and hundreds of people showed up at public hearings, and that reporting has continued to be cited in regulatory filings and policy debates at the county and state levels. It’s a prime example of what we know from research: Local journalism increases civic engagement by giving people the raw material they need to get inspired and get involved.
In Minnesota, when federal immigration agents surged in, Sahan Journal, a newsroom built by and for immigrants, was ready. They had already earned the trust of immigrant communities across the region. Their reporters interviewed a Hmong elder and U.S. citizen with no criminal record who had been dragged outside by ICE agents wearing only his shorts in 10-degree weather. They reported one of the first stories about 5-year-old Liam Ramos, the boy in the blue bunny hat, detained and shipped to Texas. They pored over hundreds of social media posts and contacted dozens of Minnesota legislators to compile a comprehensive accounting of the reaction to Operation Metro Surge and the fatal shooting of two residents.
People were hungry for their reporting: In January alone, their website had close to 1 million views, and their social media posts reached 7 million people. Earlier this month, Sahan Journal was recognized with the 69th Columbia Journalism Award, honoring reporting that serves communities and advances the highest standards of the profession.
The journalism you produce helps a community define itself — how it understands who it is and the values it cares about. And that doesn’t have to be only when a place is in crisis. The Fort Worth Report has been running an ongoing series called “52 Faces of Community,” documenting the heroes here whose contributions often go unrecognized. They highlighted people like a motorcycle club founder who has devoted his life to raising millions of dollars for children’s charities, a former police officer who found renewed purpose managing a branch of the public library, and a veteran working to restore a once-neglected public park.
It’s a reminder that local journalism doesn’t just tell us what’s happening. It doesn’t just urge lawmakers to act. It helps communities define themselves to themselves.
The second theme that stands out is ambition. Nonprofit local news is now beyond the proof-of-concept phase: It works.
And the organizations in our portfolio are operating with a level of ambition that is reshaping what local news can mean.
In Los Angeles, The LA Local launched this January, replicating the Boyle Heights Beat model in East LA and expanding it to more neighborhoods like Inglewood and Koreatown — now serving a population of more than a million people and backed by a broad coalition of funders, nearly all of whom are investing in local news for the first time.
In Tulsa, the launch of the Tulsa Flyer, alongside the expansion of the more than century-old Oklahoma Eagle, is transforming a legacy institution and building something entirely new. At a time when legacy coverage has sharply declined, this combined entity is now the primary source of original reporting in the city, and doing so where audiences are today: online, in inboxes and in multiple languages.
Up in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Watch has more than doubled in size over the past few years — and is expanding its reach and remit. It now has three newsrooms working together, including a statewide investigative reporting newsroom, the Neighborhood News Service, to serve Milwaukee, and, most recently, a new team in the northeast.
And Deep South Today: When we first partnered in 2019, it was a single newsroom — Mississippi Today, with less than a $2 million budget. It’s now a $10 million network of newsrooms. Its recent merger with The Current, now the largest newsroom in Lafayette, Louisiana, shows how shared infrastructure can expand reporting across the region.
In California, CalMatters recently won the Trust in American Institutions Award for its Digital Democracy initiative, which uses AI to track legislative activity and public records and identify story ideas for local journalists statewide — bringing a new level of transparency and accountability to state government. The model began in California, expanded to Hawaii in partnership with Honolulu Civil Beat, and is now being scaled to newsrooms across the country.
And we’re not just seeing ambition to build the scale within our organizations, but also in the culture at large: On April 9, Montana Free Press launched the first-ever “Local News Day” — a national initiative to draw attention to the field that succeeded in bringing together more than 1,400 newsrooms and over 200 partners, with official proclamations in three states and dozens of communities. This is movement-building in action.
If you take one thing away from AJPalooza, let it be this: this is working.
It may not be easy. There is no silver bullet. But it is working.
Finally, a word about the future.
As everyone here knows, news organizations are going through some somersaults right now as we grapple with what AI and shifting audience behavior means for our work. One veteran of the newspaper business said to me recently, “I haven’t seen this much change in my entire career as we’ve seen in the last 18 months.”
Inevitably, some of this will be hype, while other things will turn out to be understated. But there is no question that AI is rapidly transforming how people engage with news and information. The good news and the bad news is that we are the experts on the encounter between AI and local news — which means we have a key role in shaping what comes next.
The choices we make about how to use these technologies, how to reach audiences, and how to invest in and build sustainable local news organizations will shape what becomes of an informed public. As Peter Drucker, widely recognized as the father of modern management, put it: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
Our mission has not changed, and will not change: to serve communities with reliable, independent information, and to help people understand and engage with the places where they live.
And that means holding two ideas at once — staying deeply focused on the core work, while continuing to adapt in how we do it.
It’s incumbent on us to surface, share, and circulate what we are learning — and to do that collectively, so that we can move faster and build on one another’s progress.
