What The Hell America!

Among Ben Romo’s core ’80s memories as a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, CA: Placing third in a Big Wheel race on Leadbetter Beach.

That accomplishment was documented in his hometown paper, the more than century-old Santa Barbara News-Press. It was the first time Romo remembers making the paper, but not the last; the News-Press was a constant presence throughout his young life.

When the newspaper stopped publishing and filed for bankruptcy in 2023, and local journalists brought the historical value of the archives to his attention, Romo, now a consultant and a onetime News-Press paperboy, listened. And last year, when civic-minded cousins revealed that the newspaper’s digital archive, trademark, and other assets were at risk of being sold to a Maltese company that would harvest it and turn it into an AI “zombie site,” Romo felt compelled to protect those, too.

Romo — who has no background in journalism — partnered with Jason Yardi, a local developer, who provided financial backing ahead of the News-Press’ bankruptcy hearing. (Yardi and Romo “are involved in a lot of different social impact investing stuff” on the local level, Romo said.) By swooping in to outbid “Weyaweya Ltd” for the digital archives, which they secured for $285,000, Romo and Yardi “inadvertently also ended up owning the assets necessary to restart the News-Press as a business: the trademark, domains, social media accounts, and copyrights to the digital archives,” as Romo wrote in the Santa Barbara Independent. (The Santa Barbara Historical Museum later made a successful bid for the physical archives, an outcome Romo and Yardi fully supported.)

The News-Press “has not only reported on the news of our community for more than a century, but it’s helped shape our community,” Romo said. “I’ve heard from dozens of people who expressed a desire to see this thing come back.”

When outbidding Weyaweya, “our goal was to keep those assets local,” Romo said. Mission accomplished — but he and Yardi weren’t interested in restarting and running a newspaper themselves, so they began exploring what to do with their new assets. They dismissed offers from (local) buyers to purchase the newspaper and act as for-profit owners; they wanted to ensure it would operate as a public good. Some Googling led Romo to the Knight Foundation, which led him to a conversation with director of journalism Marisa Kwiatkowski, who connected him with media consultant Caroline Porter, who told him about a potential answer to their predicament: a new nonprofit called Newswell.

Newswell, a nonprofit affiliated with Arizona State University, essentially wants to build up a nonprofit local news network with the backbone of a traditional newspaper chain. It formally launched early this year with $5 million in funding from the Knight Foundation. Its pitch to local news orgs like the News-Press (and their public-spirited owners, like Romo): Donate the publication to us, and we’ll work toward long-term sustainability and provide back-end support like HR, accounting, IT, and legal support, as well as “audience, membership and advertising expertise.”

In January, the News-Press became the third local publication to take Newswell up on its offer, joining Stocktonia and the Times of San Diego. (Beyond the Knight Foundation, other Newswell funders include Arnold Ventures, which is supporting investigative reporting in Stockton, and the Hewlett Foundation, which awarded a grant for misinformation-related work.)

At the helm of Newswell is executive director Nicole Carroll, who joined ASU after serving as editor-in-chief at USA Today. Back in 2023, almost a full year before Newswell incorporated, Carroll began by conducting a year-long study, including meetings and conversations with local editors and publishers, to determine what small local news organizations “needed to be successful and sustainable.”

“We heard the same refrain,” Carroll wrote in the statement announcing Newswell’s formal launch. “We’ve got the talent. We’re good on passion. What we need is operational support, audience and business strategy, innovation and experimentation, diversified revenue, and a path to sustainability.” She decided to build up an organization that could provide back-end and business support to multiple local publications. (Coming from Gannett, for all its shortcomings, Carroll said she experienced the benefits of having back-end services and support of a large company.) Newswell’s staff page currently lists eight people, Carroll included, with positions such as a director of product and innovation, a director of investigative journalism ventures, and a director of audience and membership.

Newswell was conceived to have a twofold role, Carroll explained: owning and operating the media properties, and modernizing them. That dual role recalls the National Trust for Local News in some ways — a nonprofit owner that has also acquired local newspapers — while its focus on back-end support brings to mind networks like Indiegraf and the Hyperlocal News Network. (The National Trust for Local News has come under scrutiny recently as it has had to close two of its newspapers, and for discrepancy between its executive salaries and low pay for its local journalists.)

At a time when many local newspapers are reducing frequency or getting out of the print business entirely, Carroll said Newswell expects to operate print publications in the future. She sees potential for AI to speed up and streamline the print production process, and said students at ASU have begun to experiment with ways to make that happen. “As unsexy as it may sound to talk about print, it still provides a lot of revenue for small, especially weekly, publications around the country,” she said. (One recent estimate suggested print still drives nearly 75% of publisher revenue.) “Transforming the print process could be very beneficial to help them with their runway toward their digital transformation.”

Carroll said she’s met and “compared notes” with leaders at the National Trust. Relative to this and other organizations, “We are the same-’plus,’” Carroll said. “We do different things, and there’s room for all of us, because there’s so much need out there.”

What makes a local news outlet a good candidate to donate to Newswell? The first key criterion: It can’t have any debt. Carroll said debt must be resolved before a publication is donated.

Second, a Newswell publication must be “in a community that wants us and…values local news and has the capacity to support local news,” Carroll said.

Beyond that, though, the nonprofit is open to local publications with different histories and business models. The previously for-profit Times of San Diego (founded in 2014) and nonprofit Stocktonia (launched in 2022) are both newer, digital-first startups, whereas the News-Press is a legacy newspaper — both types of outlet are a fit for Newswell.

The publications came to Newswell needing different things, Carroll said, but “they were all at transition points.” Times of San Diego was a successful for-profit; Chris Jennewein, its editor, publisher, and general manager, after 10 years of work, was thinking about succession and “wanted a long-term place for his publication,” Carroll said. (She also sees room for Newswell to support more investigative and enterprise reporting work at the publication.) Stocktonia, meanwhile, was a newer nonprofit in need of backup on the business side. And the Santa Barbara News-Press, as a legacy newspaper that Newswell plans to relaunch after some community listening work, was a “blank slate.”

“When you think about it from a prototype perspective and trying to learn before we scale, these are three really good, different examples to help us learn what works best,” Carroll said. (Times of San Diego has 13,000 daily newsletter subscribers, while Stocktonia has 1,700 subscribers to its thrice-weekly newsletter, according to their respective media kits. Both publications include donations and advertising in their revenue mixes, but their coverage is free to read.)

While Newswell is based in Arizona, all three publications serve communities in California. The concentration in California arose out of “a combination of need and opportunity,” Carroll said. Stocktonia and Times of San Diego both formally joined Newswell around May 2024, and Carroll came to believe working with multiple publications in the same state made some sense.

“There’s certain synergies and economies of scale by being geographically in the same state,” Carroll said. She pointed to Newswell’s California managing editor, who is based out of ASU’s Los Angeles center, noting she can distribute content of statewide interest to, for now, two, and soon all three publications. “We don’t intend to always stay in California,” Carroll said, “but for right now, that’s where we’re at.”

On top of providing back-end support, Newswell is looking to get students involved in its work “in any way we can,” Carroll said. (ASU has a large student and alumni base in California — more than 23,000 students are Californians, and the state is home to about 65,000 alumni, which the school says is the largest alumni concentration outside Arizona.) Each semester, students from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism intern at the publications (another example of journalism students filling local news gaps). Last semester, as part of an online audience capstone, students analyzed site engagement for the Times of San Diego and presented suggestions on audience growth. This semester, students in the sports division of Cronkite News, the school’s news service, will cover the San Diego Padres’ spring training just outside Phoenix for the local outlet.

Newswell is also working on creating classes for online learners that they envision being embedded in partner organizations’ news stories. Newswell is working with a partner on rolling out classes in its publications “in the next couple of months.”

Newswell’s ultimate goal is to help get its publications to sustainability (or remain sustainable) by diversifying revenue and drawing on a mix of advertising, memberships, and philanthropy. “We want the publications that we support to be self-sustaining,” Carroll said. “We want them to be here for the long haul and serve their community for generations.”

Since Romo donated the News-Press to Newswell, his only involvement has been introducing Newswell people to Santa Barbara community members as the organization conducts a listening study as its first step toward re-launching the News-Press. Under Newswell’s stewardship, he’s hopeful for the future of the local newspaper he read and appeared in as a kid.

“My biggest hope,” he said, is “that we have a news source that is additive to our ability as a community to come together and have honest, meaningful conversations about difficult community challenges.”

“Having grown up reading the local paper,” he added, “at the local level, local news matters, and it’s a place where people can actually come together as a community and feel that bond of a positive, constructive civic dialogue that is missing in such a profound way at the national level.”

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