What The Hell America!

Houston, with a population of more than 2.3 million people, is the largest city in Texas — and the Houston Landing had funding to match.

The nonprofit news startup raised $20 million well before it began publishing, from the American Journalism Project and the Knight Foundation along with local philanthropies the Houston Endowment, Kinder Foundation, and Arnold Ventures.

But less than two years after the Landing officially launched, its board has voted to shut the news outlet down. The site will stop publishing by mid-May, CEO Peter Bhatia said Tuesday, and its 43 employees will be laid off.

Bhatia cited “a challenging financial environment that has made long-term sustainability unattainable. We were not able to build the additional revenue streams needed to sustain ongoing operational needs.”

Bhatia didn’t elaborate on the Landing’s challenges, financial or otherwise, in the announcement — but in an insightful story Tuesday, Sewell Chan, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and former editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, spelled out some of them:

• The Landing spent “$5.5 million in 2023 and $7.9 million in 2024. Last year, it spent $2 million more than it brought in. Last year, in its second year of operation, the Landing attracted just thirteen thousand newsletter subscribers and generated $80,000 in membership revenue — a pittance, given the size of the city.”
• The Houston Landing’s seed funding was supposed to cover operations through 2025, and “the Landing started hiring aggressively in the late summer of 2022, months ahead of launch,” Chan writes. “As its costs increased, the revenue did not match. Last year, the Landing generated just $430,000 in new revenue, including just $25,000 from major donors.”
• As CJR reported last month, Arnold Ventures decided to stop funding the site.
• The site “suffered from a lack of focus…in a city where many residents lack basic civic information, the Landing didn’t attract and retain the kind of deep, loyal audience it needed to survive.”

Six months after the Houston Landing launched, in January 2024, I reported on the firing of its popular editor-in-chief and a star investigative reporter. Those firings “blindsided” the newsroom, exposing internal divisions about the editorial direction and strategy to achieve sustainability driving the nonprofit.

At that time, Bhatia said the firings were part of a company “reset.”

“We’re doing good work, we’re doing good journalism,” he said, “but we’re basically putting out a newspaper on the web. And that’s not a recipe for success for us for the long term, nor is it a recipe for sustainability.”

He told me then that the Landing was “in excellent shape financially.” The Landing’s six-person board, which included executives from three of its major funders, backed Bhatia following the firings. (The blindsided newsroom, meanwhile, unionized.)

The Landing might have begun as one of the best-funded nonprofit newsrooms in the country. It now appears to be a cautionary tale about the risks of relying on a few big funders and of disagreements about mission and strategy undermining a newsroom. (The disagreements about mission reminded me of challenges another local news nonprofit, the Wichita Beacon, ran into before shutting down last year.)

The Landing’s board has initiated discussions with The Texas Tribune about “the possibility of establishing a Houston news initiative as part of its broader strategy to expand local journalism and serve more Texans.” The Tribune’s initiative to establish community newsrooms, starting in Waco and Austin, is supported by the American Journalism Project, one of the Landing’s founding backers.