Two days after Tom Wiley joined the National Trust for Local News in May as its new CEO, the organization announced that it was selling 21 of its Colorado newspapers to a for-profit Arizona-based company.
The large sale had been in the works long before Wiley joined the nonprofit, but it marked perhaps the biggest disruption at the Trust following what had already been a turbulent few months.
In January, the organization’s co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro abruptly stepped down. In February, the Trust closed two of its Colorado newspapers. Then in March, the Trust’s Maine subsidiary cut print production and laid people off amid the departure of multiple other long-serving editors.
Since its creation in 2021, even critics have lauded and championed the Trust in hopes that it would provide some sort of panacea to the local news crisis that has been gripping the United States for more than two decades. But nearly five years later, reality has proven to be harsher. Months of upheaval have raised questions among journalists and others in the media industry about the sustainability of the Trust’s model — and, with new leadership, where the organization goes from here. While some say the cracks are starting to show, others say it’s too early to determine if the Trust is or isn’t accomplishing what it set out to do.
Two months into his new job, Wiley is optimistic as he says he’s focused on stabilizing the nonprofit and its current newspapers before turning to acquiring more publications. “We are in that transition mode, and when we get to the point where we feel like we’ve got the infrastructure and the overarching ability to fulfill on our promises in a way that has business discipline and aspirational goals,” he told the Local News Initiative, “then we will start looking at where our acquisitions would be most impactful.”
Hansen Shapiro founded the Trust in an effort to respond to the country’s local news crisis. The nonprofit’s mission is to acquire local newspapers to save them from either closing and creating news deserts, or from getting bought up and gutted by hedge funds or other companies. It employs just under 400 staffers across more than 30 print newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia.
The Trust is based in Colorado, but Wiley lives in Buffalo, New York, where he most recently worked as publisher and president of the Buffalo News daily newspaper. Throughout his more than three decades in the journalism industry, he has worked at various publications and media companies in Connecticut, Michigan, Missouri, New York and Wisconsin.
Wiley’s plan is a marked departure in strategy from how the Trust was previously run. Up until recently, acquisitions were the name of the game for the Trust, which, in less than five years, amassed a staggering 64 local newspapers across three states. It also launched a brand-new newspaper in Georgia called The Macon Melody and bought a printing press.
By the time Hansen Shapiro stepped down in January, she had grown the Trust into a $50 million media business, Marc Hand, co-founder and Trust board chair, said in a statement announcing Hansen Shapiro’s departure. “Recognizing that it’s the right moment to transition to new leadership is further evidence of Elizabeth’s extraordinary skills as a visionary and entrepreneur,” Hand said. “We’re moving from inspiration to execution,” board member Lisa Borders told the Portland Press Herald, the Trust’s flagship Maine paper. Hansen Shapiro did not respond to requests for an interview.
While Wiley is focused on the future, the Colorado sale and the Maine reorganization still hang over the organization and the communities it serves. They also offer lessons learned from the Trust’s first few years and inform how Wiley will try to get things back on track.
To Damon Kiesow, a University of Missouri journalism professor who focuses on journalism innovation, it’s far too early to determine whether the Trust is teetering. “Five years is not enough to answer that question,” he said. “We need diversity in strategies. And no one is doing what they’re trying to do,” Kiesow added. “There’s no one solution that’s going to fix things.”
The Trust’s decision to sell most of its Colorado papers to Arizona’s Times Media Group was a financial one, according to Wiley, who said operation costs ended up rising higher than originally anticipated. “There was a cost problem,” he said. But, he added that it wasn’t a decision that was made lightly. “It wasn’t knee-jerk. It wasn’t without a great moral compass,” he said. “There isn’t some Machiavellian, secret cabal.”
Cabal or not, the sale still came as a shock to people like Corey Hutchins, a Colorado journalist who covers the state’s news industry. Residents had bought into the idea that the Trust was going to help save Colorado’s local media industry, he said. “There were certainly high hopes, and I don’t think they were met,” Hutchins said. “I’m encouraged that in two months, I haven’t had to write a story yet about layoffs at those papers or one of them closing down.”
The Times Media Group has previously gutted local news outlets, but only one person was laid off amid the sale: Linda Shapley, who served as publisher and then director of editorial and audience management at Colorado Community Media. Even though she worries about what will happen to the 21 papers, she thinks the Trust did what was right for the organization. “I understand why the Trust did what it did,” she said.
Colorado Press Association president Tim Regan-Porter shares those concerns about the future of the papers — some of which are the only ones in their respective communities. “It’s going to be an uphill battle to keep them all publishing,” he said. Still, he agreed with Shapley that selling the papers was likely in the Trust’s best interest. “I was glad that they were able to sell to somebody, as opposed to maybe shutting some of the papers,” he said. Better to sell off some of them than hold onto all of them and run the company into the ground, Regan-Porter said.
In an emailed statement, Times Media Group spokesperson David Leibowitz said several of the Colorado publications involved in the sale “were in serious financial distress,” with two slated to close. “Times Media Group stepped in not to wring the last few dollars from this transaction,” Leibowitz said. “These newspapers are worth saving.”
Leibowitz added that the company was not in a position to make any guarantees about future staffing decisions. “We are operating with transparency, urgency, and care. Our priority remains the survival and relevance of local newspapers in communities that need them now more than ever,” he said.
It’s difficult to point to any specific decision by the Trust to explain what went wrong and forced it to sell the papers. Most likely, the error was acquiring so many papers so fast. “They grew a little too quickly before having in place the infrastructure that they needed,” Shapley said. Regan-Porter agreed: “They had a lot on their plate, and something needed to give.”
As for Wiley, he says he doesn’t want to criticize or dwell on past decisions. “It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback it,” he said. “It’s easy for me to say Elizabeth and whoever she had on her team overstretched, but the real answer to that is ‘maybe.’ But given the inputs they had, would we have made the same decision? I don’t know.”
Nevertheless, Wiley’s current strategy suggests an understanding that the Trust may have expanded too quickly. To the new CEO, one of the most important lessons that the nonprofit has learned is that acquisitions put stress on organizations — and the Trust is no exception. “There’s communication challenges, which we suffered. There’s execution challenges, which we suffered,” he said. That’s why new acquisitions aren’t Wiley’s top priority right now. “The biggest challenge is going to be being purposeful and smart about the growth strategy,” he said.
Hundreds of newspapers have contacted the Trust in hopes that the nonprofit will acquire them, Wiley said. Some possible acquisitions have been in process since before Wiley joined the company, but he declines to say which publications or even what states they’re in. “Growing smartly, rather than just growing around opportunities that are presented, would be one thing that I think we’re doing better,” Wiley said. “We’re trying to sustain and then grow the impact of local journalism in the markets we serve.”
When the Trust came to Maine in 2023, staffers at the papers it acquired say they viewed the Trust as a way to sustain the journalism they were so committed to.
“There was this collective sigh of relief that we didn’t move into the hands of a hedge fund,” said Judith Meyer, who served as editor of three dailies under the Trust until February. “Everybody was on cloud nine,” agreed Steve Greenlee, former Press Herald executive editor who resigned in 2024 to join Boston University as a journalism professor.
But the honeymoon period didn’t last, they said. In 2024, the Trust owned about 40% of Maine’s daily and weekly newspapers. Now, the three daily newspapers that the Trust publishes in addition to the Press Herald are identical to the Press Herald. Since last year, five of their weekly papers have shifted to printing every other week; seven other weeklies no longer print at all. Newsletters have replaced some of them.
“They’re still finding their footing,” said Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, executive director of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Still, the reduced publishing has had an impact on state residents, especially people in rural parts of Maine who aren’t getting as much local news as they once did. “I hear a real sense of loss from people that they don’t have regular local news,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said.
Wiley said he understands the disappointment but that it was a financial necessity to sustain the business. “I get missing print. I feel the same way, but I would say that there’s a practicality to what is the tolerance for the price and the value on that,” Wiley said.
To Meyer, the Trust’s model “is working in its evolution,” she said. “There’s a lot of excitement around being able to stay alive in local journalism. So there’s a lot wrapped into the model working.”
Cliff Schechtman, who served as the Press Herald’s top editor from 2012 until he retired in 2021, shared peoples’ optimism when the Trust came to Maine. But Schechtman now says he believes the paper is prioritizing stories that will get clicks over watchdog journalism. “I’m simply embarrassed by what the Press Herald has become. The standards have dropped dramatically, and the productivity is a shadow of what it was only a year or two ago,” he said. “Almost no watchdog journalism — and that was our hallmark.”
When Hansen Shapiro stepped down, she said that the Trust showed “that a new model of stewardship is possible — one that honors both preservation and innovation while proving that local journalism remains vital to our communities.” But Schechtman said he’s concerned that the Trust has strayed from its original mission and that the top-down direction means the company now resembles the likes of Gannett or McClatchy — something Hansen Shapiro even acknowledged in 2024 to Poynter. “They’re building a national chain,” Schechtman said.
Under Hansen Shapiro’s leadership, the Trust faced criticism over steep salary discrepancies between its national executives and its local journalists. Hansen Shapiro made $370,540 in 2023, up from $116,667 in 2021, according to public records. At least three other executives also made more than $150,000 in 2023. The Trust is currently hiring for a head of development; the job description says the salary range is $200,000-$215,000. Meanwhile,in Maine, reporters at the Morning Sentinel average $43,503 per year, while reporters at the Press Herald average $56,277 per year, according to union-provided figures published in The Boston Globe. (Salaries are less in Colorado.)
The Trust uses philanthropic funds to pay executive salaries, but not to support newsroom operating budgets or fund reporters’ salaries or benefits. That was another source of discord, according Greenlee. Many newspapers in the Trust’s portfolio rely almost entirely on circulation and print advertising revenue, but, as Wiley acknowledges, both streams have been declining for decades. “The Trust’s philosophy was that the company has to stand on its own,” Greenlee said. “What’s the point of going nonprofit if you’re not going to use fundraising to support the journalism?”
But for all the criticism, the elephant in the room is what would happen if the Trust didn’t exist at all. Even though buying so many papers so quickly may have been to the Trust’s detriment in Colorado, Regan-Porter thinks some of them would have been forced to close if the Trust hadn’t purchased them in the first place. Now they at least have a fighting chance at survival under the Arizona company’s ownership, he said.
And the same goes for Maine, where “people love their local papers and support them and treasure them,” Meyer said. Despite the consolidation, the Trust has kept the Maine papers alive, she said. “I will forever support local journalism, Maine, because I just think it is critical to our communities, and by extension, I support the Maine Trust for Local News.”
Wiley doesn’t have any illusions about the ever-growing problems facing the local news industry, but he says the Trust still has a role in helping respond to the crisis. But under his leadership, he says he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself.
“There needs to be a smart growth pattern here, otherwise we can get over our skis,” Wiley said. “Let’s remain joyful about what we’re about to accomplish, but let’s also be practical.”
