Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell is Leading the Nation’s Most Watched Local News Experiment

In the ninth episode of the State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with Melissa Bell, CEO of Chicago Public Media, home to one of the nation's most unique models for local news: the combination of a public radio outlet and a legacy newspaper.

Two years ago this month, Bell took over as head of Chicago Public Media, the nonprofit parent organization of NPR member station WBEZ and the iconic Chicago Sun-Times. She joins Tim Franklin to discuss how Chicago Public Media is bringing together NPR member station WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times under a nonprofit model. Bell co-founded Vox.com and later served as publisher of Vox Media, overseeing Vox, The Verge, Eater, and SB Nation. She helped guide Vox’s acquisition of New York Magazine. Earlier in her career, she worked on digital strategy at The Washington Post and helped launch Mint, a business newspaper in India. She has also served as a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. In 2025, Bell was inducted into the Medill Hall of Achievement, the school’s highest honor for graduates. In this episode, she reflects on the challenges of integrating two different news cultures and the financial decisions required to build a sustainable news organization with a revenue model that includes philanthropy, memberships, sponsorships and print subscriptions, as well as its efforts to grow its audience across radio, print, digital, podcasts, YouTube and social platforms. Bell also discusses the future of public media, the challenges of declining traditional audiences and Chicago Public Media’s experiment with Chicago.com as a new community platform.

• 

  It's been a pretty uneventful two years since you started at Chicago Public Media. The federal government cut off funding. Like other news leaders, you've been dealing with this huge disruption in the local news business model and you've had to assimilate two iconic legacy Chicago news organizations, the Sun-Times and WBEZ. Other than that, it's been a real honeymoon for you, right?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I have to say it has been a total and absolute honor and blast. I don't know how else to describe it. It's been so much fun and it has been hard for sure. And there's been some difficult decisions that we've had to make and some complicated choices, but overall it has been a complete privilege to be in this job right now.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  Well, it's a big job and we're glad you're in it. So we know it's in good hands. I'm sure our audience would be interested in an update on the status of things at Chicago Public Media these days.

  Just to remind our viewers by way of background, Chicago Public Media, the parent of WBEZ, acquired The Sun Times on January 31st, 2022 and converted the newspaper to a nonprofit. It was a landmark deal and a relatively novel approach, combining a public broadcasting station and a legacy newspaper under a single roof and creating the largest nonprofit local newsroom in the nation. The acquisition was backed by 61 million in pledges over five years from foundations and civic donors. So the clock is ticking on that funding. I wanted to get to that in a few minutes.

  Even with that funding, as you referenced, there have been tough decisions. You had to take painful steps like buyouts at the Chicago Sun-Times last year.

  A couple of years ago at a Chicago local news summit that we hosted, Evan Smith, the legendary former CEO of the Texas Tribune, told the crowd that the WBEZ-Sun-Times merger was the single most important experiment in local news in the nation. So, not to put any more pressure on you, but how's that going?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Well, I can say four years into it, I think that it was not just the single most important experiment, but also one of the smartest. It's why I wanted to come here in the first place. The acquisition happened two years before I arrived, so I feel like I joined right in the middle of the experiment.

  And at this side of the clock, I think we're doing great. You mentioned we had to make some tough decisions in my first year here. We had to stabilize the business and we had to renegotiate our print contract. We sadly had to bid farewell to about 35 journalists in my first year here.

  Those decisions were tough, but they also allowed, I think, the staff to say, "Okay, I'm going to be committed to the new Chicago Public Media and what do we need to do going forward?"

  On the other side, we have a strong business with the Sun-Times, one that is growing and we have a strong foundation with WBEZ 91.5. We've climbed up in the rankings to the top 10 in the city and that business is going well also. So we're just about to start launching new products, which is really exciting.

  But the work feels great. And what happened in Chicago was that it didn't lose a newspaper. And as your research shows, when a county or region loses a newspaper, a city loses much more than great journalism. Corruption goes up, partisanship goes up, payrolls bloat, even taxes increase per citizen when you lose a newspaper. So we really did something that saved great journalism and helped improve the city of Chicago overall.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  I mentioned that the initial philanthropic investments had a five-year time horizon and we're now nearing the end of that period. So are you now sustainable? Did you get renewals? Can you update us on the status of that?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Sure. I think that the one thing that we need to make sure that we're cognizant of with public media is that the revenue mix is diversified, but it always does include philanthropy. There are major funders that we have that have been partners to us for years and years and years. New members come along and decide they can only support us with a $5 gift, but we treat those the same as our membership package.

  And then, of course, we have sponsorships and we have currently with the print paper subscriptions. So it's a healthy mix of revenue, but we will also always look to larger funders to help support our mission.

  We've seen that with the Sun-Times. We've seen that with some of the folks who originally committed money to us at the beginning of the experiment five years ago, recommitting to the future of the organization.

  But we've also seen new funders step up. We recently received a major gift because they love the Sun-Times sports section, as they should! It's the best section in the city and they know that they want to continue to keep the paper going long into the future. So we're really lucky to have a mix of supporters and a mix of revenue.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  So you now consider things to be pretty stable, pretty sustainable?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I always feel a little funny to say this in the journalism industry because we know everything is precarious and at risk, but at this moment in time, I do feel things are pretty stable here. We're in a strong spot with our financials.

  We came out of a very strong year last year. We don't expect it to be as strong this year because there was a lot of national attention to public media and a lot of members and a lot of funders stepped up and said, "Hey, this matters to us and it's valuable and it's important."

  We can't rely on that kind of press attention every year, but it did really help us in the past year. Now we need to start thinking about some new revenue potential.

  We're really focused on thinking about our digital products in the future. We have a good base with the print paper and the radio station, but we know audiences are declining on both of those platforms. So what can we do moving forward to ensure that we continue to keep a stable business going?

  Melissa Bell

• 

  Public radio newsrooms and newspaper newsrooms often have very different cultures, very different metabolisms. Has melding these organizations been tougher than you thought it would be and how's that going?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yes and no. I think it's probably the appropriate answer.

  Radio stations are much more attuned to a slower cadence of storytelling. It takes more time and effort to get audio and video than to write a quick story and put it up on the website quickly. That's just a matter of fact.

  The Sun-Times has always been really fast-paced: investigative, sports, politics. There's that real energy of the live report of the Chicago Sun-Times, whereas WBEZ has always been a little bit more of an experience. You want to sit down and you want to capture those driveway moments where you really are connecting with people.

  So there are fundamentally two very different cultures here, especially when I started. But the good thing is that everybody here really felt the benefit of working with one another.

  It started off in a much more casual way where the newsrooms were not merged when I first arrived and journalists just wanted to work with other great journalists. And so they started off sort of at the ground level, finding ways to collaborate and work together.

  But then as we made it more intentional and merged the newsrooms into one, there was some trickiness figuring out workflows, figuring out different systems. Technically, it's still two different companies. So there are Sun-Times reporters and there are WBEZ reporters, but they all report up to Kimbriell Kelly, our new editor-in-chief and her leadership team.

  And I really feel that because of the collaboration and the good spirit of the reporters themselves, we've been able to make a huge impact behind the scenes. So you might not see it really from an audience perspective. We still have the Sun-Times and we still have WBEZ, but these teams are really working together, learning from one another, collaborating and I think having a pretty good time doing it.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  So I'm sure our audience would be interested in a little bit of the nitty-gritty. So the newsrooms have been fully merged, making it the largest nonprofit newsroom in the country, probably the largest newsroom in Chicago.

  So are all of the journalists filing stories for broadcast, print and pixels? I'm seeing a lot of WBEZ bylines in the Sun-Times these days. Can you talk a little bit about how that's manifesting itself now?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Sure. Well, really what the newsroom did and I think that this is the important key feature, is that we put all of the reporters essentially into news desks. So they're topic-based.

  Our politics team is working on politics stories and they're talking to each other about what's happening in the city, the state and the country and collaborating with one another. And then we have a team dedicated to creating the radio product. We have a team dedicated to creating the print product and then we have a team dedicated to thinking about the digital experience.

  And to me, that was a very, very smart choice that our editorial team came up with. And it was to think about what really currently needs to be told as a story and then what platform the story should be on.

  Because really the story will change according to the platforms, of course, but fundamentally the key components of it- the report, the sourcing, the through line- all of that will just be changing per medium.

  It also allows the specialized teams to really be thinking about their audience specifically. What does a print audience really need from us? What does a radio audience really need from us? What does a digital audience really need from us?

  And so they're able to select the most important stories or slew of stories according to the platform needs.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  You had to merge these newsrooms creatively, but you're also having to do it at a time when consumer preferences and behaviors for local news are changing rapidly.

  We published our annual Chicago News Consumer Survey a few days ago.

  One finding is that radio's share of local news consumption has slipped from 34% to 25% over the last three years. Local TV news usage also slid over the same period (daily local TV audience declined from 52% in 2024 to 47% in 2026).

  It also showed that only 14% of Chicago area residents pay for local news in any form: subscriptions, memberships, donations.

  How are you working to combat those headwinds and I guess how does this new newsroom structure fit into that?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Sure. Well, first, the newsroom structure is fundamentally flexible. So if we are starting to think about new platforms or new experiences and really I think that we think about the internet as a monolith, but Kimbriell Kelly, our editor-in-chief, broke it down that we actually publish on 19 different platforms every day if you think about it.

  That includes YouTube, that includes podcasts, that includes Instagram, that includes our websites, that includes the print paper and the radio product. So we have to recognize that we need to be set up to adapt to how many times we change the platforms that we serve people on.

  I think fundamentally what your study pointed out and what I think is true for a lot of the research that we've been looking at over the last couple of years, is that we haven't adapted and created platforms that truly reach people in the way that they want to be reached today.

  We know that radio numbers have been declining for over a decade. We've seen this in the print world too. We've stabilized the decline and actually seen some growth on the radio side for ourselves and I believe I actually have a whole theory about the print paper.

  I think that there's a lot more that we could be doing to grow that too, but we know that that's not going to be the future business for our audiences and the future way that they interact with us.

  So we really need to think intelligently about how we are not correctly serving audiences and what we need to do to make that change.

  I'd be curious about your study, Tim and this is maybe a question that you have answered, but are we including influencers in that study in terms of who people pay for?

  I think that there's more news and information out there than ever before and people are finding a multitude of ways of getting it. And so I think that the journalism is not the problem. The delivery mechanisms are the problem.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  The one thing that our study showed is that there's still high demand for local news. 85% of people said they consume local news at least once a week and a majority- a significant majority consume local news daily.

  So they are consuming it, but as you say, the delivery platform that they're getting that news on is changing. Creators were the third or fourth highest grouping of news providers that folks are consuming and of course that percentage is especially high among younger consumers. And then search is at the top of the list and social media is also near the top.

  So yeah, those things are changing rapidly, and trying to organize a newsroom and keep up with the pace of that change is tough.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  It is, but I think it's great. We're in a moment I think of real opportunity.

  I think that I always feel that there are these major shifts every decade or so in journalism and I think that we're on the brink of a massive shift that is also quite frightening and that is the rise of AI agents. Again, some of the same mistakes that we made two decades ago, where we're not seeing the right government policy step in to regulate it correctly and a lot of people are uncertain about how to approach this.

  To me, it really resonates when I reflect on the 1961 speech by Newton Minow, the FCC chairman, where he described television as a "vast wasteland." I feel we are now on the brink of an much vaster wasteland of misinformation, disinformation, AI slop and we really need to say, "Let's not shy away from this moment. Let's really lean into it and think about new ways that we can create something that works better."

  And in part, that's because everything is disrupted, not just journalism, but the technology giants of the past 15 years are also disrupted and uncertain about how to move forward. So this is a time to seize that opportunity.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  We've seen other examples of public radio combining with local news organizations. Most recently, just in July, when the San Antonio Report donated its assets to Texas Public Radio, there've been a few others, like in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Denton, Texas, both in 2023. Do you think there will be more of these? I mean, at a lot of levels, it makes sense.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I really hope so. I think there's a lot of value in strength in numbers and if you can find ways to partner intelligently with other news organizations, it's a good move for everyone.

  You don't have to do it as a consolidation, though. I mean, that's not the only approach that you can take. We're working with the other 12 Illinois broadcast stations across the state to share resources and we're not combining into one major Illinois broadcast station. We're thinking about ways to collaborate and support one another.

  So I think there are different approaches to this, but I definitely think that in this world and in this day and age, we have to be focusing on collaborative solutions and that's hard for journalism because we've always been in a system that prized competition and we can't do that anymore.

  We need to find ways to collaborate.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  I wanted to ask you about paywalls. In the last episode, I interviewed Eric Barnes, the CEO of The Daily Memphian. The Daily Memphian is a very successful local news startup, probably one of the more successful in the country and they have a paywall. It's a nonprofit, but it has a paywall and about half of its total income comes from readers through digital subscriptions, which pay about $178 a year.

  Prior to your arrival, Chicago Public Media dropped the paywall at the Sun-Times. How is that working and would you ever consider reinstating a paywall or have you moved past that at this point?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I think that it hasn't worked as well as we'd like. I mean, just to be frank, the membership growth that we've seen on the Sun-Times has not been as strong as we'd like it to be and that's part of the reason why we're developing new digital products.

  But also, I think that it's a harder lesson for people to say, "Oh, I've been a public radio supporter or a public television supporter for 50 years and I know that part of their effort is membership drives, et cetera." And it's different with the newspaper.

  People are more used to either being forced into a subscription paywall model and that's fine for a lot. It supports a lot of journalism organizations, but they're less familiar with saying, "This is a nonprofit and we want your support as a member." So it's a tricky decision for people to make.

  I definitely think that I'm really interested in seeing what's happening at Salt Lake Tribune. They just dropped their paywall, for instance.

  At the same time, though, I do think this is a really important part of public media; part of our mission is to make information accessible to everyone and our members support us in part because they want others to have that publicly accessible information.

  We can't live in a world where truth is always locked behind paywalls and misinformation is free. I think public media should ensure people can get productive information.

  Does that mean that we won't have membership benefits that maybe we would have? Currently, we have membership benefits, including certain newsletters that only members get, but for the most part, we want to keep as much of our information unpaywalled and open to everyone.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  You lost about three million in federal funding last year, is that correct? Which is about 6% of your total budget when Congress and the Trump administration approved their rescission package. When that happened, you understandably launched an aggressive fundraising campaign to make up the gap and you set out a goal of doubling memberships over five years. So how's that going?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Well, I have to tell you that it's been a very, very interesting experience. We had one of our most successful financial years last year. Our membership grew by 25%. Our development grew by over 48%.

  People really stepped up and stepped forward and said that they wanted to make sure that we were continuing to do the great work that they love. We have a deep connection with our audiences.

  Somebody the other day just mentioned to me that WBEZ is the soundtrack of their life. That to me is such a beautiful connection that we fostered and that really showed up last year.

  The challenge, though, is that this isn't a one-time loss; it is an annual loss. So every year we're going to have to face that $3 million deficit and we're going to have to do it again and again and again.

  And we're lucky. You mentioned that even though we lost $3 million, it's a small portion of our budget. Some of the other stations have lost up to 50 or 60% of it.

  So this is a challenging moment. There are a lot of other people out there that are facing other cuts in the arts industry, in the health industry. And so we also need to recognize that our members might be fatigued by our demand — not our demands, we don't demand — our pleas for support.

  We're watching that closely this year. We need to make sure that we're continuing to create a service, that we're continuing to explain to them why we need their support.

  The good news is that we have seen an increase in our sustaining members in particular. So it's not just a one-time donation that we're seeing and I think that the one-time donors usually will come in a moment where they feel really emotionally moved.

  But the growth in the sustaining members is really important because that means that they're committing to helping us over time and that's been a really rewarding outcome of the past year.

  So we're hoping that we can continue those relationships with people over time.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  Speaking of relationships with people, you announced just a couple of months ago your launch of chicago.com, a new digital community platform. The aim is to host local digital communities, connect neighbors and help build trust. Talk to us about chicago.com and the vision and philosophy behind it and what you hope to accomplish.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Sure. I mentioned earlier that I think distribution is part of the challenge and I think public media has always served both as great creators of journalism and as stewards of infrastructure.

  We are stewards of radio and broadcast signals and we need to state that, in this day and age, we also need to be stewards of digital infrastructure.

  I think one of my biggest regrets or frustrations of the last 15 years is that we really seeded digital connection and convening to for-profit technology companies that, of course, put a business model above civic infrastructure and civic discourse and that we did so at peril, at our own peril.

  I think that we've seen a rise in people using social media. I think the latest, it might have been from one of your studies, Tim, that 69% of adults in Chicago say that they get their news from social media, but they're frustrated with it.

  They find it toxic; they find it not enjoyable to use.

  I think a large part of that is because we're not really thinking about the human connection.

  We know from research too that we've seen a huge rise in teenage depression and anxiety and suicide rates. And my concern is that the answer coming out of Silicon Valley is, “Let's make people have a friend, an AI agent friend,” and that's not the dystopian future I want for my child.

  I want us to really think about how we can say we need to care about public digital infrastructure as much as we do the public journalism that we create.

  Chicago.com is our experiment to see if we can start rebuilding people's online experience from the ground up. We really want to start at the neighborhood level in Chicago.

  We're partnering with this great nonprofit called New Public that has built out a technology platform called Roundabout, but it's so much more than a platform.

  It's really based on research about how you help the people who are moderating conversations online and how you support them so that they can support their neighborhood, their community.

  So it starts with the people. We're centering people at the heart of all of it and we're helping them find ways to connect to journalism, to resources in the city, like other civic institutions, to local businesses.

  We're really trying to think about how to create a space for healthy, non-toxic conversation.

  We're starting in five neighborhoods in Chicago. We just announced this a few days ago. We're going to be in Evanston, Avondale, South Shore, Bronzeville and Edgewater.

  We are working with paid moderators, which is very different from a lot of other technology companies.

  We spent a lot of time looking for these folks. They are not journalists. They're not part of the newsroom. They are civic activists. Some of them may have been moderators on Facebook groups but grew disenchanted with the platform.

  They are very actively engaged in their communities. One's an urban planner, but wants to help create a healthy space for conversation.

  We also think of this as an opportunity not just for Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, but really for Chicago as a whole. We want this to be a platform we steward, but not just for our own purposes.

  We're hoping to have other partners in the nonprofit news organizations across the city. We have a really rich media ecosystem in Chicago. We want to make sure that we're raising up those voices.

  We also are partnering with other civic institutions across the city and thinking about how we can help the Chicago Public Library System get information more directly to neighborhoods.

  And that's really fun for me because it feels like we can create a really rich information ecosystem for people who live in Chicago and work in Chicago and want to build their best life here and also make Chicago the best city for themselves.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  So it's not a news site; it's a community site.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Community site, yes. It really is. I mean, I think some of the things that you'll see, the best experience will be when we launch in your neighborhood, but you'll be able to see chicago.com in a few weeks out in the wild and there's going to be guides to the city that journalists can create and other people can create.

  There's going to be how-tos: how do you fix a pothole? How do you build a community garden? We're trying to make it a tool for people to live their best life here and also encounter information and news because we know that's an important part of people's civic engagement with the place they live.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  This is something that will help build trust with communities because you're engaging with people; you're helping them live their everyday lives. It's an interesting idea. I'm going to follow it.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited about it.

  Melissa Bell

• 

  Yeah, as you should be. So I can't believe we're out of time already. This time has flown by. I have so many other questions I wanted to get to, but Melissa, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

  I also want to thank our audience for joining us. I also want to thank our foundation supporters for the local news, for supporting the local news initiative and this podcast, the MacArthur Knight and Joyce Foundations. You can find this podcast every month on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Medill Local News Initiative website.

  Please join us again for our next episode when we'll unpack our annual Medill State of Local News report. It's going to be a newsy report this year and you're not going to want to miss the podcast. So thanks for being with us, Melissa. We'll see you later.

  Tim Franklin

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