When Chicago Public Media, parent company of public radio station WBEZ, acquired the Chicago Sun-Times in January 2022, it created one of the country’s largest nonprofit news organizations while establishing a new template for combining a local public radio station with a heritage daily newspaper. There have been other partnerships between public radio stations and print news outlets in recent years (see section on public media), but this one was the most ambitious, and the rest of the local news industry took note.
As the WBEZ/Sun-Times merger approaches its second anniversary in January, company officials view it as a success while noting ongoing challenges amid difficult industry trends.
Recent fiscal results
According to Chicago Public Media’s IRS Form 990 filing for fiscal year 2022 (ending in June 2022), the combined organization realized a profit of $3,806, 960. That was down from a little more than $10 million in fiscal year 2021. Still, even after absorbing a new company, the organization made money while some other public radio stations were shedding jobs.
Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog says the organization is holding its own, for now. “A number of public media, commercial and nonprofit news organizations have been cutting back largely due to a soft advertising market and a tough economy,” he says. “For us things are OK. We’ve been able to make it work so far, but we’re definitely watching to ensure that growth keeps pace with revenue.”
Moog says the combination with the Sun-Times hasn’t yet had a significant impact on any of Chicago Public Media’s primary revenue sources. He adds that the organization has been concentrating its energies in other areas.
“Honestly, our focus has been making sure we grow the digital audience, collaborate with each other and do more back-office integration,” Moog says. “Focusing on revenue is something we’ve just started doing.”
The merger has led to investments in the Sun-Times that have had a positive impact, says Alison Scholly, managing director at Public Media Company, a nonprofit consulting firm that worked on the acquisition. She also is a former chief operating officer and interim CEO at Chicago Public Media. “You can see that they’ve started to spend money and invest in the newspaper. Therein lies the story of why the Sun-Times is a better paper today. They’re making significant investments, and the digital site is growing.”
Matt Moog confirms that the organization has seen “very significant audience growth,” particularly on digital platforms. He says it currently has about 650,000 subscribers for email products; a year ago that number was about 350,000. He also says the audience for the Sun-Times website is up about 70 percent year over year.
“It’s great that they’ve been able to grow their email list,” says Ken Herts, chief operating officer at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer that also provided consulting on the WBEZ/Sun-Times deal. “To me, though, eventually it’s about revenue. Ultimately, the email has to lead to revenue to help them maintain and support their reporting staffs.”
Herts notes that a unique aspect of WBEZ’s acquisition of the Sun-Times is the conversion of the newspaper to a membership model after years of its relying on subscriptions. Moog says Sun-Times members have increased their money paid relative to their subscriptions and are remaining members for longer than they maintained subscriptions.
Greater capacity enhancing capabilities
When the combination of WBEZ and the Sun-Times was announced, one of its stated goals was to double the new organization’s capacity for journalism. Moog says that expanded capacity is already in place.
“Combined, there are about 200 journalists across both newsrooms,” he says, noting that the combined organization has twice the capacity of either newsroom before the merger. “Each newsroom has increased by about 20 percent, but when you combine them, that’s where capacity doubled.”
Chicago Public Media’s chief content officer Tracy Brown says the addition of new journalists has led to expanded and enhanced capabilities, such as the combine outlets’ investigative reporting.
“Some of the investigative journalism we’ve done together, such as ‘Chicago’s 50 Closed Schools,’ demonstrated our ability to deepen the way we do investigations,” she says. “There’s been a similar impact on how we cover City Hall and crime.”
Community engagement, she adds, is another area being approached differently. “We want to be more present in the community, so we launched community listening sessions, where conversations with the public ultimately inform our journalism,” Brown says.
Avoiding culture clash
Whenever two large, established organizations merge, there are often challenges to integrate management, staff and processes. Brown acknowledges there’s been tension at times, but she says the biggest surprise has been how effectively the two organizations have collaborated.
“The degree to which we’ve worked well together is one of the most surprising things to me,” she says. “You look at some of the big stories that we’ve collaborated on, and a lot of that collaboration started with individual reporters just talking with one another. The competitiveness I was expecting hasn’t been so evident.”
At the same time, the two units have tried not to step on each other’s toes.
“One thing we’ve had to work through is making sure we don’t duplicate coverage,” Brown says. “We had a situation recently where shortly before a story was going to be published, two reporters realized they were working on basically the same thing. But one reporter pivoted and did an audio story to complement the text version.”
A model for news media elsewhere?
Both Moog and Brown emphasize that unique factors in Chicago made the merger strategy more viable. They cite experiments taking place across the country as providing potential models for strengthening local news elsewhere.
“Just last year, KERA, which is a public radio station in Dallas, and WYPR in Baltimore both formed partnerships or were acquired,” Moog says. “In Dallas, it was with a community newspaper, and in Baltimore WYPR hooked up with the Baltimore Banner. Then in Pennsylvania and Maine, there were efforts to take newspapers into nonprofit ownership.”
Public Media Company’s Scholly says the WBEZ/Sun-Times collaboration may be instructive to other markets as well.
“One lesson that everyone can take away from the WBEZ/Sun-Times merger is that you’ll need philanthropic funding to help the newspaper convert to a nonprofit model,” Scholly says. “It’s a model that’s less reliant on print and more reliant on membership and community support.”
Herts at the Lenfest Institute says different partnership models make sense for different areas of the country, but they all ultimately face the same challenge.
“I think in places where these partnerships have been done, they’re finding benefits,” he says. “But local news is a hard business to be in. The jury is still out on whether any of these approaches can create a sustainable model over the long term.”