Local News Bright Spots 2026

Bright Spots in the Local News Landscape

Highlighting local news outlets and some of the business models most successfully navigating 21st-century challenges.

by Jennifer Kho

*Press “play” to see local news startups as they occurred over the last five years. Click on a star to read about outlets with promising business models for navigating 21st century challenges. Use the News deserts map button to activate a layer showing news deserts by county across the country. You can also zoom in for more detail.

It’s no secret that journalism faces existential challenges: Newsroom layoffs have been an epidemic across the U.S. – including at The Washington Post, the Associated Press, NPR, BuzzFeed and newsrooms owned by Gannett and McClatchy – and many news outlets have closed entirely.

But periods of change are also frequently epochs of opportunity – and of learning.

Over the past few months, Bright Spots researcher Srishti Bose and editor Jennifer Kho evaluated more than 50 nominations to find and interview this year’s Bright Spots. You’ll find Q&As with leaders at 12 outlets that have never previously been featured in this section and a follow-up interview with updates from 2023 Bright Spot The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Here are the 2026 Bright Spots:

The experiments highlighted in this section span editorial impact, revenue, product, community building and civic engagement. To help their communities thrive, these organizations are growing and deepening relationships with their audiences, expanding coverage to fill news gaps and diversifying revenue streams to achieve financial sustainability.

Some common themes include:

  • Pride of place: All of these organizations are rooted deeply in their communities, leaning into their locations and community pride as a differentiator to make content that’s truly unique to where they are.
  • Relationships: Community engagement is an everyday practice for most of these organizations. As digital routes to reach audiences, such as search and socials, have become increasingly unreliable for news organizations, more local news outlets are turning to one-on-one relationships and partnerships that are much harder for larger regional and national outlets to duplicate. For example, some leaders individually email, text and call readers; many of these outlets host hyperlocal in-person events; and one even runs a store that sells locally made products out of its offices.
  • IRL: Events are helping many of these newsrooms engage existing audiences, introduce themselves to new audiences and learn more about potential audiences to inform new content or expansion strategies. Some outlets have used events to help differentiate their coverage and create news moments to bring readers back repeatedly. Others see events as an immersive storytelling medium or an opportunity to grow media literacy.
  • Service: These outlets’ focus on place-based distinctiveness and community service means that utility content or service journalism – such as things to do, how tos and other community resources – features heavily among the pack, along with accountability journalism, Pulitzer-winning investigations and enterprise stories.
  • Civic engagement: Many of these newsroom leaders view their organizations’ roles as sustaining and improving their communities, not just informing them. This shows up in community events, journalism workshops, and lighter stories that reflect community pride. It also extends to setting goals about inspiring more community members to participate in public and civic life, whether that’s attending events and meeting neighbors, volunteering and joining community organizations, or proposing solutions and taking collective action.
  • Revenue diversification: As they strive for financial sustainability, news organizations are embracing new revenue streams. Nonprofits are prioritizing memberships, grants and sponsorships, while for-profits are focusing on growing community grants and contributions. All of these outlets are growing revenue from a mix of sources to secure their futures in an ever-shifting economic landscape. Creative new revenue streams include conducting trolley tours, hosting food festivals and developing an apartment building for working-class tenants.
  • The inbox imperative: Newsletters continue to be important to building audience relationships and growing loyalty, membership or subscriptions and event participation, and these outlets are experimenting with different types of newsletters for different issues and communities. Some are treating newsletters as entry points into new geographic areas or new audiences, while others are using them to connect their existing audiences.
  • Future-proofing: Collectively, these local news outlets are conducting many interesting experiments with platforms and mediums, including vertical videos for social media and creator partnerships. Their AI experiments are also noteworthy, especially in streamlining operations, building internal AI newsroom archive librarians, scraping public data to fill news gaps and make more information accessible.

This year, we’ve redesigned this report to add vertical video clips from our interviews, key statistics about each outlet and tags so you can more easily follow your interests to navigate through these Q&As. View the interviews on the right, explore the map above or click on the tags to find the information most relevant to you.

Our aim in sharing these examples is to spark other projects, in more places, that move local news forward. So if you try an idea prompted by these interviews, learn something that could help others or have questions or feedback, please let us know by emailing stateoflocalnews@northwestern.edu.

We hope you’re as inspired by these Bright Spots as we are!