The National Trust for Local News is buying newspapers again, this time with an ink-stained leader from the world of corporate newspapers.
In July the nonprofit news publisher acquired two dailies in Georgia, adding to its stable of more than 50 outlets, and it’s talking to others about buying more.
The deal-making signals that the Trust has emerged from brutal restructuring in early 2025, when its ambitions to acquire and save local newspapers across the country collided with the harsh realities of operating a news business.
To right the ship, it hired Tom Wiley, a CEO who spent decades as a publisher and executive at chains working through the industry’s downturn and reinvention.
Wiley started in May 2025. Previously he was publisher of The Buffalo News, which halved its newsroom after it was acquired by the Iowa chain Lee Enterprises in 2020.
In a phone interview, Wiley said the Trust has stabilized but like the rest of the news industry, it’s a perpetual work in progress.
“I don’t think it’s ever fixed,” he said. “Righted might be correct, but I don’t think it’s ever done.”
Wiley said that after 30 years in the business, “I can’t point to one time I ever felt like my department or my paper or my division was really fixed, because it’s such a challenging space, but it’s also why I love it.”
Despite that complexity, closures and losses at big chains, Wiley still believes their underlying business is mischaracterized as a loser. It can succeed if it’s run differently and not shackled by debt and dividend obligations.
“Fundamentally the difference between what we’re doing and what the other for-profit organizations are doing is we’re not servicing shareholders and we’re not servicing debt,” he said. “Like, we’ve got to get out of this idea that they’re just these giant sinkholes. They’re not.”
What about the Trust?
“I would say we are healthy,” he said. “We have a much longer financial runway for the health of the organization, we’re not in a position where we’re raising (funds) to make payroll in the short-term.”
What’s changed?
“We have brought on operational talent that knows how to run these organizations in a way that makes them sustainable and that’s what’s changed,” he said.
Those new leaders “brought in some discipline around how to run the business side of it, so there’s a real focus on the financial performance metrics in a weekly cycle … that allows us to see any challenges coming down the road sooner.”
Those challenges could include paper or postage cost increases, or declines in advertising or subscription revenue.
“We see those earlier and we can react to them earlier,” he said.
The Colorado-based trust raised more than $30 million since its founding. Major donors included Fidelity’s charitable arm, George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society and the Knight Foundation.
It grew quickly, acquiring clusters of newspapers in Maine, Colorado and Georgia. It also built a press in Colorado and launched a weekly newspaper in Georgia, competing with Macon’s daily.
Grants declined as business revenue more than doubled in 2024, to $46 million. But its tax filings show expenses also soared and the trust spent nearly $8 million more than it brought in that year.
The Trust retrenched in early 2025. Its founding CEO, former Harvard and Columbia University research fellow Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, resigned.
In Maine, it cut staff and print frequency and eliminated some weeklies. In Colorado, it sold 21 of its 28 papers to an out-of-state chain.
The Colorado sale punctured idealistic notions about the Trust, a flagship in the emergence of nonprofit news publishers, succeeding where commercial owners could not.
It turned out the Trust needed to operate more like a for-profit chain. Especially if it was going to survive by generating more revenue from operations than donations.
Perhaps the Gartner hype cycle applies. The Trust experienced a peak of inflated expectations in the early 2020s, then crashed into a trough of disillusionment last year.
Georgia acquisitions suggest it’s on the upward slope of enlightenment, working toward a plateau with more tempered expectations.
Another positive sign is that restructuring in Maine, while painful, didn’t cut the group’s roughly 120 newsroom jobs, Wiley noted.
Downsizing newsrooms is the easiest way to cut costs, he said. Instead, the Maine group made changes like cutting print editions and replacing carriers with postal delivery.
How concerned is Wiley about those changes breaking news habits and losing longtime customers?
“It’s a little bit of a chicken or the egg conversation,” he said. “Like, are we reducing the frequency because of a reduced demand on print, or are we reducing demand on print by reducing frequency? And the answer, I think, is both all the time, so it’s a balancing act.”
The Trust’s press in Colorado is close to breaking even and added 20 publications last year. Wiley said it could potentially support the regional news industry with more than just print, sharing local coverage with those newspapers, for instance.
The Trust now raises around $8 million a year from philanthropy. That provides around 16% of its revenue and 84% is from “earned revenue,” or operations, Wiley said.
That doesn’t include money raised locally to acquire The Macon Telegraph and The Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus from McClatchy, a chain owned by an investment firm. They are now led by a Georgia subsidiary of the Trust that has 21 print and digital publications in the state.
Local donations are also funding investments in the Georgia papers.
“We’re adding newsroom, we’re adding sales, we’re adding leadership,” Wiley said.
Georgia saw another U-turn for the Trust. In 2024 it launched The Macon Melody weekly with a $5 million Knight Foundation grant. It’s now being folded into the Telegraph.
Wiley favors buying established outlets over building new ones and believes “this is something that the philanthropic world could use a lens change on.”
“I truly believe that if you want immediate impact, then buying a legacy organization and modernizing it — not only its technology but its way of thinking, its way of doing business — is a faster path to both net operating income supporting the longevity of the organization as well as impact of the philanthropic dollars,” he said.
Wiley said it can buy more papers with its “hybrid” model, with donors funding the national organization and community foundations and others raising money locally for acquisitions.
There is no single solution to sustain America’s roughly 5,000 local newspapers. Nor is any single organization going to be their savior.
But the Trust is doing noble work to save local journalism where its model works. It’s encouraging that backers stuck with the project, the organization found a path forward and its growth is resuming.
It also offers a good message about putting aside differences and finding success by drawing on insights from both the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.
“We’re not pretending like there weren’t problems, and there’s not going to be problems in the future,” Wiley said. “This is a tough business. Let’s do it right.”
