The most critical feedback loop in a democracy is a free press and access to vital information. Yet decades of corporate consolidation allowed giant conglomerates to annihilate local news outlets and predatory hedge funds are leaving news deserts in their wake. In 2025, a fifth of people in the U.S. live with little or no access to local news and three quarters of newspaper jobs have been axed over the last 20 years. But new models are crystallizing to fill the void, thanks to innovating journalists and publishers. With Larry Ryckman, publisher and co-founder of The Colorado Sun; Madeleine Bair, founder of El Tímpano; and Jacob Simas, community journalism director for the Cityside Journalism Initiative.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): As the iconic journalist Bill Moyers has said, “The quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably intertwined.”

Yet decades of corporate consolidation in the U.S. allowed a half-dozen giant conglomerates to seize control of information and nearly annihilate critical local news outlets that people rely on and trust.

Two or more local newspapers go out of business every week. In just the past 20 years, nearly a third have folded under the crushing weight of giant media and digital platform monopolies that starve them of advertising revenues.

Some outlets that survive become distressed properties and therefore targets for private equity firms that swoop in, downsize them, strip them for parts, and then close up shop.

According to a 2025 study by Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School, about a fifth of people in the U.S. live with little or no access to local news – and they often live in rural and low-income areas.

One committed journalist who decided to fight back is Larry Ryckman. After decades working as a reporter for the Associated Press, he landed at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Denver Post.

Ironically, he’d previously worked as a foreign correspondent in the early 90s where he covered the dismantling and looting of the Soviet Union by big banks and investors. Returning to the U.S., he witnessed the Alden Capital hedge fund dismantling and looting the Post. Larry Ryckman spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Larry Ryckman (LR): Alden is a hedge fund that buys distressed properties, whether they’re shoe stores or pharmacies or whatever it might be. I mean, you know, back in the day, owning a newspaper was like printing money; it was a very profitable business. Until it wasn’t. Craigslist came along, the Internet came along, digital advertising, print advertising became upended, and it became a very different business. And when the bills came due, the people who held the notes were hedge funds like Alden Global Capital.

So Alden went from not being involved in newspapers at all to being one of the nation’s largest newspaper owners. It’s just been awful to see them snap up newspapers left and right and do what they do.

So, they follow a very similar playbook in town after town after town. They come in and they buy the newspaper. They sell off the real estate – so that might be the newspaper’s building, might be the printing press, whatever that property might be. So they sell off the real estate, they jack up subscription costs, and they cut the staff. So they just lay people off, wave after wave after wave of relentless cutting.

And there’s another hedge fund that owns the nation’s largest newspaper group, which is Gannett. Take a look at Salinas, California, birthplace of John Steinbeck. The Salinas Californian was once a great scrappy newspaper that covered Salinas. Today, Gannett owns it, they have no local reporters left. They have laid off all the reporters. The only unique local content in The Salinas Californian are death notices. I mean, you can’t even make this stuff up. And that’s what the future looks like under hedge fund ownership. They are not planning for the future. It’s all about today.

A mural celebrating John Steinbeck on the former Salinas Californian building. The newspaper moved out of the historic building in 2017.

So they squeeze every dime they can out of these properties. And at the end, if nobody wants to subscribe to it, they’ve already made their money and they move on, and they just turn the lights out. They really do not care at all about newspapers, journalists, or these communities – or frankly, democracy itself.

These hedge funds are such a threat. I think that they have done more damage to American democracy than practically anything that I can even think about. I mean, how can we expect to have informed voters if people don’t have access to knowledge, if they don’t have access to, you know, verified information? There’s a reason the founding fathers put protection for freedom of the press in the very first amendment of the Constitution. It wasn’t that they were any big fans of newspapers. They got beat up pretty bad back in their day; maybe they should have gotten beat up a little more. But they understood that a healthy democracy depends on a vibrant free press. It depends on having a watchdog able to ask difficult questions of those in power.

Host: Powerful political and economic players benefit from information deserts. Research shows what happens when communities don’t have reliable local news sources: there’s more corruption and higher public spending. Fewer people register and turn out to vote, fewer people run for office, and there’s more polarization.

Research also shows that good local journalism holds policymakers to account. Communities that are well informed are more likely to have representatives that vote in their interests.

But since 2005, a whopping three quarters of newspaper jobs have been axed. Newspaper job losses now rank in the same range as employees of companies that manufacture DVDs and cassette tapes. Ryckman says that when we have fewer reporters, it’s the community that loses.

LR: We’ve lost so much. I mean, the fact is, it’s sad when anyone loses their job, whether it’s a journalist or someone working at a restaurant or a factory. 

The tragedy is we’ll never know the stories that aren’t being told because there wasn’t a journalist there to tell them—the trials that weren’t covered, the city council meetings that weren’t covered, the school board meetings that weren’t covered because there wasn’t a journalist left to cover them.

Once upon a time, legacy newspapers like the Denver Post had teams of reporters who covered city hall, teams of reporters who covered state government, who covered religion, education, health, etc. Those are long gone.

Where are people left to turn for news about their government? You know the fact is, there are bad people getting away with things because there was no journalist there to shed light on their misdeeds.

I mean, there are studies out there that show that borrowing costs for cities rise when newspapers go away. Government operates less efficiently when there are no reporters poking around in budgets and asking difficult questions. 

But also, you know, journalism is not just about being the watchdog, it’s also about celebrating good people doing good things in our communities. And journalists provide the fabric that weaves together the tapestry of community; it helps us connect with each other.

I’ve heard from people in the arts community that they’ve noticed the absence of journalism as well. They’ve said we don’t care if we even get a bad review for our production. If there’s no review, people don’t come to our art galleries or they don’t come to our productions.

When there is a lack of local coverage, local news coverage, what do you have left? It is more of the national discussion, it’s the news coming out of Washington. It just dominates everything. It’s the politics, the things coming in from TV, from wire services, whatever it is. If the hedge funds and others aren’t willing to hire local reporters, they’re filling up their newspapers with something. It’s not things that are relevant to you and me on a local level.

Host: When Alden Capital hedge fund bought the Denver Post, it ordered Larry Ryckman and his fellow journalists to vacate their offices in the iconic downtown Denver Post building and exiled them to the printing plant in the suburbs. A few weeks later, Alden Capital cut another third of the newsroom.

That’s when Ryckman decided there must be a better way. He invited nine other journalists, including Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, from The Denver Post to start a new online news outlet. The Colorado Sun would explore new models for journalism.

LR: Journalism isn’t dying, but the old business models are dying. Newspapers, forever, 100-plus years, were dependent largely upon advertising. Yes, you had to pay for a subscription, but circulation never paid the bills for a newsroom, really, and newspapers could provide that because there was no Internet, there was no other way to get their message out there other than advertising in the newspapers or maybe going on radio or TV. So that model is dying right before our eyes.

Now, at The Colorado Sun, when we launched in September of 2018, we looked around and said, if the old model was built around traditional advertising, then let’s not do that; let’s come up with another way. And in the newspaper world, in the legacy newspaper world—and I’m talking digital here— the way you get get eyeballs is through page views. The way you get page views is to do things like write about zoo babies. When there’s a new baby at the zoo—and for the record, I love zoo babies—but those stories are easy to do, and they’re cheap to do, because you’ll get a press release, you can rewrite it in less than a half an hour, you post some photos and then you move on. But does that really provide us much understanding of what’s going on in the world? It doesn’t.

What takes time is to file public records requests, to sit through court hearings or sit through government hearings. Who’s got time to do that if not a journalist? Most people don’t. So we go there and try to do that work, because it’s important to do. But a lot of news organizations are just stretched so thin that their reporters don’t have time to go out and actually get out in the world and talk to real people and dig into documents, and do the kind of traditional work that needs to be done.

I look around the country and it’s not just The Colorado Sun that has popped up, but there are things here in the Bay Area, Berkeleyside, Oaklandside, CalMatters—things that have popped up to try to fill the void.

Host: When we return, Larry Ryckman joins two fellow news entrepreneurs innovating new models of journalism.

You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: As local news outlets are shuttered week after week, new models of news media are crystallizing to fill the void. Today, there are nearly 500 nonprofit news organizations reporting for their communities. It’s clear there’s no lack of heart, grit, and reporting chops to provide vital local news. The question is how to pay for it when… Federal funding for public media has been slashed since the Reagan Administration declared war on it in the 1980s. Those grants continue to diminish today.

Some state governments have passed legislation to support local newsrooms. It includes subsidies, tax credits and journalism fellowships to retain and hire reporters. Philanthropy has also stepped up with hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s far from enough to stem the losses.

Some outlets are funded solely by their readers. One emerging nonprofit model revolves around building trust by listening to and reporting on the local community’s perceived needs and aspirations. Building that cohesion also helps outlets engage more effectively with city, county, and state governments.

Madeleine Bair is an award-winning journalist and the founder of El Tímpano, a media outlet which creates news stories for and with Spanish and Mayan speaking residents in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Madeleine Bair (MB): So I started El Tímpano back in 2018. And before launching, we undertook a process of just listening for nearly a year to Spanish and Indigenous Mayan immigrants in Oakland, to really hear what do they want to see in local media; what are the issues that are most important to them; where do they get news and information on those issues; what do they want to see change in local media. And what’s really interesting is when you start from that place rather than from the idea that, well, we’ll start putting up Spanish-language articles on a website, you wind up with a very different looking newsroom.

And in that initial listening process, we heard from so many people that, “I don’t have a home computer,” “I don’t have home Internet,” “I wish I could get the news on my phone or at any time of day.” And so text messaging became our primary platform for distribution and also engagement.

But we’re also in the streets. We do a lot of community outreach and engagement. We partner with a lot of other trusted organizations, because all of our work is really founded on a relationship of trust with audiences, the communities that we serve.

We have an editorial meeting each week where, you know, rather than us kind of looking at what other news outlets are covering, or what sort of press releases are coming in, we’re really listening to the community members themselves, and talking about, okay, what are the stories that came in that week from our text messaging community; what stories are worth investigating.

Also looking back at all of the surveying we’ve done, which has told us, for instance, a lot of people might think that as a news outlet covering immigrant communities, immigration might be the number one issue. Not true. Immigration is actually usually around number five. The top issue of concern for the communities we cover is health. Has been well before the pandemic and is every time we go out and ask people. And so that’s why the very first reporter that we hired is a health equity reporter, and that’s most of what you’ll see on our website.

Host: Journalist and educator Jacob Simas is the community journalism director for the Cityside Journalism Initiative. It’s a media outlet that creates hyper-local news stories in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond, California.

Jacob Simas (JS): We also started a pretty in-depth community listening campaign to just really try to understand what people in Oakland wanted from a local news organization.

And so we really saw this absence of like a lot of the bread and butter stuff that local newspapers used to provide information about local community events, just consistent reporting about public meetings, what’s happening at the school board, what’s happening with the city council.

You know, we have a section that we call How We Work, and it’s just a space where, as editors and reporters, we can just explain to readers why we do journalism the way we do; why we don’t cover crime the way that the Oakland Trib used to; why instead we chose to cover the police department, and cover systems instead of symptoms, right? That kind of work I think has been really important in building trust with our communities in Oakland.

It’s just so important that local news plays such a critical role of a town square, where people can have conversations and dig into the nuance without the polarization that you get at the national level with discourse, and that’s playing out on certain platforms.

Host: By listening to their readers, news outlets like El Timpano and Cityside can produce life-saving information for the communities they serve. That includes community feedback on what’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

MB: California became the first state in the nation to expand MediCal eligibility to undocumented immigrants of all ages – really groundbreaking policy to address a huge health equity issue. These are the communities that El Tímpano’s really designed to serve. We’ve been following this policy for years. It’s come out in stages. So when they expanded to include undocumented immigrants 50 years and up last year, we informed our community members about that; told them how to sign up; what the eligibility requirements are; where to call if they want to learn more.

For thousands of undocumented immigrants, they were newly eligible, newly enrolled, and really trying to access their healthcare coverage for the very first time. We found a number of these community members within El Tímpano’s own audience. As we were providing information about this expanded new policy, so many people were writing us back saying, actually, I’ve been trying to get back onto MediCal for months but no one will answer my call; or I was dropped from MediCal and I can’t figure out why, it seems to be a mistake.

That’s one example of why this method of really having a two-way conversation with our audience is so critical, because we could just provide this information about this great new policy, how you can access it, but whenever we do that and invite community members to write back, we hear, lo and behold, that policy usually isn’t working as it’s intended. So we want to cover the successes of policies like that, but also what are the challenges that they’re facing.

Host: The Bay Area’s Cityside publishes community input and actually pays community members to contribute stories. Again, Jacob Simas.

JS: We’re not the first publisher to run first-person stories, but we do it with a lot of deliberation and consistency, where we will find community members with important lived experiences to share, and we’ll invite them to either write a piece or allow us to listen to their story and then transcribe it into a piece that we can publish, and we pay them a commission, the same as we would pay a freelance reporter.

Some of those stories have been wildly popular. A few that come to mind would be a mother who lost a son and multiple family members to gun violence and getting that really nuanced take on the problem of gun violence in Oakland. Also from a solutions angle, because she’s now doing incredible violence prevention work for an organization in the community.

Host: New models of journalism range from an approach of community engagement and outreach to creative ways to sustain the small outlets that remain. Surprisingly, some of these new models are reviving the earliest form of news media – print journalism.

JS: We have two housing reporters at Cityside, they would get all these appeals from people in the community—emails, phone calls from folks—asking them, as experts in their beat and in their field—asking them about resource information and questions like: how do I get on this list for this housing in my community? They just realized there’s an incredible need for a one-stop shop for information that people can use about affordable housing in the East Bay.

They came to their editors and said, hey, we want to take this on, and we want to create this affordable housing guide, and we don’t want to just put it on the website because a lot of people are going to miss it. We actually want to create a physical product and distribute that in the community, and make it available to people.

So we piloted that and we did it. They did an incredible job. It was a bunch of reporting and multiple articles, but then also just a lot of resource information that they pulled out of their reporting, what people need to know to access affordable housing in Berkeley and Oakland, and put that content into a print publication.

We printed 500 of those, because we were taking baby steps and we thought, okay, let’s just kind of see if there’s an appetite for this. Right? Brought it to some, you know, places in the community and some different community providers and libraries and things of that nature. Published the whole package online, made it available as a pdf download, and left an email for people to get ahold of us if they wanted us to actually bring them a copy of the print version. And we ended up producing 5,000 because of the outpouring of like messages that we received from people asking for that information – both people in personal situations where they wanted the information, but also from service providers who saw a benefit in what we produced and the way we produced it. It was very easy to sort of understand and access.

Yeah, it’s a cost, but it sure seems worth it. So I would love to just hear how you’re both sort of thinking about print as a medium.

Host: Again, Larry Ryckman…

LR: And we were just going along and growing at the Sun. Then the phone rang one day and somebody said, you know, have you ever thought about owning a group of newspapers. Like, no, I have not. Should I? And the answer was yes, I should.

A lot of newspapers, small newspapers, particularly in rural areas, are owned by mom and pop operations, and that was the case with these 24 suburban Denver newspapers. So we partnered up with the National Trust for Local News, which is a nonprofit, national nonprofit, and we jointly bought these 24 print newspapers. And the good news is more than two years later, those community newspapers are still doing their hyper local coverage, which is awesome.

As it turned out, you spend most of your money on a newspaper on two things: people, of course, in your newsroom; newsprint is the other thing. Newsprint prices have just gone up like crazy over the past few years. Newsprint manufacturers, you know, frankly make more money printing—creating Amazon boxes than they do creating newsprint. So there are very few suppliers for newsprint.

The place where we printed those community newspapers was up in Cheyenne, Wyoming. They wanted to more than double the cost of printing those newspapers. So we moved the printing to the Pueblo Chieftain, which is owned by Gannett. Well, not for long after, Gannett decided they were going to close the printing plant. So we ended up having to be printed at the Denver Post. [LAUGHTER] So, you know, there’s just no escape sometimes.

So we, along with our friends—really, it was the National Trust for Local News and the Colorado Media Project decided, you know what, what if we bought a printing press; what would that look like? And could we turn it into an asset for the community, for all of these other newspapers?

And we really ran the numbers. It was counterintuitive, like hey, I know a great business model: let’s get into print. [LAUGHTER] But as it turns out, it really—when you run the numbers, it made sense.

I’m still happy about being all digital at the Sun because it is a lot less complicated; we don’t have to worry about the availability of newsprint. But there is an equity issue as well. There are communities in Colorado, particularly rural communities, where their Internet coverage is not great. They need print. They want print.

Host: As established and emergent news outlets continue to research and reveal vital information for their communities, one way or the other, they require support.

Clearly good government policy ought to include support for journalism in a nation where the value of a free press is baked into the Constitution. At the same time, the reality on the ground is that communities themselves have a big stake in supporting local media and real news.

LR: Freedom of the press is something we should all care about. Readers can make choices. Do they want to support hedge fund-owned newspapers and news sites, or do they want to go support Berkeleyside and Oaklandside and some of the other digital startups that have tried to fill the void?

You have to fight for your freedoms, and you have to fight to preserve your rights.  Freedom of the press is not something that you should take for granted. You know, whether it’s a hedge fund taking it away or whether it’s the government. We all need access to information and knowledge.

I’m up on my soapbox, but I’m not dramatizing this. Our democracy is at stake. And it’s not a partisan issue. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I think it requires vigilance on all our parts.

Host: Larry Ryckman, Madeleine Bair, and Jacob Simas … When No News Is Bad News…