Gregory Rec, Chief Photographer, Maine Trust for Local News.
Strength in Storytelling — One Community at a Time
Reimagining local press as an investment in democracy
In 1941, the then 17-year-old Elizabeth Morningstar of Saginaw, Mich., dropped out of school, married General Motors worker Herbert Hansen, and, within a year, gave birth to Herb Jr., the first of nine children.
A wry humorist, Betty Hansen began writing about her chaotic home — which she nicknamed Scotland Yard after the London police force’s “We Never Sleep” motto — for the Saginaw Daily News.
Her column earned instant popularity, chronicling the “muddy togetherness” of a Midwestern house where dresser drawers were always open, a toddler was always jumping on a bed, and someone was always dancing impatiently outside the bathroom door.
A testimonial for The Best of Betty Hansen, a collection of her most beloved columns over 13 years, reads, “She puts into words what we housewives and mothers feel.”
“She was incredibly smart, a self-taught and principled woman,” says Hansen Shapiro, who, while studying Latin at Swarthmore, wrote for The Phoenix and considered a career in journalism.
Fascinated by Swarthmore’s extraordinary community, she also grew interested in the question that would ultimately shape her career: What is the relationship between organizations and communities?
Columns like her grandmother Betty’s are few and far between today, as most print newspapers have reduced publication or ceased altogether.
But Hansen Shapiro believes local news just needs help fitting into the digital media landscape — and where it fits best, she says, is community-building.
“Feeling connected to the place we live empowers people,” says Hansen Shapiro, who lives in Lexington, Mass. “Local news should be in the business of that place-making.”
With journalism in her DNA, Hansen Shapiro is devoting her career to rehabilitating small-town newspapers. And she’s betting on community stories like her grandmother Betty Hansen’s to save them.
After Swarthmore, Hansen Shapiro joined the Pendle Hill community — a Quaker study, retreat, and conference center not far from campus. A few years later, after learning the basics of organizational management at the Philadelphia-based Center for Applied Research, she entered the Organizational Behavior Ph.D. program at Harvard Business School.
Over the next decade, she conducted research on business models, innovation, and change in media organizations, including public radio organizations like WBUR and Public Radio Exchange (PRX), single-topic news sites like Chalkbeat and ProPublica, and the recently revitalized Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Her studies led her to one conclusion: “Newspapers do not have completely broken business models — they have audiences and trusted brands — but they do have completely broken ownership models,” she says. “So I wondered: Could we create a new ownership model that supports communities and conserves local news?”
She was inspired by her co-founder Marc Hand’s Public Media Venture Group, which supports public television broadcasters, and by conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy. In October 2020, Hansen Shapiro and Hand published a paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center proposing a national news nonprofit that would work to conserve and reinvest in local newspapers. The goal would not be profit, but sustainability and community-building.
A month after the paper was published, the Gates Family Foundation in Denver called. Jerry and Ann Healey, owners of the 24 papers in the Colorado Community Media network, were looking to sell. “The Gates Family Foundation was inspired by our paper and wanted to see if we were ready to put ideas into action,” she says.
Hansen Shapiro got to work. She and her skeleton founding staff secured funding, established local governance, and hired a new publisher. Thus was born the nonprofit Colorado Trust for Local News.
NTLN has since acquired newspaper groups in Maine and Georgia and now owns more than 65 newspapers across the country. Each presents different challenges: The Colorado papers in high-population-growth suburban Denver need different investments than the rural Georgia papers that are getting their first-ever websites.
“We spend a lot of time in the newsrooms and the community,” Hansen Shapiro says, citing the Quaker values of humility and social responsibility she learned as a Lang Scholar as guideposts. “We need humility to build news organizations that truly represent the diversity of communities across a state.”
Now at 550 employees, including 215 journalists, NLTN has caught the eye of the Knight Foundation, the Google News Initiative, and more than 25 other institutional funders.
But these investments aren’t just about news, Hansen Shapiro says. She and her team see them as investments in local democracy, which she says is threatened when communities don’t feel a strong sense of place. They also encourage community news and reporting on local events to help people feel that shared sense of place.
“Local news can foster that place-making: It reduces polarization through shared stories, cultivates shared purpose, and builds community connections,” says Hansen Shapiro.
Those connections often come through topics like school sports, the local hunting and fishing guide, or a beloved local columnist, like her grandmother was to her community decades ago.
“Watchdog reporting is important, but it’s just one ingredient to strong local news,” she says. “Sometimes what your community wants looks less like one more breaking news update about yesterday’s story, and more like my grandma’s columns — stories that share experiences of everyday life.”
To help bring community voices into local news organizations, NTLN is establishing advisory boards in each state. “We want to ensure a diverse range of voices, especially to represent the ideological and geographic diversity across each state,” says Hansen Shapiro.
NTLN has received calls of interest from publishers in all 50 states. As part of making acquisitions, NTLN conducts detailed business analysis to be sure they have a plan for operating their new papers. They assess the news organizations’ marketing strategies and determine how to handle sales, advertising, and newsletters. But the primary goal, she says, is to grow the audience.
“Most founder-led organizations falter when the founder leaves, so I see my job as building organizational capabilities that can outlive me,” Hansen Shapiro says with a smile.
Just like Betty Hansen’s stories have outlived her.