Built for the long haul, Fresnoland turns local reporting into impact

Rob Parsons is senior editor at Fresnoland. (Photo credit: Larry Valenzuela)

We are big believers in reporting early and often, not just waiting until something goes on a city council agenda.”

Rob Parsons

When Danielle Bergstrom walked into her first meeting with The Fresno Bee, she was seven months pregnant and, as she recalls it, “without a single byline to my name.” Bergstrom was an urban planner who had spent more than a decade watching consequential local policy decisions unfold at a distance from many of the people who would live with their effects. Her original idea for Fresnoland, launched in 2018, was closer to a think tank: research complicated civic problems, bring residents into the conversation, and make policy easier to understand.

A colleague told her what she was describing sounded like public-service journalism.

That realization led to a partnership with The Fresno Bee. Bergstrom raised money for the Fresnoland Lab, which began publishing through the Bee in 2020. Fresnoland became independent in 2022, after McClatchy Media filed for bankruptcy and the newspaper chain was acquired by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. This September, the Bee lost seven reporters and an editor amid broader McClatchy layoffs that eliminated more than 90 jobs nationwide. Meanwhile, Fresnoland has grown into a nonprofit newsroom with nine full-time employees, one regular contributor and a budget that topped $1 million this year.

Its evolution presents a question increasingly familiar to nonprofit local news: What happens after a journalism experiment proves it can produce work a community values? Can it build an institution capable of sustaining that work?

Danielle Bergstrom is Fresnoland’s editor-in-chief and executive director. (Photo credit: Larry Valenzuela)

“We haven’t changed our mission since our beginnings,” said Bergstrom, Fresnoland’s executive director and editor-in-chief. “We are still firmly rooted in ‘making policy public.’”

For Fresnoland, that often means reporting before public-policy decisions are made.

“We are big believers in reporting early and often, not just waiting until something goes on a city council agenda,” said Senior Editor Rob Parsons. “If we wait until then, the community often doesn’t stand a chance to influence the discussion or understand what’s going on in any meaningful way.”

Reporters attend meetings and community forums looking for questions from residents who may not be connected to Fresno’s political power structure.

“A lot of people reach out to us when they’re having issues with their landlord. We could have a reporter full-time on those inquiries,” Parsons said. “But we think the better option is for us to go after systemic issues,” such as why inspectors aren’t routinely revisiting properties with previous violations, why evictions are rising, or why affordable housing remains difficult to build.

“We try to focus less on individual harms, but where systems are broken,” he said.

The approach also influences what Fresnoland decides not to pursue. This spring, Parsons said, competing outlets devoted significant attention to a registered sex offender who announced plans to run for Fresno City Council. Fresnoland examined the prospective candidacy and largely stayed away.

“Fresnoland doesn’t try to break headlines simply for the sake of being first,” Parsons said. “We are more likely to pass on a big story where coverage has been saturated and repetitive and pursue another subject of equal or greater importance despite possibly seeing less general reader interest.”

In the end, the controversial candidate never qualified for the ballot.

When reporting changes the record

Fresnoland’s approach played out in its years-long coverage of Fresno’s Southeast Development Area, a growth proposal for the city’s southeastern communities.

The newsroom didn’t wait for a final City Council decision. It began reporting roughly three years ago, while planners were still seeking public input. Bergstrom said the first story, which laid out environmental and financial questions and told residents how to submit comments, drew nearly 40,000 readers. More than two dozen stories followed.

Fresnoland later reported on meetings between the mayor and developers and disputes over financing. The proposal remains under debate, and Bergstrom said residents now show up at public meetings to ask detailed questions about municipal finance, citing Fresnoland's reporting.

“That level of civic engagement is what we want to see as a result of our reporting,” she said.

In 2023, Fresnoland’s Omar Rashad (former investigative reporter and assistant editor) began investigating why Fresno City Council budget-committee meetings weren’t appearing on the city’s public-meeting calendar. Rashad reviewed archival records, interviewed officials, spoke with residents and First Amendment experts, and compared Fresno’s budget practices with those of other California cities.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and First Amendment Coalition subsequently sued the City of Fresno over the closed-door deliberations. In May 2026, a Fresno County Superior Court judge ruled that the City Council had violated California’s Brown Act by conducting budget deliberations privately for years. The city stopped convening the private budget committee, although Parsons considers the outcome imperfect: Officials eliminated the committee rather than opening its meetings.

“While the story hasn’t gotten the transparency outcome we’d hoped for,” Parsons said, “it has instigated a much broader community conversation about government accountability and transparency.”

Building an audience and a business

“Fresno readers respond best to highly reported, detailed and accountability-focused investigations and enterprise stories,” Parsons said. “Our highest-read stories are almost always about big land use battles.”

Fresnoland’s website attracts roughly 40,000 to 50,000 unique visitors monthly, according to Bergstrom. Its “Toplines” newsletter has grown from fewer than 1,000 subscribers in 2022 to more than 6,000, and the newsroom is investing in Instagram to reach younger residents.

But proving demand for journalism is different from figuring out how to pay for it. Institutional philanthropy still supplies about 85% of Fresnoland’s budget. Individual giving and memberships account for roughly 10%, and sponsorships about 5%.

That makes Fresnoland considerably more dependent on institutional philanthropy than the nonprofit-news field overall. The 2026 Institute for Nonprofit News Index found foundation grants accounted for 48% of member revenue in 2025, compared with 33% from individual giving and 17% from earned revenue. INN classifies an organization receiving at least two-thirds of its revenue from foundations as heavily reliant on that funding. Diversification is increasing across the field: 49% of INN members drew on at least four revenue streams in 2025, up from 38% in 2022.

At Fresnoland, building those streams has exposed another constraint: people need time to build them.

Isabel Santos-Gonzalez is Fresnoland’s director of operations. (Photo credit: Larry Valenzuela)

“One of the biggest operational challenges has been launching and scaling new revenue streams without full-time staff dedicated to each revenue stream,” said Isabel Santos-Gonzalez, Fresnoland’s director of operations.

Until this summer, Santos-Gonzalez and Bergstrom were the only two staff members handling operations and revenue. Sponsorship development began in 2023, but Fresnoland didn’t land its first sponsorship until 2024. A founding sponsorship for its new food vertical this year nearly tripled sponsorship revenue over 2025, Santos-Gonzalez said.

The newsroom has now hired its first senior revenue officer, focused on major gifts and sponsorships. Reader giving has grown alongside that effort. A 2023 campaign increased Fresnoland’s monthly donors from fewer than 15 to more than 65. Reader revenue grew about 68% in 2024 and reached approximately $88,000 in 2025. Fresnoland now has nearly 300 monthly supporters.

“Fresno could not be more different than the Bay Area when it comes to fundraising for local news, despite being just a couple of hours away,” Santos-Gonzalez said. “Our path to scaling these revenue streams will look different, but we believe with the right approach, strategy and staff investment we can get there.”

There is independent evidence of the broader capital disparity she describes. A 2024 Urban Institute analysis ranked Fresno 83rd among the nation’s 100 largest cities for aggregate investment after adjusting for population. Researchers also found weak small-business lending and lower investment across many asset classes in higher-poverty and predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods.

The analysis doesn’t measure willingness to support journalism. Fresnoland’s donor growth suggests local support may be something the organization can cultivate rather than something Fresno simply lacks. Bergstrom wants reader contributions, major gifts and sponsorships eventually to provide nearly half the newsroom’s revenue.

“If we can’t find a way to grow local donor and sponsorship revenue to nearly 50% of our total budget in the next three to five years,” she said, “I don’t think we can survive long-term.”

The James B. McClatchy Foundation, a longtime supporter, plans to sunset in 2030. Fresnoland is already planning for a budget without it.

Producing ambitious reporting

Fresnoland’s five reporters currently work with one senior editor and Bergstrom, who divides her time between leading the newsroom and running the organization. Santos-Gonzalez said Fresnoland has paused adding reporters and interns until it can increase editing capacity.

“We primarily need more editing capacity, revenue capacity and audience capacity,” she said. “As we look ahead to long-term sustainability, we need to be incredibly intentional about the hires we make and the pace at which we make them.”

Fresnoland requires employees to live in Fresno.

“We believe that one needs to live in the community one covers,” Santos-Gonzalez said.

Recruiting journalists to Fresno can be difficult, she acknowledged, but most Fresnoland employees have remained for at least three years. Recent full-time hires have come through internships and journalism fellowship pipelines.

“We can always promise candidates that this is one of the best news cities they’ll ever work in,” Santos-Gonzalez said. “You can do ambitious work early in your career, an opportunity you don’t get if you go to the big legacies early on.”

Parsons would use additional reporting capacity to expand accountability reporting on public safety beyond policing to the broader criminal justice system. Bergstrom is cautious about geographic expansion. Communities elsewhere in the Central Valley have asked Fresnoland to cover them, but its approach depends heavily on local knowledge.

“Part of what makes Fresnoland work is a little bit built on an idiosyncratic obsession with Fresno,” she said. Her larger ambition isn’t simply to make Fresnoland bigger. “I feel like as local newsrooms have shrunk, so have our ambitions for our role in communities,” Bergstrom said.

Seven years after she began imagining a civic-minded think tank, Bergstrom no longer needs to prove that the idea was journalism. Fresnoland’s next experiment is whether it can build the local financial and institutional support necessary to keep that journalism ambitious.

Taayoo Murray is a New York City-based journalist who covers health, wellness and parenting. She is the founder of The Care Capitalist, which convenes off-the-record rooms to think through healthcare’s hardest questions. She welcomes emails at taayoo_murray@yahoo.com.