Revitalizing Tulsa’s news landscape: Nonprofit Tulsa News Initiative charts a new path

I was born here. I was educated in local public schools. I kind of became a storyteller as a kid growing up in a North Tulsa neighborhood. And so, this is kind of the fruition of all the things that I've worked on in my career. Just having the potential to give people better, deeper, broader news so they can then make better decisions about their lives, it just excites me.”

Gary Lee, executive editor, the Tulsa News Initiative and the Oklahoma Eagle

Journalists and philanthropists have joined forces to infuse more storytelling and accountability resources into Tulsa, Oklahoma.

After talking to hundreds of people in the community to identify journalism gaps in the Tulsa and Tulsa County area, forming a board and formulating a strategy to fill those gaps, a nonprofit was formed. 

For now, the nonprofit is called the Tulsa News Initiative (TNI), which has absorbed a historically Black-owned newspaper into its fold and will provide resources to a handful of other news outlets. The arrangement was made possible thanks, in part, to the American Journalism Project (AJP). The initiative was announced in December. Tulsa County is home to 682,000 people and is a growing metro.

The Tulsa News Initiative is reminiscent of other nonprofit news organizations that the AJP has helped launch in recent years.

Unlike such startups in Ohio, Indiana and California, the Tulsa project involved negotiations to turn a previously for-profit newspaper, the Oklahoma Eagle, into a nonprofit. TNI will become the publisher of the Eagle, which has covered news affecting the Black population of Tulsa for more than a century. The Eagle’s managing editor, Gary Lee, will lead the TNI newsroom. The Initiative is governed by a board consisting of local and national industry and civic leaders, as well as the owner of the Eagle. 

The project was conceived with information gleaned from a steering committee, working with the AJP to conduct comprehensive research. After working with community and local news organizations, the interested parties agreed to a strategy, which will, in part, use philanthropic grants to support more journalism. 

When asked about his emotions heading into this new chapter in Tulsa, Lee said, “My God, I can't tell you, man. I've been in journalism for a fairly long time, and I've done different things. I've been a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. I worked for Time Magazine. I've done freelance writing and book ghostwriting … and I've never done anything that I've been more excited about than this. One of the reasons I think that I am excited is that I come from Tulsa. I was born here. I was educated in local public schools. I kind of became a storyteller as a kid growing up in a North Tulsa neighborhood. And so, this is kind of the fruition of all the things that I've worked on in my career. Just having the potential to give people better, deeper, broader news so they can then make better decisions about their lives, it just excites me.”

Lee explained that the Tulsa News Initiative started off as a “grassroots” effort, starting with focus group feedback, in which they asked participants what they were missing from their local news in the city and region. The sessions and research identified that “they wanted less negative news — for instance, news about crime — and more positive news about people and their lives in the community. They said they wanted more accountability journalism that is holding public officials more answerable for the jobs they were elected to do. They said they wanted to see more of themselves and their neighbors in the paper. They also wanted more authenticity in everything that they read and heard. And what’s really great is that now we have a blueprint for what we want to provide as a Tulsa News Initiative. We can go back in a year or two and say, ‘Here are the things that people said they wanted. How well have we been fulfilling their wishes?’”

In addition to keeping the Eagle operating as a publication, the initiative, according to its website, will also invest journalism resources into The Frontier, an investigative newsroom in Tulsa; KOSU, a public radio station operated by Oklahoma State University; La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English publication that serves Oklahoma; and Focus: Black Oklahoma, a radio program.

Beyond those organizations, TNI will work with other legacy journalism outlets in the community on projects and permit the republishing of content, if it can be accessed for free to readers and viewers. The Initiative, for example, has received endorsements from the community’s newspaper, the Tulsa World.

Among the negotiations for turning the for-profit Eagle into a nonprofit is that the owners retain a licensing fee, Lee explained.

Sarabeth Berman, CEO, American Journalism Project

Sarabeth Berman, CEO of AJP, said this is the first time that they’ve been involved with negotiating a for-profit organization into a nonprofit. In the bigger picture, the AJP continues to work to create new methods to bolster local journalism in news deserts or news-depleted areas.

“We’re really excited about this effort,” Berman said. “We’ll be immediately adding two dozen new journalism jobs into the Tulsa ecosystem and then fostering collaboration among the existing news organizations.

“I think we see nonprofit news is a very promising way to support original reporting in communities. I mean, that is fundamentally the crisis that we are experiencing. Sixty percent of American journalists have lost their jobs over the last two decades. So, at a moment where we feel bombarded by content, we’re actually lacking the original reporting that communities need. We’re seeing the introduction of nonprofit news as a promising way to support what is ultimately a public good.”

Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.