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In recent months, Knight Foundation has announced two investments, of $5 million each, in Indiegraf, which offers technical support for news sites, and Village Media, a Canadian local publisher, which said it will be expanding into 15 US communities, beginning in Wisconsin. Both entities are for-profits, and I wanted to know more about what this portends for Knight and the field.
Happily, both Maribel Pérez Wadsworth and Amalie Nash of Knight accepted my request to talk about it. Given that I have been critical of Knight on occasion in the past, I especially appreciated this.
Pérez Wadsworth is president and CEO of Knight, a role she assumed in 2024. She spent more than 26 years at Gannett, rising from reporter at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida to managing editor there, and then 13 years as an executive, ultimately president of Gannett Media and publisher of USA Today. Nash is VP/Journalism of Knight, which she joined a year ago. She came to Knight after stints at the International News Media Association and the National Trust for Local News. She is also a veteran of Gannett, where she spent 12 years, ultimately as SVP of local news and audience development for the USA Today Network. She had previously been executive editor of the Des Moines Register and assistant managing editor of the Detroit Free Press. Our conversation, which occurred earlier this week, has been edited for length and clarity.
RT: Thank you very much for doing this.
Knight has recently invested $5 million in each of Indiegraf and Village Media, both of which are for-profits. How do you all think about making investments in companies like that?
MPW: The overarching philosophy for us at Knight is to make sure that we are taking a very diverse and comprehensive view of the whole ecosystem. We feel a great urgency toward finding lasting solutions and sustainable business models for local journalism in particular, and that means that while a lot of our grant making would fall along more traditional lines, and particularly in the nonprofit area, we look at investments like Village Media and Indiegraf on the for-profit side as another really important piece of the puzzle toward finding those long-term solutions.
Toward local ownership
RT: These are investments in for-profits. Do you intend them ultimately to make money? That is, would you expect to eventually sell them at a profit?
MPW: Let’s talk about Village. What we’ve done there is take a 50% equity stake in the individual local structures that Village is setting up, to start in each of these three states [including Pennsylvania and Illinois]. Our hope is that we will ultimately be in a position, with the markets thriving, stable and profitable, that we would be able to sell our stake into local hands. We believe in the value of that local ownership, and so would love to see that.
We’re not necessarily looking at this as a means to make a profit for Knight, but definitely to be able to ultimately recapture that capital, reinvest it, ideally into additional markets, and certainly to bring local ownership to the operation.
RT: Does that mean that you all, as opposed to Village, would have some say over who the buyers would be locally?
MPW: I think it would be important for us to collaborate on that. The buyer or buyers looking at investing in Knight’s stake in these operations would still be in partnership with Village, and Village has been successful because they have a good formula, they know what works, they bring a lot of operating experience to the table, so I think it would certainly be important that we arrive at that collaboratively. But yes, of course, we’ll have a say in who, and particularly that it be someone that is local.
RT: When you say, Maribel, that you would envision reinvesting if you got your money out through a local buyer, would you anticipate reinvesting it in further Village properties or just in other Knight grants?
MPW: I think either is possible. At the moment, we’re just getting started, but feeling very positive, having high conviction in what Village has already demonstrated in the markets where they’ve operated across Canada. I think in an ideal scenario, we would see them be equally successful in the States, and be in a position to help invest in further expansion of that model here.
RT: At Indiegraf, I know that you have a member of your staff on their board. How does he balance his fiduciary duty to their shareholders with his work for you? And do you envision taking more such board seats?
MPW: We sit on any number of boards. Across our grantees, we think that’s helpful to be close to the business and how it’s performing. One of the things that Knight deeply cares about is learning alongside our grantees, making sure that we are deeply understanding the strategies and tactics that are showing progress and promise, because we can then use that knowledge to help inform how we think about other investments. We also care deeply about these organizations on their own being financially strong and doing well by their stakeholders. [Knight’s director of communications later clarified that the Knight staff member is a board observer at Indiegraf and “has no fiduciary responsibility or voting authority on board decisions.”]
RT: Do you have seats on other for-profit boards in the journalism space?
MPW: Amalie, you might need to help me with that, because I don’t want to miss something.
AN: I don’t think for-profit. I’m on the [American Journalism Project] board, you’re on the [Report for America] board, but I can’t think of one specifically that would be for- profit. We will have board observer seats at Village Media on their national board, and Duc [Luu, Knight’s director of business sustainability grantmaking] and I are serving on the initial board of the Wisconsin operation that’s being set up.
RT: So Wisconsin will be a separate for-profit corporation that’ll be a subsidiary of Village, but with your ownership as well?
AN: Correct. They’re setting up three separate ones for the three states that they will be in.
Competitive concerns
RT: When you invest in a for-profit, where does that leave you vis-a-vis other grantees or potential grantees with whom that for-profit may be competing, such as, for instance, Newspack or Blue Lena with Indiegraf or Wisconsin Watch with Village?
MPW: A lot of these that you’re naming are our grantees, and again, we take a very holistic view of the field. We think it’s really important to be investing in all of the players that are showing effective strategies, that are bringing new ideas to the table, that can help strengthen the overall business models for journalism. So we see this as part of a very holistic, comprehensive strategy that is meant to not exclude any viable player or viable solutions from this big, urgent challenge that we all feel.
RT: So, if I’m running a nonprofit that is competing with a for-profit in which you have an investment, I shouldn’t be concerned about that?
MPW: I would hope that’s not a cause for concern. I think that, if anything, we should feel it’s frankly a confidence boost-- that journalism still can be a profit-making business. That’s how I would look at it.
Looking ahead
RT: Do you anticipate more for-profit investments in news companies anytime soon?
MPW: We are always scanning and in conversations with a lot of key players across the system. It was only in the last couple of years that we created an expansion fund that does include some for-profit investments in established legacy companies that were looking to expand their offerings and/or expand their coverage areas. The [$900,000 2025 grant to the] Post and Courier in the Carolinas is one good example of that. So while there’s nothing imminent in that regard, it’s always a possibility.
RT: I know that resources are always constrained for any foundation. Do these two recent significant commitments to for-profits, notwithstanding what you’ve said about an ecosystem approach, indicate some loss of faith in the nonprofit model?
MPW: Oh, absolutely not! The majority of our investments are still across the nonprofit landscape. In our doubling down of our commitments to journalism, we’ve done $300 million to the field [in the three most recent fiscal years], the vast majority of which has been to nonprofits. So in no way should what is still a relatively small number of for-profit investments be seen as anything other than that. We do not want to exclude any part of the field where solutions can be found to strengthen and sustain local journalism, but we are still deeply committed, as we always have been, and as our funding shows, to the entire sector.
AN: If I can just jump in for one second, Knight has a long history of helping different elements of the sector. One of the ways that I got to know Knight Foundation was many years ago during the Table Stakes program. When Jennifer Preston was the VP, Knight created this Table Stakes program to do transformation among newsrooms. It was right after Gannett had acquired Journal Media Group, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (a for-profit part of Gannett) was one of the first major metros in that program. So certainly there is a long history there of working with different sorts of models and helping with business sustainability and transformation initiatives over the years.
RT: Anything you wish I had asked in this area, or that you’d like to say, bearing on this?
MPW: I don’t think so. I appreciate the interest in these investments and in the work that Knight is doing. We’re proud of the work that we’ve been doing, but more specifically, we feel a lot of gratitude to be in real partnership with our grantees and optimistic about ultimately finding these lasting solutions we’re all seeking.
RT: Amalie?
AN: I would also just note that we’ve known Jeff [Elgie, the CEO] and Village Media for quite some time. He’s been very involved in the American media ecosystem. I first met him at Newsgeist many years ago. He’s someone who has been very active in the International News Media Association. Maribel is on the board of that; I worked for that previously. So the mission alignment that we’ve had with Village and with Jeff goes back a fair bit, and for us that certainly gives us a stronger comfort level; this is not an unknown entity. This isn’t someone who’s just come on our radar. We’ve looked very closely at the business plans and the pillars. I’ve seen the CMS, I’ve kicked it around. I’ve looked at the SPACES program that they created, the Cares program. We believe in the business strategy. It was more than simply having a replicable model, it was having a real leader and a company that we could believe in as part of it, and so it made a lot of sense for us.
RT: Anything you’d like to say about Indiegraf as well, since they are clearly one of the subjects we’re discussing?
AN: I got to know Indiegraf when I was with the National Trust for Local News, and they provided the CMS for the Georgia Trust for Local News. They’ve proven to be really innovative. Their leaders, Erin [Millar] and her sister Caitlin [Havlak], are both extremely strong. They’ve gone through a couple of acquisitions recently of Hearken and Stylebot. They’re acquiring RevEngine from News Revenue Hub. I think they’re really thinking about the full ecosystem and where they fit in and how to meet the needs of their customers. I’ve found them to be very collaborative, very innovative, and very much thinking about the customer at the center of their business and what they need. So for us, that one also feels like a real partnership.
RT: Great, thank you both very much. I really appreciate it.
MPW: Of course, thanks. Anytime.
Meh. The Knight ppl say some stuff re figuring out the next self-sustaining news model -- but offer no specifics. The news biz has been in crisis for 20 years -- since 2006 -- and these highly paid Knight nonprofit news execs remain clueless. Reminds me of 2006 when all the mainstream news execs had no idea what to do about the internet, so ignored it.
Nice that Knight is funding news nonprofits -- but the interviewees have no clue wrt innovation, evolving news models. Just some safe corporate-speak. And a weak interviewer who doesn't press.
I agree with Jim.