Newsrooms in Colorado that once employed hundreds could now “fit around a large dinner table,” Larry Ryckman, publisher and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, told me in December. Leaders at newsrooms like the Sun, seeing the rapid collapse of local news around them, are thinking about how they can do more to compensate for what’s being lost in their own backyards. One model they are betting on: Regional hubs, otherwise known as multi-local newsrooms. The Colorado Sun plans to establish four of them to serve communities in specific parts of the state.

“Regional hubs” might sound like the recreation of the regional bureaus for-profit local newspapers like The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News had in their heyday. But Ryckman makes a distinction. While bureaus were “writing for the mothership” more than serving individual communities, he says, the Sun’s hubs will be built from the ground up to serve and report on the smaller, region-specific communities they’re created for.

“We don’t intend to be arrogant and say, ‘We’re here from the Colorado Sun, and here’s how it’s going to be,’” Ryckman said. “The real work begins with a lot of listening.”

Not all use the language “regional hubs.” But a growing number of nonprofit newsrooms and local public radio stations, supported by big investments, are pursuing some kind of network model as one of the best hopes of sustainability for delivering more local news to more communities.

The American Journalism Project, the venture philanthropy that has raised more than $200 million for local news since 2019, is investing in and fundraising on this vision for scaling local news. Last fall, it awarded $3.6 million in grants to three nonprofit newsrooms to help them “expand their reporting to reach audiences lacking access to quality local news.” The Colorado Sun was one of the newsrooms to receive such funding.

Read the full article about multi-local newsrooms by Sophie Culpepper at Nieman Lab.