Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Three summers ago, nonprofit news organization The Beacon launched its second newsroom in Wichita, Kansas, expanding from its first newsroom in Kansas City, Missouri.
On paper, the organization seemed to be on solid footing for that kind of growth: almost $4 million in the bank before launch, including $1.1 million from the Wichita Foundation and more from the American Journalism Project, and ambitions “to create a regional network of nonprofit newsrooms across Kansas and Missouri.” The Kansas City Beacon had begun publishing in March 2020, so this would be The Beacon’s second newsroom getting off the ground in the thick of the pandemic.
Startups are notoriously challenging workplaces, so that level of turnover in the first year, while significant, could have indicated early bumps in the road that would eventually even out. But in the two years since, at least four more reporters have departed the Wichita Beacon, as has a second editor.1 Their tenures ranged from three months to two years. The revolving door has meant the Wichita Beacon hasn’t been fully staffed — with three reporters and an editor on the editorial side — since January 2022.2
The turnover is striking not just in its own right, but relative to the comparable continuity in its counterpart in Kansas City, which is about a three-hour drive away. In the Kansas City Beacon newsroom, three of four listed reporters have been with the newsroom for at least two years. (Both newsrooms are primarily remote, with access to a coworking space. The newsrooms have some in-person meetings and joint hybrid meetings with staff from both cities.)
Nonprofit startups like The Beacon are a critical part of the push to revitalize local news. When the Wichita Beacon launched, it was recognized by publications like The New York Times as an exciting demonstration that “the sorts of local philanthropists who used to donate to the opera or museums now see local journalism as a worthy cause in a path promoted by the American Journalism Project.”
At Nieman Lab, we spend a lot of time trying to understand what is required for the financial sustainability of these newsrooms. But the pattern of turnover at the Wichita Beacon raises a sad, and important, question: No matter how much funding you have, can you revitalize local news if you can’t retain reporters?
When I set out to figure out why reporters keep leaving, I found no single answer, but turned up common themes across years: A mismatch between idealistic expectations and the difficult reality of startup nonprofit news; frustrations with editing, and inadequate mentorship and support for early-career reporters; a sense that Wichita was treated as an afterthought to Kansas City; and disagreement about the site’s mission and what kind of news would best serve Wichita.
Some of these issues may be unique to the Wichita Beacon or to the individual staffers it hired. But with a growing number of local news outlets across the United States launching as, or even converting to, mission-driven nonprofits, it seems to me some of the challenges The Beacon has encountered have broader relevance — and offer cautionary lessons — for other outlets trying to figure out the essential work of building sustainable local news outlets.
In nonprofits, “you have to fake it til you make it — that’s the game,” ex-Wichita Beacon reporter Sawyer Belair told me. To an extent, he understands the necessity of that mindset: “You have to inspire confidence that it’s a worthwhile investment to fund you.”
But when you keep alienating the reporters you hire, he said, “you’ve toppled the whole apple cart.”
“My theory for a while has been [the Wichita Beacon] is going to be gone — eventually, it’s going to get phased out,” he said in May. “It’s just not working, because they refuse to allow the changes that are needed, which is more autonomy…from Kansas City.”
Belair, ex-reporter Marcus Clem, and two others ex-Beacon reporters who requested anonymity said that, from the start, the Wichita Beacon was treated as less important than the Kansas City Beacon. It was, one reporter said, an “afterthought.”
In addition to feeling burnt out and unsupported, an anonymous staff member who left in 2022 mentioned something that became a common theme in my other conversations. “I did not feel, as a reporter, that there was an individual plan that existed just for Wichita,” the person said. People in Kansas City “would make decisions, and they just happened to trickle down to Wichita, versus Wichita forging its own path.”
Beacon founder Kelsey Ryan left the nonprofit in the summer of 2022. Ryan was based in Kansas City during her time at The Beacon, but is originally from the Wichita area.
“The Beacon surpassed all of my expectations,” Ryan told Amy Kovac-Ashley in a 2023 Reynolds Journalism Institute article. “My goal was to do a startup, but creating a thing is different than managing a thing long-term.” She cited health issues and a need for more work-life balance among her reasons for leaving. (Ryan declined to comment on the record for this story.)
When Stephanie Campbell came on as Beacon CEO in January 2023, she felt the need to make a decision about The Beacon’s identity as a news organization.
“Are [Wichita and Kansas City] two separate things that are sharing back-of-house, business expenses only?” she recalled wondering. “Or are they truly operating together as one team?” She made the decision to “centralize” them and hired Scott Canon that summer as editor-in-chief of a unified Beacon.
“In my opinion, or in my lived reality, attempting to build two teams, two cultures…was impossible,” she said. “It wasn’t working.” Instead, she wanted to build “one strong Beacon culture.” But “that transition’s been challenging.”
Campbell and Canon are both based in Kansas City. (Canon joined The Beacon from the Kansas News Service, and had spent 27 years at The Kansas City Star before that.) This May, The Beacon completed a transition of the Wichita and Kansas City outlets into a single Beacon website that it described as a “four-in-one destination” because it also included landing pages for statewide Kansas and Missouri coverage.
A reporter who worked for The Beacon under Campbell said they liked her personally, but thought she had “a tech startup brain.” They perceived an emphasis on constant expansion: “We need to be announcing what’s new all the time. We need to make more and more money. We need to appeal to a mass amount of people.” From this reporter’s perspective, this included, for instance, The Beacon’s desire to hire rural reporters so it could apply for more grants. (This month, The Beacon announced its first rural Missouri reporter, with support from the Missouri Foundation for Health.)
The pace was “a detriment,” they said. “It never gave us time to slow down and say, ‘Let’s shore up the things we have, make those stronger, make them better, and then we can think about what’s next.”
Belair agreed: “The needs of Wichita are not recognized because this is a Kansas City-based organization, and it’s trying to expand faster than it can.”
From the beginning of Campbell’s tenure, along with questions about how separate the newsrooms should be, there were questions about what Wichita’s mission was, and how distinct the “brand” for Wichita should be from Kansas City.
Polly Basore Wenzl joined the Wichita Beacon in mid-July 2022 as a contract editor, and was promoted to full-time editor by the end of the year. Belair, and another reporter who worked with her, described her as a good mentor who championed a Wichita-specific vision for The Beacon — “the idea that our stories should come from the community,” said Trace Salzbrenner, who was hired as a full-time Beacon reporter in the summer of 2022 and left this year (partly to move to another city, he said, but partly because “I was tired of watching people come in, and becoming friends with them, and then them leaving” the Wichita Beacon).
That community-centered reporting approach was exemplified in a regular feature championed and sometimes written by Basore Wenzl: a community profile series called “Wichitans You Should Know,” highlighting community members “who are often unseen, through stories of their lived experiences.” These stories had their own section on the Wichita Beacon’s website, while The Kansas City Beacon did not have a comparable feature. Wichitans You Should Know were consistently among the Wichita Beacon’s most popular stories, Belair said.
Basore Wenzl told me she worked on these features on her own time, “outside of my regular hours, often from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. in order to produce something unique to the Wichita Beacon in the Wichita media landscape.”
“The stories were, in my view, in keeping with the mission to provide community-centric stories explaining community challenges,” she said.
Wichita “was actually starting to thrive,” Belair told me. “I think a big part of it was that it had a sense of autonomy.”
“These are supposed to be hyperlocal outlets,” he said. “They’re supposed to have a little bit of independence from each other, because the different communities have different needs.”
But after Canon was hired in August 2023, he discontinued “Wichitans You Should Know.”
Why? The Beacon’s news mission, Canon told me, is to “return more protein to the news media diet.” In his view, “protein” means health care, education, and local government coverage stories; he sees an opportunity in all three areas, and especially in the first two, to compensate for shrinking coverage in commercial media. This kind of coverage can multiply The Beacon’s impact when republished by other outlets.
Campbell supported Canon’s decision. “Wichitans You Should Know” “didn’t feel like the core mission. It felt like a side thing,” she told me. “Every story we publish sends a signal of who we are now…every time we publish one of those stories, and not a story on health or education or local government accountability or labor and housing, we’re sending a signal that a single-source profile piece on a community member is a bigger priority to us than those other stories.”
The “meat” stories, in her view, also make a stronger case for philanthropic funding.
“Our theory is that asking philanthropy to come in and subsidize public service journalism would be more successful if we’re giving them a piece that’s the most critical piece,” she said.
Former Wichita Beacon reporters saw the loss of “Wichitans You Should Know” as a sign that the site was shifting toward reaching a more general audience, rather than the underserved audiences it originally prioritized.
One reporter said they and Basore Wenzl shared a vision of reporting for Wichita, and specifically “for the audience we had identified that needed a news outlet,” including Wichita’s Hispanic and Latino populations and historically Black neighborhoods.
“I believed whole-heartedly in the mission of the Wichita Beacon as envisioned by founder Kelsey Ryan and the following interim publisher Jennifer Hack Wolf — that The Beacon would be community-centric, focused on populations underserved by traditional media,” Basore Wenzl said. She said this vision was informed by a two-year, independent market study and focus groups funded by the Wichita Foundation, which she participated in.
“I was committed to the idea of filling a gap in local news coverage by covering stories not otherwise covered or in ways not otherwise done,” she said. “I left when it seemed to me that the many things that brought me to The Beacon were no longer being supported.”
Campbell, in addition to referencing a Wichita landscape analysis completed prior to joining The Beacon, said she’s conducted her own listening tour in the community. “There’s a wide variety in the opinions, in the conversations about who we should be and what we should do, and it’s my job to synthesize all of that,” she said.
“Synthesizing the stakeholder feedback in multiple markets has been one of the challenges of this role,” she added. “Who do you listen to? There’s hundreds of voices that all matter in different ways.”
When I asked Campbell and Canon who they see as The Beacon’s target audience, Campbell said it is “civically engaged public servants.”
“We probably have a particular focus on people who have been marginalized in one way or another,” Canon added.
“From the very beginning, there was just this ambiguity around what a Beacon story was,” one reporter told me. “There’s these lofty, ambitious goals” — variously, “diverse,” “in-depth,” “second-day,” “solutions journalism.” But, they said, reporters interpreted those terms differently.
To Wichita editor and senior reporter Maria Carter, who joined The Beacon in February, the definition of a Beacon story is clear. “Beacon stories are policy stories; they’re depth, they’re analysis,” she said. “It’s not about one person’s issue — it’s about an issue affecting a lot of people.”
But she acknowledged that concept was difficult for some reporters to grasp. “I can see reporters struggling with how to make a Beacon story,” she said. “One of the things I saw in the shift over to Scott [Canon as editor-in-chief], where it’s a little bit more focused on policy and analysis, I think maybe some reporters interpreted that as, like, ‘Oh, I can’t put a person in my story.’” (Not true, she said.)
Marcus Clem joined the Wichita Beacon this June, as an education reporter. He was excited, he told me, to return to writing after a few years spent working mostly in TV news. He was also attracted by The Beacon’s salary: At $50,000 to $70,000 a year, the range was “above market value” for the area.
Clem said his first two stories were heavily edited, to the extent that his voice could not come through and that the publication process was slow. By his third story, about the conversion of a former park elementary school into a shelter, he felt Canon and Wichita editor and senior reporter Carter fundamentally disagreed with his reporting approach. He says they told him he was stuck in “daily newspaper” writing mode, failing to create an overall narrative structure talking about a broader issue.
“I felt I had no ownership of the final product,” he said.
Clem resigned this month because he felt demoralized and confused about what was being asked of him, he said. At the time of publication, he said nobody at The Beacon has responded to his letter of resignation, more than three weeks later. He said he talked to me “to protect the welfare of the new reporters that are still at the Wichita Beacon, who do not have the experience and do not have the understanding of how…most professional newsrooms work.”
Canon, Carter, and Campbell would not discuss personnel issues on the record.
Two other ex-Wichita Beacon reporters who worked with Canon told me his edits and expectations were unreasonable. One called him a “bully”; another said his edits “felt very targeted and angry.”
Reflecting on turnover at The Beacon, Canon said, “I don’t doubt that my editorial approach, and me wanting to focus on policy analysis stories at a certain clip, didn’t go over well with some of those people that left,” adding, “I want to own that.”
Asked specifically about his editing approach, he described himself as weighing in “pretty heavily on stories as a word editor.” He sees that as his responsibility to The Beacon’s audience and mission: “I’ve been trying to make our enterprise reporting accessible, meaning easily readable, and as impactful as it can be, and have a level of clarity that makes the sort of story you might pass on to a friend.”
“I feel like I owe it to The Beacon and to people in Wichita and people in Kansas City that our stuff is strong work with a professional polish to it,” he added, “and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
Campbell said Canon has been a significant asset in earning other news organizations’ trust, making them willing to republish Beacon stories, and furthering The Beacon’s strategy.
And problems with Canon’s editing style are not universal. Blaise Mesa, The Beacon’s Kansas State House reporter, works out of Topeka and joined The Beacon last November. He followed Canon to The Beacon after working with him in another job. In that job, working with Canon, “it really felt like I was starting to grow a lot more as a reporter,” Mesa said.
When I talked to Clem and Belair, in particular, I noticed that they were both drawn to work at The Beacon with a promise that they could cover stories in a unique way. They seemed to share an experience of whiplash — being told they had the freedom to pursue the stories they wanted, then receiving edits that pushed their work in different directions that they didn’t always understand.
Canon told me that most stories at The Beacon are reporter-driven, not assigned. “Nearly all of our stories in both markets come from reporters,” he said.
Belair, and one of the other ex-Beacon reporters I spoke with, moved to Wichita to work for The Beacon as their first full-time reporting job.
The anonymous staff member who left The Beacon in 2022 told me they were initially excited about working there because of its nonprofit structure. “I’ve always been really drawn to the nonprofit model,” they said. “Not that I’m a news business expert, but as a consumer and community member, I just always thought it feels like the strongest path forward for local news in general — there’s no paywalls [and] it feels a lot more community-centered to me.”
The staff member told me they were eager to learn and grow at The Beacon. Instead, inadequate mentorship, direction, and editing left them feeling demoralized and lost.
“I don’t want anyone to work in The Beacon, period, especially not someone bright-eyed like me…I’ve cried so many tears over this place,” they said. “It took me a long time to heal from The Beacon…I was just so defeated about what I thought I was capable of.” (The Wichita Beacon’s first editor, Matt Hennie, declined to comment for this story.)
Belair, who joined the Wichita Beacon under new leadership in August 2023 as a data and public health reporter, described being “treated like I’d been in the business three to five years.” Wichita editor Basore Wenzl, he said, was “the only person in management who treated me like a fresh-out-of-college journalist.”
Basore Wenzl left The Beacon in October 2023, while Belair left this past February.
“I believed my role was to build up and support reporters,” Basore Wenzl told me in an email. “I saw it as an investment in the future of the profession.”
From Campbell’s perspective, “a lesson learned for me has been that the distance between someone who’s been in newsrooms for 40 years and someone who’s stepping into one for the first time in 2024 is pretty big.”
“I’d love to see us build up a stronger, more formalized mentorship program,” Campbell added. “Something we’ve been talking about a lot is our responsibility to the professional development of journalists.”
Two of the three reporters who worked for the Wichita Beacon in its first year now work for other newsrooms in Wichita. Campbell said The Beacon should be proud of the talent it brought to Wichita.
Despite having left The Beacon, Basore Wenzl said she’s grateful for the local funding that supports the news outlet. “I am grateful to the Wichita Foundation for investing in local news and being willing to experiment,” she said. “We will never be able to revitalize local news without bold experimentation.”
The staff member who left in 2022 reflected on how they saw The Beacon shape Wichita’s news landscape. “I think that The Beacon’s presence…has maybe pushed newsrooms [in Wichita] to think more creatively about their relationships with the community,” they told me. “When you see something new, even if maybe it’s not done properly, I think it forces [other newsrooms] to be like, ‘O.K. let’s take a beat — why did the foundation think they couldn’t invest in us? Why did they think they had to create something entirely different?’”
To succeed, ex-reporter Salzbrenner thinks The Beacon needs to “ditch” the idea that there’s “one single road map to every story that is published on The Beacon.”
Wichita Beacon leadership, for their part — Canon, Campbell, and Carter — have all been in their roles for less than two years. From their perspective, that just isn’t very much time to restaff and shore up a newsroom.
Campbell stressed they face two separate challenges — one to “fix this broken model of journalism that’s disappearing,” and one that “reporters have been living in really tough and challenging working environments because of that scarcity.”
“We’re trying to solve both of those problems at the same time,” she added. “I think we’re prioritizing how to solve for the journalism, [but] we can’t do that without solving for the culture challenge as well, concurrently.”
From Carter’s perspective, the Wichita Beacon is “just getting to the point” where it could be a success.
“It’s not like there’s an instant newsroom starter pack,” she said, using the analogy of a foam dinosaur. “You don’t just drop it in water and it becomes a newsroom in 10 seconds.”
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Canon spent 12 years at The Kansas City Star. In fact, he worked at The Star for 27 years.
