CASE STUDY
Hundreds of Hoosiers came together to launch a nonprofit local news startup. One year later, here’s how it’s going.
It takes more than a good idea to build a successful local news organization. In Indiana, it took a coalition — journalists, civic leaders, philanthropists and community leaders — working toward shared goals: to build a trusted source of local news that authentically reflects Hoosiers and to develop a business model to sustain it. With research in hand, early capital raised, and a team built for both journalistic and business excellence, this coalition launched Free Press Indiana, a nonprofit organization dedicated to local news in Indiana, and its flagship newsroom, Mirror Indy. One year in, they’re proving what’s possible when everything aligns — mission, leadership, business model and community.
The seeds of this effort were planted in 2020, when a group of Indiana leaders asked a hard question: What would it take to rebuild local news in a state where the press had been nearly hollowed out? This group of Hoosiers — former journalists and media executives as well as philanthropy and business leaders — set out with an ambitious mission: to turn the downward trajectory around by building a broad coalition of concerned residents in support of a free, independent and thriving local press. They surveyed over 1,100 residents from 79 of Indiana’s 92 counties, in partnership with the American Journalism Project, and raised more than $10 million from a dozen donors to seed the launch of a nonprofit news organization. Free Press Indiana invested in a number of newsrooms across the state and launched Mirror Indy, a publication dedicated to Indianapolis.
Mirror Indy was created to reflect the full, multifaceted story of Indianapolis, by and for people who live in it, in service of a better future. With 19 journalists and just over a year of reporting, the publication has produced impactful journalism, including an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment in the mayor’s office, which led to widespread calls for change, a city-county council probe into the administration, and the creation of an anonymous reporting system. Mirror Indy did a series investigating the failures of the Indianapolis Housing Authority with an accompanying series of guides and explainers for renters to make the reporting useful for people most affected. A deeper look into a pilot program of a gunshot detection system prompted questions over the value of the technology, which was ultimately abandoned by local police. The newsroom has deployed resources to report on reader tips, documented the stories of local residents trying to make a difference, and invested in a growing community reporting team, which places dedicated reporters in neighborhoods in Indianapolis that aren’t covered consistently by other newsrooms.
Mirror Indy has connected with Indianapolis residents in innovative ways. It has recruited and trained almost 300 Indy residents so far to its Documenters program, which trains and pays residents to help cover public meetings, and nearly 50 of those residents have taken an assignment in the last 30 days. The site’s arts and culture coverage, which regularly highlights artists and musicians around Indianapolis, is a local favorite. The organization publishes across multiple platforms to reach as many residents as possible.
Mirror Indy makes it a point to reach not only typical news consumers but audiences that aren’t typically served by mainstream media and aren’t habitual newspaper website users. After hearing the needs of some residents who shared they weren’t best served by email newsletters, Mirror Indy began using texts to expand the ways they tell stories and get information to residents. They launched four texting groups focused on their everyday reporting, housing, and the westside and eastside neighborhoods. Combined, more than 1,000 people subscribe to get direct updates from Mirror Indy reporters. And it’s a two-way conversation. Subscribers use the groups to text reporters directly with questions they have or anything they want the newsroom to look into. With a platform-agnostic model, it publishes on MirrorIndy.org and is steadily building a daily newsletter audience and social media following. And it shares its content with partners, including local broadcaster WISH-TV, which amplifies Mirror Indy stories to hundreds of thousands of people so that information produced reaches as many residents as possible. Nearly 30,000 subscribers get Mirror Indy news in their inbox every day; nearly 24,000 people follow Mirror Indy on social media, with over 17 million impressions since launch. The website, a mix of hard news, service journalism, arts and culture, and contributions from Indy Documenters, averages 50,000 unique visitors each month, and that number is growing steadily.
The organization has gained early traction in building a revenue model to sustain its organizations for the long term. All of Mirror Indy’s content is free, so readers don’t hit a subscription wall. But the organization now garners financial support from more than 1,000 members, and it has built upon its founding coalition of funders by raising another $1.1 million in its first 12 months of operation, including multiple six-figure donations from new donors and local foundations motivated by Mirror Indy’s impact. This has propelled the organization to a $5.3 million operating budget in 2025, and is budgeted to end the year with 31 staff members. The organization has also paid careful attention to managing expenses-to-revenues and building a cash reserve— it has built a six-month cash reserve it believed was critical for long-term planning and sustainability. This stability and early traction has allowed the organization to explore expanding its model to serve rural communities in Indiana in 2026.
Nonprofit local news is still in its early growth stages, and with hundreds of organizations appearing on the scene over the past decade, not all organizations are built the same way. So what can we learn from Free Press Indiana and its coalition of supporters?
Local roots
The seeds that blossomed into Mirror Indy and Free Press Indiana were planted during a three-way phone call in 2020.As the pandemic raged, trusted local information was scarce, and Indiana felt increasingly ripped apart by political polarization.
Myrta Pulliam, Karen Ferguson Fuson, and Mark Miles all had deep roots in Indiana, and all three were concerned about the future of its local media ecosystem. Every newsroom they could think of across the state was dramatically smaller than just a few years earlier, leaving huge gaps in coverage.
The dwindling amount of news reporting wasn’t worrisome only on principle. Pulliam, a journalist and philanthropist who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Indianapolis Star and co-founded the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors, was well acquainted with research showing that places without strong local news coverage are subject to higher tax rates. Ferguson Fuson, who had spent several years as the Star’s publisher and as an executive at its parent company overseeing newspapers in 19 states, was troubled by how many people of all political persuasions saw the existing media options as hopelessly biased, which she knew could lead to broader failures of trust in other community institutions. Miles, currently CEO of IndyCar and Penske Entertainment, with a storied career in business and civic leadership, had thought deeply about the role of local media in Indianapolis’ economic and civic trajectory.
“How can you not look at that and think, what the hell is going on? Something’s wrong here. We’ve got to fix this,” Pulliam said. “What’s going to happen with democracy if nobody’s reading a newspaper and knows what’s going on? For democracy, it’s terrifying.”
The group connected with the American Journalism Project, which had developed a program to conduct information needs assessments and identify potential sources of philanthropic help. Together, they led a statewide community listening effort and organized a steering committee composed of Ferguson Fuson, Miles, Pulliam, and three other local community leaders. Lumina Foundation and the Central Indiana Community Foundation supported the costs of the assessment and provided invaluable support and guidance to the project’s formation.
A community-driven vision
Ask anyone involved in Free Press Indiana now — more than a year into the organization’s life as a core part of the state’s news ecosystem — about the secret to its success, and they’ll start with the community listening initiatives that resulted from Pulliam’s conversation with the American Journalism Project. While the steering committee saw a clear need, they wanted to be careful not to presume to understand what it looked like from the perspective of communities they weren’t part of or to assume they knew the solution. The only way to answer those questions was to talk to a huge number of people: slow work for which there is no shortcut. “Patience was the name of the game,” Ferguson Fuson said. “Not having an ego in this was what was going to make us successful.”
A team of researchers with the American Journalism Project, led by Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer, and Loretta Chao, head of startup studio and local news innovation, interviewed 1,137 people in 79 of Indiana’s 92 counties. They found that in Indianapolis, residents wanted more information about how police were tackling gun violence, about the impact of education policies, and about what was happening in communities of color and among queer and trans people. Several said they wanted to know about potential changes earlier, before it was too late to have their opinion heard on a given issue. Others spoke about the need for news outlets to be accountable to their readers and proactively reach out, rather than letting the most “active and engaged, the loudest and most frequent” dominate coverage, in the words of one interviewee. “We heard clearly from people that they felt that they were not seeing themselves reflected in the news and that their stories weren’t being told,” Pulliam said.
Among many conclusions, a few priorities were clear. The solution had to include a combination of starting new newsrooms, investment in existing organizations, and a shift to collaboration rather than competition between media outlets. It was obvious that the entire state was in need of more local news, but that Indianapolis, northwest Indiana (particularly Gary, a majority Black city), and rural counties around the state faced the greatest need. By the time the exploratory phase had concluded, the steering committee and its partners at AJP had coalesced around three major strategies for bringing more news to Indiana:
- Fill gaps by creating new, independent newsrooms with innovative community journalism programs.
- Facilitate investment in partner news organizations to strengthen their news and their impact.
- Foster collaboration with a growing list of local news partners to amplify quality, independent journalism for all Hoosiers, especially underserved communities.
The big tent: Building a coalition to power the work
With a problem so vast and complex, the steering committee knew the solution had to be ambitious. They also knew they’d need broad local support at every level of funding to make the solution more resilient and sustainable than with media models of the past. It wouldn’t be enough to secure seed capital from a handful of investors — the organization needed a groundswell of support from the state’s civic and philanthropic communities to develop a credible path to growth and sustainability.
Continuing their partnership with the American Journalism Project, the committee set out to talk to as many people as possible about the plan. As they went out to speak to people, committee members found widespread agreement about the problem and excitement about supporting their solution. To reach as many people as possible, Pulliam described developing an informal system of concentric circles, where people she knew would recommend people they knew, spreading the net ever wider.
At first, they weren’t even looking for particular skills or qualifications, or even money — they were just trying to talk to as many people as possible. As they worked their way down an ever-lengthening list, they began to home in on types of people they needed: potential board members, potential staff members, potential funders, potential media partners. By the time they went out asking for money, they had built a broad network and credibility with people from many different worlds. “We sold a vision for an organization that was going to help protect democracy and create more local news and help the media ecosystem. It was really strategic and focused,” Fuson Ferguson said. “We concentrated on the research, we showed where the gaps were, and we talked about how we could create an organization to fill those gaps.”
The slow, tactical approach paid off. By the time the Indiana Local News Initiative, as the project was then known, was formally announced in February 2023 — two years after research began — the steering committee had raised more than $10 million from a who’s who of local foundations, including the Herbert Simon Family Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Indianapolis Foundation, the Robert R. and Gayle T. Meyer Family Fund, and the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. The impressive sum told the steering committee, as well as the larger community, that the Indiana Local News Initiative had the resources and the focused mission to achieve its lofty goals for news coverage across the state.
With a growing number of backers, Ferguson Fuson established a founding board alongside Miles and Ouimette. Their vision was to create a board of Indiana leaders who were deeply devoted to Indianapolis — leaders with strengths spanning business, nonprofit and community leadership, with representation from both major political parties. The board quickly expanded to include notable figures such as former state representative and Indy Recorder publisher Carolene Mays; Nichole Wilson, vice president of Community Health Operations at Indiana University Health; Melissa Proffitt, partner-in-charge of Client Relations at Ice Miller LLP; and Pulliam. Their shared mission, vision, and values are essential to providing strategic oversight and in helping make the case for resources for the organization.
To hire their founding chief executive officer and editor-in-chief, the board formed executive search committees of local and national experts and conducted competitive public searches. Residents were included all along the way: The executive searches included opportunities for community members to ask candidates questions and give their input. Community members were also invited to join in the organization’s naming and branding process.
Today, the tent continues to grow. Free Press Indiana’s board now includes nine local leaders — including Butler University Dean Carolyn Gentle-Gennity and Barato Britt, president & CEO, of the Edna Martin Christian Center — forming what Fuson Ferguson says is the best board she’s ever seen.
A counterintuitive approach to hiring
Free Press Indiana’s first publication, Mirror Indy, would cover Indianapolis, increasing the volume of original local reporting and earning trust by focusing on community. To ensure that this orientation would be baked into the newsroom’s DNA, the first hire was neither CEO nor editor-in-chief, but a position titled “Community Journalism Director.” The American Journalism Project’s Startup Studio, a program designed to help take nonprofit newsrooms from idea to launch, developed the role as a hybrid of editorial and community-building work and turned to its network of community members to spread the word about the opening, asking them to make recommendations for people with this special blend of skills. Starting with that job was crucial to demonstrating to both prospective talent and readership that Mirror Indy was doing something different, Chao said — that it was serious both about amplifying the voices of all Indianapolis residents and about ensuring that its journalism felt like a collaboration.
That first employee was Indianapolis native Ariana Beedie, a journalist and community builder who was working at the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center when she heard about the efforts to build Mirror Indy.
As soon as she started, Beedie received all the materials from the focus groups and resident interviews the steering committee had overseen, but she also set out to do her own listening sessions focused more specifically on Indianapolis. The broad themes echoed what researchers had heard statewide, but drilling down to the neighborhood level allowed Beedie to hear exactly which communities and stories weren’t being covered. She knows that having the time to do that focused work is a rare occurrence in the journalism industry, where there’s an emphasis on speed. “We weren’t going to rest on meeting with people at the beginning of the process and saying we’re done,” she said. “We were saying ‘we actually want to earn your trust. And that takes time, and it takes us listening to you.’”
Beedie still remembers many of the specific conversations she had with Indianapolis residents back when she was Mirror Indy’s sole employee. Over and over, she heard that people were scared of the news. It wasn’t that they didn’t want coverage of serious issues, but too many outlets made it seem like their communities were only the worst parts. They wanted to hear about the bright spots, like music and art, as well as about how to make a difference.
They also talked a lot about trust. Why would they talk to a journalist about what was happening in their neighborhood when that journalist wasn’t part of that neighborhood and might never come back there after the big story of the week died down? Residents of Northwest Landing, a historically Black neighborhood, told her that they saw reporters after a crime occurred, but never at events at the community center or the bookstore, or for their annual festivals. Beedie had spent much of her career working in grassroots nonprofits in the city, including as the neighborhood engagement director at the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center. She wanted to attend the community festivals. More importantly, she wanted to get the people already attending to feel empowered to cover what was happening in their own neighborhoods.
Building a team and a newsroom culture from scratch
Beedie wasn’t on her own for long. The month after she was hired, Free Press Indiana hired veteran journalist and nonprofit communications executive Ebony Chappel to be its market director, overseeing branding, marketing, event planning, communications and community outreach strategy. Two months after that, Mirror Indy got its first editor-in-chief: Oseye Boyd, who had been a top editor at the Indianapolis Star and the Indianapolis Recorder.
From there, Boyd worked quickly to bring on a team that included people with varying types and amounts of experience, from people new to journalism to prominent local media veterans and a Pulitzer Prize winner, who would go on to help Mirror Indy publish hard-hitting investigations in its first year. With support from the American Journalism Project Startup Studio, Boyd developed a staffing strategy that included dedicated capacity for arts and culture journalism, social media, and mentorship and editing capacity for residents who signed up for the Indy Documenters program. Though every role had distinct requirements, every hire was screened for their belief and passion in the impact-first, community-centered vision and mission of the organization, their commitment to doing journalism differently, and their personality’s suitability for a fast-paced startup environment.
Importantly, Boyd took her time filling each role, cognizant that the cost of hiring the wrong person would be far greater than the cost of delay. The result was a staff with a strong culture and a shared mission. “We don’t always agree on how we get there, but we know where we’re trying to go,” Boyd said. “They’re just good people. The team that came together and the work that they do, their personalities and their willingness to help each other, it is awesome to watch.”
Boyd, Chappel, and Beedie all have long histories in Indianapolis: Boyd, the only non-Indianapolis native among them, first moved to the city in 1998. They were also all Black women, designing a new outlet from scratch in an industry that is still majority white. They each knew the feeling of having been the only Black voice in the room, and they were thrilled by the chance to flip the script. “It was a lot of imagining,” Chappel said of those early days. “We sat and we thought about what we want this to look like, to feel like. We spent a lot of time being very, very creative and thoughtful and setting intentions about what the future could be.”
A different kind of newsroom
Mirror Indy has many components familiar to anyone who’s worked in a traditional newsroom, but with key structural differences that enable it to produce a body of work that looks and feels entirely different from others in Indianapolis.
That included creating a website that looked unlike any other news publication. The early team members told the branding firm that the digital publication should be an homage to alt-weeklies, not staid newspapers. It should be “bold,” “gritty,” and “people-forward,” Chappel said. The result was a site that looks young and fresh, with neon green and pink splashes and bold fonts. The publication’s name grew out of that same ethos: reflecting people’s stories and going beneath the surface. Together, the various parts of Mirror Indy’s identity make clear that it’s doing something distinct.
This intentional approach shapes every part of Mirror Indy’s journalism — from story selection to sourcing to how reporters engage with the communities they cover. Mirror Indy developed six audience personas to guide its reporting strategy, ensuring that coverage reflects a wide range of residents — especially those historically left out of mainstream media. This framework helped make the goal of serving underrepresented communities concrete, not abstract, and is deeply embedded in the newsroom’s culture and hiring. As Boyd put it, “We are here to help people thrive.”
The organization’s leaders knew they needed a content strategy that met the needs identified in the original research: strong coverage of government, the local economy, and other areas in need of more accountability; arts and culture coverage to tell the full story of Indianapolis; and lots of on-the-ground community coverage in the townships often neglected by shrinking legacy media. Boyd and other early staff members landed on creating community reporting positions for the east and west sides of the city — reporters who would spend the majority of their time interacting with residents and covering topics important to people in those outer townships. The newsroom is adding a third community reporter this year and aims to eventually have at least one in each of the nine townships of Indianapolis.
Bringing residents into the news gathering process
One of Mirror Indy’s biggest differentiators is the newsroom’s participatory journalism program, Indy Documenters. The staff knew that simply covering stories wasn’t sufficient to build trust with local residents: People also had to feel empowered to write about their own communities.
One of Beedie’s first big projects was building a network of Documenters — local residents who are trained and paid to attend and take notes on government meetings to create a public record. Documenters was founded in 2018 by the journalism lab City Bureau, and has now expanded to 26 cities. Beedie has 291 Documenters trained to cover meetings across Marion County, where Indianapolis sits. Suddenly, groups like the library board, the public transit agency, the police complaint board, and the historic preservation commission were having their meetings covered — often for the first time — bringing a new layer of accountability as well as opportunities for people to cover topics they were interested in without working full-time in journalism.
Prioritizing the Documenters program worked for Mirror Indy because Boyd made sure to only hire people who didn’t think certain types of stories were beneath them or carried less value than others. Investigative work isn’t seen as more important than service journalism; in fact, it almost always has some sort of service component. Nobody sees any type of work as beneath their station.
Savvy business leadership
Free Press Indiana was founded with a clear goal: to become a self-sustaining nonprofit organization supported by diverse revenue streams. Its seed capital was never intended to carry it indefinitely—it was a strategic head start. The funding allowed the organization to launch its first newsroom with a large enough staff to demonstrate meaningful impact, while also building the infrastructure necessary for long-term health: a broad base of financial support from institutional and individual philanthropy, membership contributions, and corporate sponsorships.
To generate the kind of revenue needed to support an operation with ambitions to grow to $5 million or more in annual expenses, the organization needed a CEO who could build on early momentum and rally widespread local support around the idea of journalism as a public service — and the urgency of Indiana’s need for it. The right person would need to navigate the volatility of startup life, stay focused on the mission, and build an organization where top talent would want to work.
Significant care went into hiring Free Press Indiana’s first CEO and assembling its business and operations team. As with the search for the executive editor, the CEO search was led by a committee of experts, including representatives from the American Journalism Project. Bro Krift, then executive editor of the Indianapolis Star, emerged as a standout candidate. He had earned deep respect across the local media ecosystem for his integrity and vision, and he brought a rare mix of editorial insight, executive leadership, and business acumen, despite this being his first formal CEO role. He was hired in October 2023.
With Boyd leading the editorial team toward launch, Krift turned immediately to building the business side of the organization. While he anticipated a learning curve, the clarity of Free Press Indiana’s mission—and the energy of the team around it—gave him the confidence to move quickly. His priorities were to build a sustainable revenue engine, raise significantly more funding, and set up strong operational systems.
Krift developed a three-year business plan focused on building a six-month cash reserve, diversifying revenue sources, and practicing rigorous financial management. An early priority was assembling a full business team to support the organization’s long-term sustainability. He engaged a fractional finance firm to ensure strong financial controls and forecasting, hired staff to lead human resources and people operations, and built out core functions in audience and membership, development, and donor engagement. He knew that fully leveraging the runway afforded by the organization’s seed funders would mean not just raising more money, but building the operational backbone to sustain and grow Mirror Indy for the long haul.
In the organization’s earliest days—before Mirror Indy had launched or begun building an audience—Krift prioritized philanthropic revenue. One of his first major hires was Chief Development Officer Peter Hanscom, who brought experience from leadership roles at United Way of Central Indiana and a background in organizing and fundraising. Within a year, Free Press Indiana had expanded its support base and brought in over $1 million in new funding, including from prominent local philanthropists like the Glick and Irsay families. The organization’s goal is to increase that total by at least 50 percent in 2025.
Importantly, Free Press Indiana’s funders now include both journalism-focused and non-journalism philanthropies. One notable partner is the Clowes Fund, an Indianapolis-based arts foundation that made a multiyear commitment to support Mirror Indy’s arts and culture coverage as well as its investment in local artists for visual and production work. The shared interest in elevating the local creative economy has become one of Mirror Indy’s defining features and a reason the newsroom has resonated deeply with its audience. The organization considers this partnership a proof of concept that can be replicated.
Krift is just as excited about the small donations from readers, which he says is a true measure of impact. A year in, Free Press Indiana has more than 1,000 members, with the average monthly recurring donor giving $16 a month. Sixty-seven percent of members contributed less than $100 in 2024. About 71 percent of Free Press Indiana’s revenue comes from foundations and grants, and 22 percent from individual donors. The ultimate goal will be growth across the board, with less dependence on any single revenue source or type—that means significantly more individual and small donors, and the addition of sponsorship revenue as Mirror Indy’s audience continues to grow.
As Mirror Indy enters its second year, with a growing audience base, the organization is now expanding its focus to include membership and sponsorship revenue — key ingredients in creating a more balanced and durable revenue model.
“Free Press Indiana quickly put into place a business team that’s shown the grit, hustle, and determination needed to bring in new revenue sources that will sustain the organization for years to come,” said Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer at the American Journalism Project and a Free Press Indiana board member.
Ecosystem awareness
An important part of the value proposition of Free Press Indiana and Mirror Indy is fitting into the broader local media ecosystem. Free Press Indiana’s strategy to not only fill gaps, but to facilitate investment and foster collaboration, are all vital to what its founders and board members see as the solution.
Free Press Indiana didn’t set out to replace existing local news options, or even to compete with them. Its employees believe to their core that their community is healthier when there are many options and when newsrooms are collaborating to reduce duplicative work. They feel a responsibility to help support a healthy media ecosystem where more people have more access to quality journalism. They prioritized partnerships with other media organizations, which helps get more journalism in front of more people and contributes to a healthier media ecosystem across the state. Rather than going head-to-head with organizations like the Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis Recorder, Indiana News Service, and WFYI public television, they work together, reprinting stories and occasionally co-publishing larger projects. Other important partners include locally-owned WISH-TV and Radio One. All of Free Press Indiana’s partners are able to republish and use their reporting for free.
Of course, partnership work is challenging to coordinate. So one of Free Press Indiana key hires was for a managing editor of partnerships and projects, Lisa Renze. Renze takes the lead on maintaining communication and relationships with the organization’s many media partners and also forges new partnerships with organizations across the state, with a listening ear about what kinds of content sharing and support could be most helpful to other newsrooms and most effective in joining forces to better serve Hoosiers. Last year, she led a pilot project to place and mentor interns in a rural Indiana county where legacy newspapers had folded. The project was a significant learning experience for Free Press Indiana as it explores potential solutions to fill information gaps in the rest of the state.
“We can’t do this work alone, and we shouldn’t try to,” Boyd said.
“Anything successful, it’s not even worth doing alone,” Beedie adds.
Challenges and lessons learned
As with any ambitious startup, Mirror Indy’s launch has not been without its challenges.
Asking for significant philanthropic investment for an organization that has yet to be launched or proved sustainable can make some funders hesitant. Despite widespread backing from many local foundations and individual donors, two of Indianapolis’ largest philanthropic institutions — the Lilly Endowment Inc. and the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation — chose not to participate in Free Press Indiana’s seed round. Because of their prominence in the city’s funding landscape, their absence caused hesitation among some early funders, who wanted to see whether the largest institutions would commit before making their own funding decisions. The organization was able to overcome this by taking a few extra quarters than originally planned to assemble a broad and motivated base of supporters and showing them a viable path to raising sufficient funds for launch.
Another startup challenge: Brand awareness takes time. While Mirror Indy has built strong engagement through its newsletter, social media, and community events, monthly traffic to its website isn’t a steep and steady upward trajectory. Building a digital audience from scratch — without the benefit of legacy infrastructure, existing brand awareness, or platform amplification — is a slow process, made harder by shifts in search engine algorithms and the rising use of generative AI tools, which may divert traffic from original reporting. The organization is embracing experimentation in its platform-agnostic distribution, trying different ways to achieve audience growth by testing different formats and methods of user acquisition. It is also investing in brand awareness marketing.
From Day 1, Free Press Indiana has been navigating between ambition and capacity. The organization set bold goals for Mirror Indy’s growth—expanding staff quickly, producing deeply reported stories, launching participatory programs like Indy Documenters, and experimenting with creative partnerships. That ambition has been a key to the newsroom’s early success. But it has also required constant calibration to ensure that growth doesn’t outpace capacity.
While collaboration has been a cornerstone of Mirror Indy’s strategy, coordinating partnerships across a complex and sometimes competitive local media ecosystem requires time for partners to build trust, relationship management, and clear boundaries. Efforts to co-publish content or avoid duplicative coverage have been well received, but this also requires sustained effort and flexibility, especially as more nonprofit and independent outlets emerge in the region.
The bottom line: shared ownership
Among all the components that have made Free Press Indiana and Mirror Indy successful, there is one clear through line: the ability of its leaders and champions to bring people together, united by their commitment to providing free, accurate, nonpartisan journalism for Hoosiers. Loyal audience members, staff, the board of directors, media partners, and a growing community of financial supporters all operate as a team of nonprofit news pioneers who believe that Indiana needs strong, independent local journalism.
Highly active community members have been another critical part of Free Press Indiana’s story. Local organizers, photographers, historians, artists, researchers, neighborhood leaders, and others were part of early discussions about vision, helped hire editorial leadership, and have recruited residents to join the Indy Documenters program and attend Mirror Indy events. At each quarterly Free Press Indiana board meeting, Krift kicks off with a “mission moment,” where he invites a new reader to speak to the board about what they value most about Mirror Indy and answer questions about what more they’d like to see from local news.
As for the board itself, Krift cites them as a major driver of the organization’s success. Many nonprofit boards either are disengaged or try to micromanage, he says, but the one he reports to is passionate about the mission and about using their skills and connections to help, while also allowing the organization’s paid employees to do what they’re best at. They come from diverse backgrounds and communities and are members of different political parties. “Everyone is putting in the shoe leather and sweat equity to make this happen,” Krift says.
“The most beautiful thing about seeing Free Press Indiana flourish, is that the number of people who talk about it in terms of ‘we’ or ‘us’ just keeps growing and growing. You could be talking to a reporter, a board member, an Indy Documenter, a funder — they’re all speaking in terms of what ‘we’ are trying to accomplish and how ‘our’ work can be even better — all with the utmost respect and belief in the independence of the newsroom,” Chao said. “ That’s what happens when a newsroom exists not only to inform and to do kick-ass journalism, but to be something even bigger: a true, indispensable asset to the community it serves.”
In December 2024, Mirror Indy celebrated its first birthday. Ask anyone involved what they want to accomplish in the publication’s second year, and they’ll immediately say they want to do more: more Documenters covering more meetings, more arts and culture stories about the events more local residents should know about, more community gatherings and collaborations and landmark investigations and impacts of all kinds. It’s a big mission, but it’s more inspiring than intimidating. “This year is the year of intention,” Boyd said. “I want to grow, I want to get better. I want to be the trusted news source for people in Indianapolis. I want them to know that we’re here. I want to live our mission.”
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