When saving journalism pays better than doing journalism

Editor's note: See the correction at the bottom of this story regarding an earlier reference to Anne Galloway and VTDigger.

I started looking at nonprofit journalism salaries to answer a larger question for myself. I'm preparing a TEDx Point Park University talk about what happens to a city when the old machinery of local journalism breaks down. In Pittsburgh, that question is not theoretical. We've lived for years with a weakened daily newspaper, a strike paper, a collection of nonprofit and independent outlets, public media, newsletters, student journalists, freelancers, foundations, intermediaries and civic leaders, all orbiting the same problem: Who is going to pay for the journalism a city still needs?

That question sent me into tax filings.

At first I thought locally. What do Pittsburgh's nonprofit newsrooms depend on? How much comes from readers? How much from foundations? How much reaches reporters? How much goes to executives, fundraising, administration and the machinery that now surrounds the work?

Then I widened the lens. If Pittsburgh is trying to imagine its journalism future, it helps to know what the national models look like.

One detail from The Texas Tribune stopped me.

In the organization's 2024 tax filing, the highest-paid employee wasn't the editor in chief. It wasn't the chief executive. It was the chief revenue officer.

That fact doesn't prove a scandal. The Texas Tribune is one of the most successful nonprofit statehouse journalism experiments in the country. A newsroom that raises millions of dollars a year needs someone who can keep the money coming in. But the salary table reads like an X-ray of the nonprofit journalism economy. The public mission is reporting. The business model is fundraising. And at one of the field's flagship institutions, the person responsible for revenue was paid more than the person nominally running the place.

According to the Tribune's 2024 filing, the organization reported about $15.25 million in revenue and $14.75 million in expenses. Its chief revenue officer, April Brumley Hinkle, received total compensation of $357,605. Its chief executive, Sonal Shah, received $355,030. The gap is small. What it signals is harder to wave off.

The Tribune also had one of the more diversified revenue profiles in the sample, about $1.23 million in program-service revenue, more than many of its peers. Even so, contributions and grants accounted for nearly 90 percent of total revenue.

That is the pattern I kept seeing.

From there, the question gets bigger and more uncomfortable.

ProPublica reported $64.27 million in revenue, $45.74 million in expenses and $98.06 million in net assets in its 2024 filing. Its co-CEO and editor in chief, Stephen Engelberg, received $518,182 in total compensation. Its president and co-CEO, Robin Sparkman, received $499,645. Several other senior editors and executives appeared high in the compensation rankings.

There's an easy version of this story. It points at high salaries and declares hypocrisy. ProPublica complicates that. Some of the best-paid people in its filing are journalists and editors, part of the work rather than administrators hovering above it.

Nonprofit journalism does pay some elite journalists well. That isn't automatically a problem. It raises a harder question: What happens when nonprofit journalism succeeds?

ProPublica was created to help rescue public-interest reporting from the collapse of the commercial market. It has produced extraordinary work. It has also built an institution with reserves that many local newsrooms could only dream of. That may be prudent. It also shows how unevenly philanthropic security is distributed across the journalism world.

Some nonprofit news institutions now measure their cushion in years.

Then there is the American Journalism Project, an intermediary rather than a newsroom. It raises money, invests in local news organizations and provides support meant to make them more durable. (Former ProPublica president Richard Tofel has written a sharp piece on intermediaries and the questions around them; it's worth reading.)

In 2024, AJP reported $38.10 million in revenue, $30.26 million in expenses and $64.71 million in net assets. It paid $12.29 million in direct grants to downstream newsrooms, about 41 percent of total expenses. The rest went to internal program work, salaries and benefits, fundraising, management and operations. Internal salaries and employee benefits totaled $7.83 million.

AJP's defense would likely be straightforward. Local news organizations need more than checks. They need infrastructure, coaching, strategy, revenue help, finance systems, hiring support and the kind of institutional knowledge that tiny newsrooms often lack. That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

So does the concern.

If nonprofit journalism now requires a parallel class of fundraisers, investment strategists, capacity builders and consultants before money reaches reporters, the industry hasn't escaped its overhead. It has relocated it.

This is where the debate over executive compensation becomes a debate over journalism itself.

For two decades, the argument for nonprofit journalism has been clear. Commercial newspapers were collapsing. Advertising could no longer support accountability reporting. Local papers were being stripped by chains and funds more interested in margins than civic obligation. Philanthropy would step in where the market failed.

That argument remains powerful. It's also incomplete.

The filings show a sector overwhelmingly dependent on contributed revenue. In the organizations I reviewed, contributions and grants often accounted for more than 90 percent of total revenue. Some came close to total dependence. Reader revenue, program-service revenue, events, sponsorships and consulting fees exist, but for many organizations they remain secondary.

That dependence matters because philanthropy is more than money. It creates a labor market. It creates jobs, titles, incentives and internal hierarchies. It rewards people who can speak the language of foundations, design strategic plans, manage boards, cultivate major donors, write grant proposals and translate messy journalism into clean institutional outcomes.

Those skills are useful. Some are essential. They are also not the same as reporting.

I say that as someone who has spent much of his professional life trying to keep reporting alive by doing everything around the reporting. I have written the grants. I have pitched the projects. I have built the decks. I have tried to explain why some strange, stubborn, expensive piece of journalism deserves to exist before anyone knows whether an audience will show up for it.

I don't romanticize the old newsroom. Reporters should make more money, not less. Editors should be paid seriously. Fundraisers who can bring in millions may be worth real money. Running a newsroom is hard. Building a sustainable institution is hard.

People in nonprofit journalism should get paid. The trouble is that the sector talks about mission in public and management in private. It asks donors and readers to support reporting, and the public filings frequently make it difficult to tell how much money actually reaches reporting labor.

Not program services. Not capacity. Not impact. Reporting labor.

How much goes to reporters? How much to editors directly editing stories? How much to freelancers, photographers, data journalists, local bureaus and reporting collaborations? How much to executive leadership, fundraising, brand strategy, consultants, offices, travel and the expanding priesthood of sustainability?

The Form 990 can't answer that cleanly. Organizations classify expenses differently. Some editorial management counts as program service. Some compensation figures include benefits, deferred compensation or consulting payments. Some organizations are publishers. Some are training shops. Some are intermediaries. Some are hybrids.

This is not a story about corruption. Nonprofit journalism has matured into something more institutional, more professionalized and more managerial than its origin story suggests.

That maturation has produced real journalism. ProPublica has exposed abuses that commercial newsrooms often lacked the time, money or nerve to pursue. The Texas Tribune built a durable statehouse model in a state where public-affairs reporting matters enormously. The Marshall Project, CalMatters, States Newsroom, Inside Climate News, The Trace and others have filled gaps left by shrinking newspapers.

These are real newsrooms. They do the work.

The filings also show that nonprofit journalism is building a class structure of its own. At the top are executives, presidents, chief revenue officers, chief development officers, chief strategy officers and senior editors making salaries that can look startling inside a profession where many reporters earn modest wages or survive on freelance rates. In the middle are foundation-facing managers who translate journalism into grant deliverables. At the bottom are the people whose work gives the whole system its public legitimacy: reporters, photographers, producers, freelancers and local editors.

The right measure here is opportunity cost.

A $400,000 compensation package represents more than five $75,000 reporting jobs, or four $100,000 reporting jobs. That doesn't mean one executive should be replaced by four reporters. Institutions need leadership, fundraising, legal review and finance systems. But the tradeoff should be visible.

Every budget is an editorial statement. Every compensation table is a theory of value.

This matters most for intermediaries. A publisher can point to the journalism it produces. An intermediary carries a harder burden. It has to show how much money reaches newsrooms, how much reaches reporting labor and how much gets consumed along the way by its own staff, consultants, convenings and grantmaking bureaucracy.

That doesn't make intermediaries illegitimate. Small newsrooms often need the very services they provide. But if the public pitch is that local journalism is in crisis, the public should be able to see how much of the rescue money arrives at local journalism.

That is the standard journalism applies to everyone else. It should apply it to itself.

In Pittsburgh, this is the part I keep coming back to. We don't have the luxury of abstraction. If the old daily newspaper model is broken and the new system depends heavily on philanthropy, we need to know what kind of replacement we are building.

Are we building reporting capacity? Civic infrastructure? A nonprofit version of the old prestige economy? A grant-funded managerial class that talks about journalism while reporters stay precarious? Or some complicated mixture of all of it?

I don't have a clean answer. I'm suspicious of anyone who does.

The numbers suggest that the future of journalism won't be decided only by newsrooms. It will be decided by boards, foundations, intermediaries, development officers, executive-compensation committees and the quiet assumptions embedded in budgets.

That is why salary data matters. A high salary isn't automatically shameful, and nonprofit journalism shouldn't run on poverty. Money reveals what institutions actually believe.

If there is money for presidents, chief revenue officers and strategy executives, there should be money for reporting jobs. If there are reserves large enough to protect institutions for years, there should be a public explanation of how that security is being converted into coverage. If intermediaries raise money in the name of local journalism, they should be able to show how much reaches local journalists.

The nonprofit journalism movement began as a rescue mission. It has become an industry.

That doesn't make it a failure. It means it deserves the same scrutiny it asks readers to apply to everyone else.

As I work on this TEDx talk, that is the thought I can't shake. The collapse of the old newspaper business didn't end the need for journalism. It changed the question from "Who owns the press?" to "Who funds the press?" And now, increasingly, to "Who manages the press?"

Those aren't side questions. They are the story.

If journalism is supposed to hold power accountable, it has to be able to look honestly at the power structures forming inside its own rescue.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly included Anne Galloway, founder of VTDigger, in tables and charts ranking annual compensation among nonprofit journalism officers and key employees. After publication, Galloway contacted me to explain that the figure I used reflected compensation distributed over time, from July 2022 to February 2026, not compensation paid in a single year. She said the agreement related to earlier years in which she received no compensation or low compensation while building VTDigger, and that her annual compensation did not exceed $110,000 plus modest benefits.

I got that wrong. I treated a multi-year figure as though it could be fairly compared against one year of VTDigger's budget, which made the comparison inaccurate and unfair. I have removed Galloway and VTDigger from the affected compensation table, compensation-as-share-of-expenses chart and reporter-salary-equivalent table while I review the underlying documents.

I'm sorry to Anne Galloway for the mistake. This piece grew out of research for a TEDx Point Park University talk about Pittsburgh's journalism future, then widened into a national look at nonprofit journalism finances. I used public records, my own calculations, and Google Gemini's Deep Research tool to gather and organize information. I tried to check the work before publishing, but I missed this distinction, and the responsibility for that is mine.

I still think the broader discussion is important: how nonprofit journalism is funded, how money moves through the field and how much of it reaches reporting labor. And that conversation has to be built on accurate information and fair treatment of the people named in it. I hope to speak with Galloway to better understand VTDigger's history, and I welcome additional corrections or context from others included in the analysis. Reach me any time via matt AT amphibian DOT media