Building a nonprofit newsroom in Silicon Valley

When legacy newsrooms began shrinking across the country, Silicon Valley — one of the wealthiest regions in the world — was not immune. In 2019, husband-and-wife team Ramona Giwargis and Josh Barousse launched San José Spotlight, a nonprofit newsroom focused on local government, policy, and civic engagement in Santa Clara County with a readership of over five million, according to its website. In this interview, Newsjunkie.net managing editor Peter Landau asks Barousse why he believed San Jose had become a “news desert,” how the nonprofit model sustains their work, and what it takes to build trust in a polarized media landscape.

When you launched in 2019, what exactly was missing in San Jose media? What was the gap you were trying to fill?

The harsh reality is that the Mercury News, the legacy paper in San Jose and Silicon Valley, was bought out [by Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc., part of private equity giant Alden Global Capital, in 2006] and they had round after round of layoffs. They care more about the bottom line. We felt Silicon Valley was a true news desert. 

First, a little backstory. [Co-founder and co-CEO] Ramona [Giwargis] and I, we're a husband and wife team. We actually moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. Ramona took a job at the Las Vegas Review Journal back in January of 2018, and while we're in Nevada, we learned of the Nevada Independent, which was the main competitor of the Review Journal and a nonprofit news organization. 

We both learned about the nonprofit concept, and we asked ourselves: What is nonprofit news? We did the research and met with the Independent’s founder, John Ralston, who's still a mentor to this day. We figured, if this model can work here in Nevada, why can't it work back in our hometown of San Jose? 

We quit our jobs and moved back and lived off of our savings for six months. We didn't take a paycheck, and here we are, seven-plus years later. We felt there were a lot of residents who care about what's going on at a local level, at their kids’ schools, and how city decisions impact them? The Mercury News was not only shrinking, but they were going more regional. We felt that the local San Jose voice was being lost.

Some of these owners of legacy papers are not thinking about the local community, they're thinking more about the bottom line. They're trying to do more with less. That’s how we ended up with a news desert in Silicon Valley.

It's hard for me to believe that one of the wealthiest regions in the world was a news desert. Was the Mercury News’ decision just financial, like we're seeing across the country with newspapers?

Yeah, it’s the same story that a lot of communities are seeing throughout the nation. That's why the nonprofit news model is the fastest growing model in journalism. There's now more than 500 nonprofit newsrooms throughout the country. We're 100% community supported. Some of these owners of legacy papers are not thinking about the local community, they're thinking more about the bottom line. They're trying to do more with less. That’s how we ended up with a news desert in Silicon Valley.

Are you a replacement for legacy outlets, or is there something fundamentally different about your approach.

Our niche is policy, politics, and government. We're not doing sports or arts and culture. We do some business reporting, but that's our niche for now. As we grow and scale the organization, we hope to do more down the line. 

We report the news and educate our residents, but we're also igniting civic engagement. We wanted to be more than just like a top-down news organization. We want to have a two way conversation with our readers. We host educational forums and events, candidate forums during election years. We have a full-day policy festival with panel discussions on important issues that are impacting our readers locally. 

Not only are they being educated, by attending these events, but we're also connecting them to local elected officials or local stakeholders. That's another way we want to ignite civic engagement, really motivate our audience to get involved civically.

As a nonprofit, you're not alone looking for a viable business model. But is it a stopgap measure, or is this a real path forward?

It's a real path forward for journalism. We’re learning that the advertising or subscription-based models don’t work locally. We're 100% free. Anybody can access our journalism. We do ask for reader donations, just like a lot of the other nonprofits–NPR, ProPublica, and KQED. It's a big part of our revenue models to get reader donations. 

We have a small pool of donors who are subsidizing everyone. That's why we diversify revenue streams. We also apply for various grants. We get sponsorships from corporations to help sponsor our events and underwrite some of our reporting. We also do advertising in our newsletter, products, and on our news site. That's generally the way that we make money. It’s really going to take journalism forward and we see it as a long term solution.

[W]e want to make sure that our journalism is free and accessible to everyone who wants to read it. We'll never go to a subscription or paywall model.

Since you don't have a paywall, how do you balance accessibility with financial sustainability? 

That's really important to us. It's a core principle of ours that We just make sure that we continue having diverse revenue streams. we want to make sure that our journalism is free and accessible to everyone who wants to read it. We'll never go to a subscription or paywall model.

We have a full-time director of development now. He's been with us for the last two-plus years, and he's been good at identifying our donors, taking the time to meet with them, finding out what their motivations are, what they want to see more of, and then working with them to get bigger gifts. 

That and innovate. We started covering San Jose and Santa Clara, those two cities, and now we're in the middle of expanding our coverage to South County to Gilroy/Morgan Hill. Once we do that, we'll have all 15 cities in Santa Clara County covered. Our last round of expansion was in 2024 where we expanded to an additional six cities in our county. We hope to start covering arts and culture. I think it will open us up to a larger audience. We live and die by the funnel. The funnel concept where you get readers to your news site and then get them to sign up for your newsletters products. You build loyalty that way. Hopefully they see the value in your reporting, and they'll want to donate and help sustain your reporting.

There are a lot of very wealthy people in Silicon Valley. Does that make it easier to get donors? And are you also getting small-dollar donations from the general community?

We found it hard to fundraise in Silicon Valley. It's one of the wealthiest regions in the entire world. However, I think a lot of folks are still not grasping the nonprofit concept. A lot of wealthy donors are giving elsewhere. It doesn't stay locally in Silicon Valley. A lot of our messaging, our calls to action and funding appeals, is reminding folks that we are a nonprofit, that we can't keep our journalism going unless everybody chips in. It's our path to long term sustainability. We'll just have to find new, innovative ways to grow our audience, build loyalty, and make sure they understand that if they want to keep seeing this journalism, they have to also chip in.

So you are getting a lot of small-dollar donations as well as going after the big fish?

Absolutely, everything from a one time $10 to $20 donation to monthly or recurring donation. That's where I want to say 25% of our revenue is coming from, small-dollar donations.

[O]ur audience engagement specialist applied for a grant to host three listening sessions, with the Latino community, the black community, and the Filipino community. They told us that a lot of marginalized communities feel like their voices are not being heard. We want to make sure that their stories are being told. 

Your mission is to “disrupt the status quo.” What does that mean in practice?

We do a lot of community listening. Every once in a while we'll take a step back and do a pop-up newsroom. We have an annual coffee with the editors, where we partner with the local coffee shop and hear from readers. We invite them to come out and get a behind the scenes look into our newsroom and then take questions. 

Just last fall, our audience engagement specialist applied for a grant to host three listening sessions, with the Latino community, the black community, and the Filipino community. They told us that a lot of marginalized communities feel like their voices are not being heard. We want to make sure that their stories are being told. 

Have any stories made powerful local figures uncomfortable, and how did that impact your editorial independence?

We've lost donors because of our reporting on elected officials. We have an editorial independence policy on our website. It states, “Donors and sponsors have no influence over our content. Donors have no involvement in news decisions and we do not give supporters the rights to assign, review or edit content.” Sometimes they pull back their donations, which is fine, it's totally up to them. But it's not going to shape our coverage in any way. That's what motivates us each and every day. And that's another way how we're disrupting the status quo

How do you measure your impact as a newspaper, such as policy changes, resignations, public record reforms, community engagement? 

There's several ways we kind of measure impact. First of all, is policy change. It’s the easiest way to see how our reporting is making a difference in the community. In addition to that, seeing that increase in civic engagement. There's been studies that show that when communities don't have reporting that government corruption goes up and voting participation goes down. If we're seeing an increase in voter turnout elections, at local government meetings, at neighborhood association meetings, more people reaching out to the local elected officials by writing letters or emails or meeting with elected officials, that’s likely to be attributed to our reporting. 

We can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then it's a moot point.

How are you gathering an audience? Are readers coming directly to your homepage or through your social newsletters? 

All the above. Audience engagement is really important. We can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then it's a moot point. Products like our daily newsletter, The Daily Spotlight, is the number one driver of traffic to our site. A lot of older readers, for example, don't know that they can go straight to our homepage. 

We also have social media across all platforms. We have push notifications. We have also experimented with texting campaigns. That's been an effective tool. Those are the main ways we and our friends and partners in nonprofit get the news out.

Who are your competitors? Are you competing with Substack writers, influencers or TikTok, which is how more people are consuming news nowadays? 

We're part of a few national associations, like the Institute for Nonprofit News and the American Journalism Project. They have so many resources for us at our disposal, like training, webinars, conferences. We learn new, innovative strategies for reaching our audience. And what's big right now in local news is meeting your audience where they are, and a lot of that is video. 

That's something we're doing in house. Our audience engagement person held a pretty robust training to train our reporters to get more video when they're out on assignment, just talk to the audience. A lot of younger people are getting their news on social media and through video. 

As far as competitors, there's no one else in the South Bay that's doing the news like we do. There's San Jose Foos [a social media, community-driven organization that promotes local San Jose businesses, culture, and events], which is great. They have a huge audience, but they're more around arts and entertainment. They promote concerts that are coming to the area and restaurants, but not local news or policy. We reached out to partner with them, but they declined. They said they didn't have the capacity. We understand completely. Maybe we're a little too niche, so may not be a good fit. 

Other than that, there's no other Substack writers. There's this SJ Today newsletter that goes out, but really it's just an aggregate. They include our stories, NBC, Bay Area Mercury News. I think it's another great way to reach new readers.

Would you ever license your archives to an AI firm, or do you have any relationship with AI?

We have a partnership with Google where they gave us funding to try out their AI tools. Some smaller newsrooms may lift a press release and use AI to summarize and publish it. But we offer investigative, in-depth reporting. All of our reporters have at least two voices in every story. They’re fact checking their stories. That tool is not useful for that, but we have used it for funding appeals. 

It can help us write emails to donors or partners. We use Google Translate on our website to translate our stories to Spanish and Vietnamese. As you may know, we have very strong Latino and Vietnamese communities in San Jose and Santa Clara County. Our reporters use transcribing tools when our reporters are out on assignment. Those kinds of tools help us cut down on time, especially with grants. We've heard from a lot of our partners in nonprofit news that they don't have the capacity to sit and do a 40-question grant application. 

But you’re keeping it out of editorial, that's strictly human-driven?

AI doesn't touch the editorial product. Everything else, from social media, newsletters, and emails to funding, appeals and applications, yes, but never around our journalism. 

We like to joke in Silicon Valley that we argue over different shades of blue.

How do you deal with the polarization, and do you find that lack of trust in national media is trickling down to local media? If so, how do you build trust with your community?

The answer is absolutely yes. We like to joke in Silicon Valley that we argue over different shades of blue. Even locally, there's different factions. There's a labor faction and a business faction. Those are the two competing factions over the last few decades. Donors, supporters and stakeholders that have different alliances. Even though our story is fact-based and everything's correct, one side will see us biased.

How do you overcome those obstacles? 

Frankly, the only way we can is to be neutral and objective, and make sure we get both sides of the story. Make sure that everything's fact based. Just continue doing what we're doing. Sometimes we have to let the chips fall where they may. We make sure everything's ethically sound and has journalistic integrity. We are a non-profit. We can't endorse, we can't support any candidates. We do have one editor who writes editorials. She'll write about why a particular policy is good or bad, or ballot measure is good or bad, things of that sort. But that's as far as we go.

You mentioned that you’re scaling the business to focus on a larger region. Is that going to affect your hyper-local focus?

No, not at all. It's still local reporting. We've experimented a little bit, having a national bureau report on our delegation in Washington. We thought about doing that at the State House in Sacramento. That's not something we move forward with. We don't look to expand past Santa Clara County, once we have all 15 cities covered in our county. 

We do have different newsletter products. We have The Daily Spotlight, which is our general news. We have the West Valley Spotlight, which covers the four cities in the West Valley. And then we have the Sunnyvale and Santa Clara Spotlight, which covers the cities of Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, the second and third largest cities in the county. We'll have our South County Spotlight newsletter product, and it’ll just cover the cities of Gilroy/Morgan Hill, where we're going next. 

A few folks have asked us, Have you considered being like a true hub-and-spoke model, where you have different newsrooms? No. Our county is small enough that we can get our arms around it. Collectively, there's 1.9 million residents, and we don't see ourselves growing any bigger than that.

Let's say, in the worst-case scenario, the nonprofit model collapses. Do you have a plan B to stay in business?

No, we don't. At that juncture, maybe we would consider a subscription model, or an advertising model, like legacy papers. Luckily, knock on wood, we haven't been in that position. We haven't had to lay off one person, so hopefully we can keep it going. But no, as of right now, there's no other plan B. 

Ramona and I have had those conversations in passing. If we ever felt that we're in that position, I think if we put a call out to our community. We have strong faith and confidence that more folks will step up and save this thing.

Is there something you want to add to close us out?

I just can't stress enough that we need everyone to understand that this is your newsroom. That is a core part of our mission, to ensure that everyone feels like this is their newsroom. They're invested in this. They need to help keep this thing going. We're always going to listen to our community. We’re all in this together. Please keep supporting local news whatever community you live in.