Interview with Danny Feingold, Publisher and Founder of Capital & Main

Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau speaks with Danny Feingold, publisher and founder of Capital & Main, about the outlet's origins, editorial mission, audience strategy, and the future of independent reporting.

Please introduce yourself and tell us how Capital & Main came into existence.

My name is Danny Feingold. I'm the publisher and founder of Capital & Main. I started Capital & Main almost 15 years ago, with a unique mission to report deeply on economic inequality, which really means reporting on economic power: who has it, who doesn't, and what that means for the rest of us.

Have you expanded your scope of coverage since then?

Economic inequality is still at the heart of much of our reporting, but we are living through extraordinary times, and so we have made some changes to our editorial mission. When Donald Trump was elected the first time in 2016, we made a decision to start producing some national coverage outside of California, which had previously been the geographic limit of our reporting.

In 2020, we made a very concerted decision to add climate change as the second big area of coverage for Capital & Main. That really reflected an understanding on the part of the staff and the board that climate change itself poses such an existential challenge to everyone, including those of us living in this country and in this state, that we felt it incumbent to make that a central part of our work.

How do you sustain a viable reporting organization?

Capital & Main has been supported from the beginning by charitable donations. We are a nonprofit investigative news organization, and we exist thanks to the support of dozens of entities, including foundations, private donors, and other institutions that believe, like we do, that inequality and climate change are two of the greatest challenges facing our country and the world. And they believe that there are big gaps in the reporting on those issues that need to be filled — in particular, by a news outlet that has a strong commitment to accountability journalism and to reaching beyond the choir with its content, so that we can share the stories that are shaping people's lives with as many people as we can.

Does your investigative reporting ever conflict with the organizations that are providing your funding? 

Anyone who's in the news business knows that there is no such thing as a business model free from any external influence. If somebody tells you that, then go put a fact checker on that story. 

We're very clear with all of our funders that we are an independent news organization, and we report on the facts, and we let the facts guide us. If a story makes a funder unhappy, then they have the choice of continuing to fund us or not. 

But at the end of the day, our value to the public is the fact that we're trustworthy — that when they read a Capital & Main story, they know that we've invested really significant time and that, while we may have a perspective that informs our reporting, we are presenting fair, accurate information and speaking to the public.

How do you attract an audience? 

Well, of course, all of our content is published on our website, www.capitalandmain.com — that's one way that people can find our content. But we have other ways as well, and this is essential in a time when audiences have so many different places to go for information, some of it not accurate. You have to go to where the audience is.

We deploy a number of strategies that allow us to reach a large and very diverse audience. One of the most successful is an extensive network of co-publishing partners. To give you a sense of scale, in 2025 Capital & Main had more than 2,000 placements of its stories in other news outlets in California, across the country, and internationally. 

We're talking about more than 350 news outlets that carried Capital & Main stories — everyone from USA Today, the LA Times, Rolling Stone, and Fortune, to leading state outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Texas Tribune, to papers of record in countless communities across the country. Our goal is to reach a wide, diverse audience with deeply reported content that gives them something they're unlikely to find in another publication.

Are you compensated for that? 

The media ecosystem circa 2026 is such that too many publications are just hanging on, and what they need more than anything else is content that's either cheap or free of charge. For us, this is not a monetary relationship. It serves two purposes. One is to reach as wide an audience as we can with our reporting. And two — and this is something we've come to understand just in the last few years — we are now playing a pivotal role in supporting the larger news ecosystem by giving outlets the ability to publish content they otherwise couldn't, and really to survive. Because if you're not publishing content as a news outlet, you have no other function. So we see this now as part of our mission — almost like a free wire service, in some ways.

We've also cultivated individual relationships with hundreds of outlets, and with a handful of those, they're not just republishing our coverage — they're collaborating editorially with us. We have editorial partnerships with, for example, the LA Times and ProPublica, among others. That kind of flexibility — that nimbleness to say, we want to partner with you, we want to help you, and you can help us — is now the mainstream ethos in more and more newsrooms. Which is diametrically opposed to an earlier era where the news business was nothing if not cutthroat. But it meets the needs of this particular moment.

Are you using social media, newsletters, and events too?

Absolutely, we drive traffic to our website through all or most of the social media platforms. We're very active on at least half a dozen of those platforms.

We have also, in the last year and a half, developed a robust short video capacity. We produce, on average, a video every one to two weeks, usually one to two minutes long — a snapshot of a longer story that Capital & Main has produced. Because so many people now prefer to get their news through visual media rather than written content, that has dramatically expanded our audience. Those videos are largely distributed on social media, though you can find them on our website as well.

We also have a weekly newsletter that provides a way for people to easily access our coverage. And we do occasional live events where we invite people to join us, either in person or virtually, to be part of a conversation about the coverage we're producing. We've done that in partnership with other news outlets like ProPublica and with other organizations, and it's something we think will be a significant part of Capital & Main's model of engagement moving forward.

Do you see your model as a way forward to fund local news and investigative reporting?

Yes. The model we've developed has elements that we would love for other news outlets to emulate. I already talked about the co-publishing and republishing model — that's not used by enough outlets. We have actually developed a template and training to show other organizations how to do it, because it's not quite as simple as it seems, but it's achievable, and it's a way for news organizations to support each other and move their content to bigger audiences.

The video production element is also something many news organizations are doing, some doing it better than others. We believe that high production value is important — you're not just giving people any content, you're giving them content that is delivered in a format that is easy to digest and at the same time sophisticated in its delivery and substance.

If you're a news organization in 2026 and you're not constantly innovating or experimenting, then your days are probably numbered. We're well past the era where you can simply show up, produce strong news content, and hope to survive. You have to be restlessly creative and ambitious, but also smart and strategic.

I think of where my kids get their news, outlets like Channel 5, social media, or even memes. Where will the next generation of news consumers go? I don't know if your two-minute videos will be enough to hook younger generations who grew up on a flashy, influencer-based model.

What you described is very accurate, and it's all the more reason why serious news organizations have to be in the business of understanding audiences and how they're consuming content. You can't put your head in the sand and say, "I wish it was the way it used to be." That's not going to cut it. If you're not in the game — if you're not creating content that has at least an opportunity to reach audiences where they are — then you're not going to succeed.

If we do this interview a year from now, we'll probably have developed two or three new ideas on how to reach audiences, and the same will be true in two years and three years. That's the nature of the news business today.

What hasn't changed, though — and I think this is equally important — is that the fundamentals of good news reporting are what they always were. You have to find stories that are not being well told already, because there's no point in replicating content. You have to develop sources, you have to develop trust with communities, and you have to tell compelling stories that are relevant to people's lives. 

And then you have to invest real resources in editing, fact checking, and proofreading so that you are holding up a standard that can compete with content that doesn't adhere to those standards. That's core to what Capital & Main is doing.

Speaking of resources — what's your staff-to-contractor ratio? 

We are a staff of 15 currently. We've grown very significantly over the last five years. We started out with almost no resources and have built steadily over the last decade-plus.

I saw you just hired an audience engagement person.

We did, and that is an absolutely crucial position. As most publishers will tell you, if you don't have an audience engagement person, you're going to be behind the eight ball. We brought on some amazing talent, and I will say — because it's relevant to the larger discussion about the state of news — that several of our staff came from the LA Times, a once-great publication that still produces strong content, but less than it used to because of draconian cuts. 

Capital & Main has been in a position to provide a home for outstanding journalists who came from the LA Times and other outlets and who want to produce meaningful work that can help shape the public conversation and ultimately contribute to the betterment of society.

And outside of the 15 core staff members, you have contractors as well?

We do. We have a number of folks who write for us as columnists, and of course we use freelance writers as well — they're an important part of our operation. It's crucial to any news organization that wants to reflect the communities it's covering to actually draw from those communities. We work hard to bring people into our newsroom, whether staff or freelancers, who come from a range of backgrounds — geographic, racial, ethnic, gender — because we're trying to produce content that reflects a broad range of the state and of the country.

This summer we'll be hosting an intern from the Ida B. Wells Investigative Reporting Center, started by Nikole Hannah-Jones. We'll have another intern from Loyola Marymount University, which has a strong journalism program in this region. We also see it as part of our mission to train young journalists from diverse backgrounds — not just on the craft of journalism, but on how to produce equity-focused journalism and how to look for stories that tell a larger narrative about what's going on in society.

Capital & Main has made it its mission to report on the ways in which this city, this state, and this country often aren't living up to their fundamental principles. We also tell success stories — stories of how people are organizing and coming together to solve the biggest problems we face. Those are two sides of a coin, and they go together.

To fulfill that mission, do you have any kind of orientation or training for new staff members?

We do. We're typically hiring mostly experienced journalists, so they already have their craft under their belt. But Capital & Main has its own news culture and its own way of doing things, so we spend time with people who are new to the organization. We want them to understand our mission in a deep way, and we want them to understand that our mission is connected to an even larger one: sustaining quality investigative journalism at a time when it's needed more than ever.

What are your long-term plans for Capital & Main? 

We're in year two of a four-year strategic plan, adopted in January of 2025. That plan calls for innovation on multiple fronts, and I would put audience expansion at the center of it, for the reasons I mentioned. This is a moment where you can't be stagnant — you have to be moving forward.

We envision a significantly larger pool of resources available for building our audience over the next few years, in ways that will ultimately feed into our core mission: reporting deeply on inequality and climate change and influencing the public conversation on those issues. 

We want to invest more in video content and podcast content. We want to invest in strategies that ensure we're engaging deeply and continuously with the communities we're covering — through live events and a range of other approaches that will make sure Capital & Main's reporting is really hitting the nail on the head when it comes to what is happening in poor communities, in precarious middle-class communities, in the parts of our city and state and country where people are trying to get ahead and find that elusive path to the American dream. That's the sweet spot for us.

What gives you hope right now about the future of independent reporting?

There's a lot to be hopeful for. I would start with the emergence, over the last decade-plus, of a really strong nonprofit news sector. I won't say that nonprofit news is the only path forward, but it's an absolutely essential one. The economic models have changed, and if people and leaders want to see journalism thrive as a core pillar of a democratic society, then they need to invest and they need to look at those models that are producing powerful journalism that can sustain democratic norms.

We're seeing a lot of that. There are hundreds of nonprofit news organizations now. You see newsrooms that once were for-profit and couldn't survive anymore that have converted to a nonprofit model. And I will say — though there's not enough investigative journalism — there is a dimension of the nonprofit news renaissance that is very strongly focused on investigative accountability reporting, which at its core is about making sure that someone is watching those with power and giving those without power an opportunity to have a say.

The investment we've seen is not nearly enough, but the fact that there are investigative newsrooms across the country doing powerful reporting is, to me, a sign of hope and a reason to be optimistic. Even as those of us who have made this our path spend every day making the case: whether your income is small or you have significant resources, if you believe in journalism as part of a democratic society, invest in those news organizations that are aligned with your values.