“You Have to Do Good Work. You Also Need a Business.”

Lance Knobel is CEO and co-founder of Cityside, the nonprofit parent organization of Berkeleyside, Oaklandside and Richmondside, as well as the East Bay food publication Nosh. Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau talks with him about Cityside’s evolution from a small, for-profit local publication into a network of nonprofit newsrooms, and why sustainable community journalism requires both strong reporting and an equally serious commitment to the business behind it.

Before you started Berkeleyside, much of your career was spent in business and international journalism. What did that work teach you about journalism as an institution, and what did you have to unlearn when you began covering one city block by block?

I don’t know if there was any unlearning. I think anyone who does good work in journalism learns how reporting works. You learn how to get to the truth of something. You figure out what’s a good story and what’s not a good story. There are a whole bunch of things that, to some extent, are independent of the subject matter.

What has proved very different about working locally is the immediacy of the connection and response from people in the community. You run into people on the street. People stop you in the store. We write about things that affect our neighbors and people we see in the community. That’s a very different experience from writing about geopolitics or international business, some of the things I did at various points in my career.

Could you take me back to when you started this venture in 2009? What did you believe was missing from the city’s news coverage, and what made you think you could fill that gap?

What was missing was pretty much any news coverage. Berkeley, if you go back decades, had local newspapers.

Those had vanished by 2009. There was a local paper, the Berkeley Daily Planet, that did some perfectly okay work but was more about a political cause than doing real local reporting. They wrote about the things they were preoccupied with. They ignored the things they didn’t care about, so there was no reporting on schools, public safety or a whole range of other things.

The three of us who started Berkeleyside thought there was an enormous gap in coverage of this city of 120,000 people where we lived—a city that, in many ways, is really interesting. We thought we could do something. We had close to zero pretensions that we were starting anything of significance or that it was going to be enduring.

We thought it would be fun to do the odd thing, and it grew organically from there. We very quickly discovered, because of the community’s response, that there was a desperate need for reporting. People were incredibly supportive, even of the really modest things we did very early on.

We started without any kind of plan or vision, but we quickly saw that there was a real demand for reporting and coverage of our city.

The community aspect is why I contacted you. We’re speaking with people who have a relationship with their communities and are building trust and a sustainable model for local news. Cityside says its journalism is intended not only to inform people but also to strengthen their connection to the community. What does community building mean in journalistic practice rather than just as a mission statement?

Our tagline is “Building community through local journalism,” so it really is fundamental to what we do.

This is not something we saw clearly in 2009 when we were starting, but over the years, I think we’ve developed a deep conviction that healthy communities need information. They need reporting. Journalism should be part of the civic infrastructure—the democratic infrastructure—of a healthy society.

That can mean a lot of different things, all of which can help strengthen the sinews of a community and strengthen its interconnections. It’s important for people to know what’s going on. Information empowers people. It enables them to distinguish between fact and fiction.

It enables people, if they’re so motivated, to take action. Quite often, institutions—whether it’s a city council, a planning commission, a local police department or a whole range of others—are making decisions or enacting policies that affect people’s lives, sometimes in profound ways.

Without transparency about what’s happening, without awareness and without information about what those policies mean or what decisions are being made, people lack the power to do anything. That’s part of what good local journalism provides.

I’m curious about two things. How does that principle affect the stories you select for publication? And where is the line between participating in a community and retaining the distance needed to scrutinize it?

In terms of how our editors decide which stories to cover, we can’t cover everything. There are obviously choices that need to be made.

I think we’ve managed to hire and employ editors who get to know and understand their communities. In the case of Oaklandside, much of the staff was deeply embedded in Oakland long before they became employees of Cityside.

In Berkeley, Zac [Farber], who is the editor-in-chief, was new to Berkeley when we hired him, but he rapidly became deeply immersed in it. You find out by talking to people, using your editorial judgment and assessing reactions. There are a whole host of things that go into deciding why we do one story and not another.

I’m sure there are times when we miss stories we should be doing. No one can do everything. I think our track record over the years shows that the judgments we use in deciding what to cover have proved to be pretty good.

Remind me of the second part of your question.

The line between participating in a community and covering it. How do you balance that intimacy with the necessary distance?

We do try to maintain a certain distance, but I don’t believe—and I think, more broadly, my colleagues don’t believe—in what the media critic Jay Rosen calls “the view from nowhere.”

We’re not trying to produce something so detached that it feels as if it’s being handed down from on high. The principle we follow comes from the really wonderful Ashley Alvarado, who now runs Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. I think she coined this: We should have a point of view, but we shouldn’t have an agenda.

We’re not wholly detached. We care about the health and future of our cities. We’re not dispassionate observers. But we don’t approach the work with an agenda. We’re not setting out to take a stand that this kind of development should happen or that kind of development shouldn’t happen.

We care about the future and health of Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond. That’s why we do the work. We do it for those communities. We have a point of view, and it is very clearly pro-city. We want to see good things happen. We want the cities to be healthy and do well, and we want the people in those cities to lead fulfilling, healthy lives.

But we don’t approach the work with an agenda.

You have Berkeleyside, Oaklandside and Richmondside. They serve neighboring cities, but those cities differ in size, history, demographics and political culture. What parts of the Cityside model can be replicated, and what needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in each place you serve?

Every city is different. Of the three cities we’re currently in, Berkeley and Oakland are next door to one another. Richmond is a little farther away, but you can take BART from Oakland to Berkeley to Richmond pretty quickly.

These are geographically proximate places, but they’re very different cities. They have different histories, demographics and politics. All the politics are on the spectrum from left to lefter, so it’s not typical of much of the country, but they are still very different.

We had a deep commitment to listening to the community and understanding things when we started. We had been operating Berkeleyside for 10 years when we began thinking about starting Oaklandside. It would have been conceivable for us to say, “Hey, we’ve been working next door to Oakland for 10 years. We kind of understand what’s needed in Oakland. We’re just going to do that.”

We didn’t have that kind of arrogance. We did really extensive community listening: one-on-one conversations, convening groups and tabling at street fairs and festivals. We built up a database to understand what kinds of information Oaklanders needed and which issues they cared about.

We did not presume to know. We did exactly the same thing in Richmond when we started there—Oakland in 2020 and Richmond in 2024. We start by listening to understand the differences, and that listening is something we continue all the time.

I think it was about three years ago that we promoted one of our senior editors, Jacob Simas, who had been managing editor of Oaklandside, to a new role as director of community journalism. One of the important things Jacob does is make sure we don’t forget that we have to keep listening and engaging with people in the community, whether that means going into high schools or meeting with and listening to community groups.

There are all sorts of different kinds of engagement and listening. It’s not something you can do and then stop. It has to continue.

Berkeleyside began as a for-profit publication and later became part of a nonprofit organization. What did the for-profit years teach you about what local journalism can and cannot support through the market alone?

I think our 10 years as a for-profit—and there were never really very many profits—taught us a lot. As a for-profit, your potential revenue streams are more limited than they are as a nonprofit.

For us, it was advertising and what we called membership from the start. We never charged for our content or had a paywall. We never will, as a matter of deep principle. Membership allows people to pay; it doesn’t force them to pay. It might be considered somewhat akin to a subscription.

When those are your revenue streams, it’s really important to build your audience and your connection to that audience so people are reading your work, going to your site and receiving your newsletters. That discipline has helped us enormously as a nonprofit by allowing us to maintain really significant audiences and traffic for our content.

There are some fantastic nonprofit newsrooms that, like us, care enormously about continuing to reach a significant audience in their coverage areas. That’s not always the case. I think having had that experience as a for-profit has helped us considerably as a nonprofit.

As a nonprofit, you receive revenue from members, major donors, foundations, sponsorships and advertising. What does a durable revenue mix look like, and are you achieving it?

What I say to people is that it’s always uphill. We don’t pretend that we’ve solved the problem.

Doing local news is really hard. What we have succeeded in doing is building diversified revenue. This year, our revenue will be about $6 million. The largest portion will come from major donors, whom we define as people who give us $1,000 or more. That will be about 35 percent of our revenue.

The second-largest portion comes from our members—people who give us less than $1,000. We have about 8,500 of them across the three newsrooms. That will account for about 30 to 33 percent.

The third area is foundations, which is somewhere in the 20-percent range. Our expectation is that foundation support will likely continue to decline over time, and I’m happy to discuss the reasons we think that.

Fourth is advertising and sponsorship. I sometimes talk about a Platonic ideal in which we’d love to have a quarter, a quarter, a quarter and a quarter.

We’re not that far from it. The smallest wedge, advertising and sponsorship, is somewhere not too far below 20 percent. With about 17 percent from that and 35 percent from major donors, the quarter-quarter-quarter-quarter ideal is not that far out of sight.

We’re pretty happy with that mix of revenue. I think it’s healthy not to be overly dependent on any one area.

You state that your board and funders have no role in editorial decisions. Is there ever any tension over your coverage?

Do you mean whether our coverage affects our revenue?

Or, more likely, the other way around: Does revenue ever affect your coverage?

I can say absolutely not. We maintain a very tight division between church and state. The newsrooms are the church. I’m responsible for revenue, so I’m the state.

I don’t have any particular insight into what the newsrooms are doing until they’ve done it. We’re really rigid about that. There are unquestionably wealthy people in some of the cities we cover who don’t like us, and that’s okay. I’d love it if they wrote large checks to us even though we cover things that make them unhappy, but of course they don’t.

That’s fine. It comes with the territory. If we didn’t maintain that separation—if we went soft in our coverage of a corporation or powerful individual because there might be a good check at the end of it—maybe there would be a short-term boost for our business. But it would be a long-term cataclysm for the trust we spend so much time building through our reporting.

That trust could be irretrievable.

How do you measure whether one of your newsrooms is succeeding? Is it audience size, revenue or something else? What does a successful newsroom look like to you?

I don’t think there’s any one North Star metric that tells you everything you need to know.

We care enormously about our membership numbers because I think membership is a very good proxy for someone being a highly engaged reader and consumer of our reporting—so engaged that they say, “I want to support this.”

Maybe it’s with $5 a month. Maybe it’s with $100 a month. The average across the newsrooms is about $120 a year for most of those members. I think that’s a good proxy for a highly engaged consumer of our content.

We look at that a lot, but we also care about softer ways of measuring impact.

Someone might tell us that they were previously an infrequent voter or a nonvoter. They might say, “Because of your coverage of local elections and why they matter, I became interested, and I felt confident enough to go to the polls or send in my ballot and vote.”

That may not move a needle. We didn’t change a law or send a public official to jail. But that kind of impact on a personal level is exactly why we exist, so we pay attention to anecdotal information like that.

We love to change laws, expose corruption and do all the things one usually associates with capital-J journalism. That’s important to us. But there are also more subtle things that measure our impact, our connection and our importance locally.

To broaden the lens, local journalism is being asked to solve several problems at once: disappearing advertising, weakening public trust, fragmented audiences, platform dependence and rising costs. Which of those poses the greatest threat right now?

Our audiences have stayed strong. I was speaking to one of my peers the other day, and she asked whether we had seen a cliff in our audience in March because she and a number of others had. We’re not seeing that.

There’s talk in our world about the diminishing power of search to produce audiences. We’re not seeing that either. I stay very attuned to those issues, but so far we haven’t seen a change.

We also haven’t seen a lot of what some people call news avoidance. We have very engaged audiences, and we do pretty well across age groups. I’m not sure how trustworthy services like Quantcast are when they give you age breakdowns of your audience, although some people trust Quantcast data.

We do pretty well with people ages 20 to 35. A lot of people say those people don’t read the news. We’re not finding that to be the case.

I expect change. I’m confident, though, that if we continue to provide the information people need about the cities where they live and work and that they care about, we will continue to have an important place in the community.

Whether they’re reading us, watching an Instagram Reel, following us on TikTok or listening to our podcasts—whatever way they want to receive that information—if we provide it, I think we’ll continue to matter.

Many communities need local journalism. The Cityside model requires experienced leadership, substantial fundraising and years of relationship building. How transferable is it to places without the Bay Area’s wealth or philanthropic infrastructure?

It’s a big issue. We’re really fortunate. There are a lot of wealthy people here. I think we’re good at this, but the demographics we have are also why major donors make up the biggest portion of our revenue.

There are many places in the country where that isn’t going to be possible and where foundations will be a much more important and necessary part of the equation.

Even among our three cities, we don’t spend a lot of time trying to forensically determine whether someone gave us money because they care about Berkeleyside or because they care about Cityside. Unless someone states why they’re giving, we don’t investigate it.

But I think we have a good idea that Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond each have a different mix of potential revenue.

Part of the idea behind being a network of sites and having Cityside as the umbrella is that this portfolio of newsrooms strengthens each other. In the Bay Area context, Richmond is not as prosperous a city as Berkeley. We still want to serve Richmond, and we can serve Richmond because of the strength we have as a network.

I wrote a piece for Nieman Lab at the end of last year arguing that part of the way we’ll eventually solve problems such as covering more rural areas or cities that couldn’t independently sustain a newsroom will be through what some people call multilocal models.

We immodestly call it the Cityside model: having the different parts of the network cross-subsidize one another, which could enable us to enter an area that would be less viable as a standalone newsroom.

You have 15 years of experience building local news organizations. What do you now believe a community newsroom must have before it can realistically have a chance of survival?

Seventeen years, so don’t sell us short. [Mea cupla — ed.]

The first and most fundamental thing is that you have to do good work. Without journalism, without reporting, you don’t have anything. That is the fundamental table stakes.

But the complicated thing is that you also need to have a business. Doing good work is necessary, but it is far, far, far from sufficient.

My background was as a journalist, but a number of years ago I decided I was going to take charge of the business so my colleagues could continue concentrating on journalism.

You need some kind of division of labor like that. Someone must be determined and passionate about building the revenue side, whether that’s a nonprofit with a mix of major donors, foundations, members, advertising and sponsorships, or a for-profit model with a subscription price, perhaps membership as well, advertising and that kind of mix.

Someone needs to drive it.

What has fostered this growing world of independent local news is that there are people who have managed to juggle these things, and more and more people are becoming interested in it.

But there is definitely a shortage of people who care enormously about local journalism and also want to drive the business side. You need both.