The Banyan Project

The Banyan Project is a nonprofit organization that develops a cooperative ownership model for local news, aiming to restore reporting in communities that have lost their local newspapers, known as "news deserts."

Banyan was founded by veteran journalist Tom Stites, a former editor at The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, following a 2006 keynote address on journalism's future at the Media Giraffe conference. Stites refined the model as a 2010-11 fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Banyan's pilot effort, a planned Haverhill, Massachusetts co-op called Haverhill Matters, was organized starting in 2012 but was shut down by local volunteers in January 2020 after years of insufficient fundraising; Banyan has continued to refine and promote its co-op model to other interested communities since.

Banyan provides a comprehensive co-op organizing guide, business-plan templates, and a publishing platform designed for community news cooperatives, in which reader-members elect a governing board similar to a food co-op or credit union.

Information about the Banyan model, including its launch guide and business plan, is available free through banyanproject.coop; the organization has reported interest from volunteers in more than 60 U.S. communities.