Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, co-founder of the closely watched National Trust for Local News, announced last week that she is stepping down as CEO four years after the nonprofit’s launch.
The trust’s unusual structure — it buys rather than makes grants to newspaper organizations — grew out of academic work Shapiro did over the course of a decade. But operational effectiveness has been an issue, as even she conceded in an interview with me last summer.
Board member Lisa Borders echoed that in a comment to the Portland Press Herald, flagship of a group of Maine newspapers the trust owns. “We had a visionary leader in Elizabeth, and she’s been extraordinary,” Borders said. “Now, we’re moving from inspiration to execution.”
Despite the usual niceties in such situations — a farewell message from Shapiro and praise like Borders’ — I think there is a big question lurking. Besides execution, is the trust’s big idea of a novel way to combat news deserts and ghost local newsrooms badly flawed?
Two knowledgeable sources, looking in from the outside and speaking on background, shared my suspicion that there is a basic strategic problem at the trust, which has effectively strayed from its original mission.
In the three states where it operates, the trust has acquired groups of newspapers and is creating mini-chains. The trust has raised and spent big money — $38 million Shapiro told me last summer — from leading foundations including Knight, MacArthur and the Gates Family. The great majority of that has gone into acquisitions in Maine, Colorado and Georgia, and there is a reserve fund to buy more.
In the pivot that Shapiro explained to me last summer, the trust assembled a small team of hands-on operators with experience at Gannett, McClatchy and Lee Enterprises. The industry “doesn’t need more coaches” she said. She instead concluded local teams needed expert help to realize their ventures’ potential.
In practice, though, that meant not only ownership but decision-making had migrated up to a central office. The trust had become out of sync with the mantra that news organizations work best when they are owned and run by those closest to the local communities.
The new process proved disruptive at the largest of the trust’s three groups, in Maine. In 2024, the Portland Press-Herald lost its top editor, publisher and other key executives. Executive editor Steve Greenlee, who left in July to become a journalism professor at Boston University, told me in an email, “An incredible opportunity arose at a time of great stress.” He declined to elaborate on the “great stress.”
A local group organized to take potshots at the venture’s intermediate management layer, the Maine Trust for Local News. The critique was that the trust managers were remote and the papers seemed directionless.
Carolyn Fox, the new executive editor of the trust’s papers, disputed that. “I’ve been at the Maine Trust for four months and can honestly say I’ve never worked under a more collaborative ownership structure,” she told me. “I feel blessed to have the guidance and tools the National Trust leaders provide us. But it’s been clear to me from the outset that our leadership team at the Maine Trust is in the driver’s seat, responsible for carving out our path for a sustainable future.”
Organizational details of the trust and its holdings are opaque, and Shapiro’s idea is easiest understood with analogies. She has compared it to The Nature Conservancy, buying properties but with a firm goal of upgrading and preserving them, not developing and selling them. She also has said that she embraces industry activist Steven Waldman’s concept of “replanting” existing news organizations rather than creating new ones from scratch.
In a 2020 prospectus for the trust, Shapiro wrote that at the top of a list of questions to be resolved was, “What would be the ideal mix of local and national governance in the capital-issuing entity? How best could the Trust support scaled national infrastructure and local decision-making and autonomy?”
That issue seems to still be unresolved.
It’s also arguable how much can be accomplished by an infusion of capital and chain efficiencies, as the basics of the business challenge — audience, revenue and digital transformation — just keep getting more and more difficult.
Co-founder Marc Hand, a consultant specializing in recapitalizing public broadcast for the digital/streaming era and the board’s chair, will manage the trust with treasurer Keith Mestrich on an interim basis.
(Neither Hand nor Shapiro responded to my request for comment).
From my chair, it looks as if the interim bosses and other trust board members face a formidable set of problems particular to their operation:
- Is there a CEO candidate out there who can engineer a turnaround, especially if the whole setup needs changing? What about the operating team Shapiro put together? Will they retain the roles that brought them to the trust?
- It does not appear that the properties are throwing off earnings that would replenish the capital fund for new acquisitions. The trust’s creation of three groups in four years — with a digital site serving Macon, Georgia — has been deliberate to a fault. Can the trust pick up that expansion pace with so much work to be done on its existing portfolio?
- Finally, will new rounds of foundation support be forthcoming? Three to five years is typically the window when big funders reassess. Of course, Knight and the others may judge that what’s wrong is fixable.
Despite this bearish assessment, I don’t mean to beat up Shapiro and her funders. If players in the growing mission-driven news sector are not trying different approaches with scale that run the risk of failure, they probably are not acting boldly or fast enough.
Update, Feb. 7, 12 p.m.: This story has been updated to include a comment forum Carolyn Fox, executive editor of the Portland Press Herald and other Maine Trust newspapers.
