I continue to be surprised and delighted by the upstart This Land Press, and I’m glad they’re getting attention. This project — it’s more than that at this point — gives me great hope. I love the gumption. I love the verve. I love finding an actual newspaper from home in my mailbox biweekly. Give people interesting stories well done in an attractive format and you’ll succeed. If you don’t subscribe, you should.
From CJR:
Across the street from a Fastenal hardware store in the shadow of Tulsa’s aging art-deco skyline, the staff of what is perhaps the best for-profit local journalism startup in the country has yet to reinvent the craft. Eleven full-time editorial employees sit at desks scattered across the rooms of a bright red house with Astroturf carpeting, telling stories about their community. As This Land Press founder and editor Michael Mason would argue, if this sounds unremarkable, it’s because journalism’s vision of its own future has become overly complicated.
In its short existence—one year as a passion project and another 18 months as a venture-capital-backed multimedia company—This Land has consistently produced the kinds of in-depth features and investigations that much of the industry is looking to nonprofit models to sustain. While still in its pre-investment days, it published a groundbreaking, internationally cited profile of Oklahoma native Bradley Manning, the army private accused of funneling thousands of pages of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Last September, it took an historical approach to investigative journalism, revealing that a founding father of Tulsa was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and an architect of the city’s notorious race riot in 1921. More recently, it published an investigation into sexual abuse of students at a school run by a local megachurch.
This Land is on pace to become cash-flow-positive next spring—which means that, in two years as a fully functioning business, it will have found a way to earn more money than it spends. If it stays on track thereafter, it will continue to expand its newsroom while earning a profit for its owners. It’s far too early to tell whether that will happen, but the trajectory is promising. No equivalent organization (and, granted, there aren’t many) has come so close to financial self-sufficiency so quickly. Most noteworthy is the fact that if This Land becomes profitable, it will have done so not in spite of its investment in locally focused, literary journalism, but because of it. Rather than hoping that the market might one day find a way to support great journalism—as the current discussion about the future of news suggests—This Land is betting that it can do so now.
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