Can progressive investors save Michigan’s small-town newspapers?

May 1, 2026

MATTHEW MILLER
Reporter | MLive

Bonnie Brown ran The Yale (Michigan) Expositor from the time she was 26 years old until her retirement at the age of 80.

Her family believes it was the longest tenure of any newspaper editor in the state’s history, and she spent those decades boosting the Yale Bologna Festival, the Yale High School Bulldogs and most everything else about the 1,900-resident town in the Thumb.

Her children, Jim Brown and Barbara Stasik, took up the mantle in 2013 and ran the Expositor for another dozen years. The paper had been part of the family for their entire lives. Stasik said her mother kept her crib in the newspaper’s office.

But, in 2025, they decided they were done.

“I just aged out,” Jim Brown said. “I was 70 years old at the time.”

Stasik is more than a decade younger than her brother but decided she didn’t want to keep running the paper without him. They would get out of the business together, which is how many small, family-owned newspapers meet their end. But not the Expositor.

The paper was the first acquisition by the Michigan Independent Media Group, an investment fund set up with the goal of strengthening the state’s local news ecosystem and shoring up its democratic institutions in the process.

“Their vision was pretty much true to what our vision was as far as the importance of small-town newspapers and keeping it going for our community,” Stasik said. “We just seemed to mesh on that, and we talked for a long time.”

Michigan Independent Media Group, which has acquired three additional weekly papers in the past year: The Hamtramck Review, the Lansing City Pulse and the Tri-City Times, also in the Thumb — is a business with political connections. The leaders of the project have spent years working in Democratic politics.

It’s funded partly through an organization that has received millions from a national network of left-leaning nonprofits, including so-called “dark money” groups. But it is, by all accounts, running the papers it now owns as ordinary community weeklies, the same small-town papers they’ve been for decades.

The City Pulse, which was founded as a left-leaning alt-weekly and remains a left-leaning alt-weekly, is the exception.

“At a really deep level, the belief is that every community will make its best democratic decisions if it has access to local news,” said Jason Franklin, the general partner for the Michigan Independent Media Group.

“There are other progressive news outlets,” he added. “I am happy that they exist. They provide a different type of coverage that is rooted in a value set or a political orientation. That’s not what we’re doing.”

RAISING MONEY

Franklin is the founder of Ktisis Capital, which advises progressive donors and donor consortiums about where to give their money.

He also chairs the board of the Michigan Civic Education Fund, a 501(c) that has supplied roughly two-thirds of the funding for the newspaper project. The executive director of that fund is Jon Hoadley, a former Democratic state representative from Kalamazoo.

The Michigan Civic Education Fund took in millions of dollars from left-leaning nonprofits in 2024, the latest year for which tax filings are publicly available.

That included $2.7 million from the Bright Future Fund, a “dark money” nonprofit started by veteran Democratic operative Preston Elliot, and $500,000 from the New Venture Fund operated by Arabella Advisors, a firm that advised progressive donors and managed dark money groups.

Franklin said that’s not representative of the money that’s gone into the newspaper project, and tax filings don’t give that level of detail. Franklin said the project is also raising what is known as “impact investing capital” — that is, investments meant to generate a beneficial social impact alongside a profit.

But the project is “not a blindly partisan experiment or takeover,” said Lonnie Scott, the CEO of Buried Lede Media, which is operating the papers. Scott spent a decade as the head of Progress Michigan, a progressive advocacy organization.

Rather, he said, it’s meant to shore up traditional journalism in communities where local papers might not survive.

“It’s important to the community to be able to see your neighbor’s kids when they do something cool on the basketball court, to see the events and activities that take place, to have news and access to local journalism,” he said.

“We value that,” Scott said, “and our goal is to stop that from disappearing.”

At the Yale Expositor, the news coverage looks much the same as it did under Brown and Stasik. The new owners have changed other things, though. Readers can now pay for a subscription with a credit card, for instance, rather than just cash or check. And they’ve received a grant from Report for America that will pay for an additional reporter.

Michigan Independent Media Group is in talks about purchasing another small Michigan paper, Franklin said, and it’s also part of a partnership with Civic Media in Wisconsin that purchased five Upper Peninsula radio stations last year.

They’re open to buying more newspapers, he said. It will depend on how much money they bring in and how many owners are looking to sell.

“We’d like to be able to keep as many open as possible,” he said.

NEWS DESERTS AND MISINFORMATION

The decline in local media has been precipitous. The U.S. has lost more than 3,200 newspapers over the past two decades — most of them weeklies, according to Northwestern University’s State of Local News Project.

As traditional news sources fade, “There’s been a lot of activity in Michigan over the past five or 10 years to try to flood the zone with alternative sources of local news,” said Jesse Holcomb, a professor at Calvin University.

He previously served as principal advisor to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s research initiative on Trust, Media and Democracy. He is also married to but separated from Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Hilary Scholten.

Regarding some of those alternative news sources, “I find to be somewhat disingenuous and nakedly partisan or actually deceptively partisan,” he said.

That’s a concern Michigan Independent Media Group’s leaders share. A slide deck describing the effort talks about Michigan’s shrinking news ecosystem and the vulnerability of small papers to corporate consolidation, acquisition by vulture investors or closure. It also talks about the “notable and expanding presence” of right-wing media outlets, some that “contribute to disinformation.”

Holcomb doesn’t count Michigan Independent Media Group among the nakedly partisan.

“My sense is that the folks behind this effort are very earnestly concerned about civic information and the quality of local news and the role that local news can and should play in communities around the state,” he said.

The proof, he added, “will be in whether we see the substance or nature of the coverage in these bought-up properties shifting in a particular direction. Communities and observers can be the judge of that.”

‘A LOT OF GOOD IN SMALL TOWNS’

Randy and Kim Jorgensen worked at the Tri-City Times for 46 years. They sold it to Michigan Independent Media Group in March.

Randy Jorgensen had been thinking about how much of his 70s he wanted to spend shooting high school sports photos and chasing deadlines.

He decided it was time, and Michigan Independent Media Group seemed like the right buyer.

“I think their philosophy and their business plan is sound,” he said.

Even though they’ve kept the same staff on, he added, they’ll likely have some learning to do.

But he wrote in his farewell column last month that nearly half a century at the paper had convinced him that “There is a lot of good in small towns like Almont, Capac, Dryden and Imlay City.”

“There have been many conversations over the past months with the top brass from Michigan Independent Media Group …” he wrote, “and it has convinced me they also see the good in our communities.”

Matthew Miller has been a reporter and editor in Michigan since 2002. He joined MLive in 2022. He has won national awards for science coverage and for religion reporting. He can be reached on Signal at MattMiller.517